Perhaps the most notable evidence of January 6’s international effects has been the way in which some world leaders have chosen to echo the incendiary rhetoric that led to the crisis. In the past year, politicians in democracies as far afield as Israel, Peru, and Brazil have employed baseless claims of fraud in an apparent bid to forestall their own electoral defeat or, at the very least, to build up enough grievance to fuel a future political comeback. Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of Peru’s former autocratic leader Alberto Fujimori, chalked up her presidential-election loss in June to widespread electoral fraud and tried, unsuccessfully, to have the result reversed. Ousted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who lost his premiership to an opposition coalition last year, has yet to retract his unfounded claim that he was subject to “the greatest election fraud … in the history of democracy” (though his party eventually did). In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro appears to be laying the groundwork for his own election-fraud claims should he lose reelection to former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva later this year, as recent polls project he could.

Trump is not the first world leader who has tried to subvert an election. But by doing so from the seat of American democracy, he has emboldened politicians elsewhere to brazenly do the same. “People will have learned that if you basically say from day one that the vote—if it goes against you—is by definition fraudulent, you can get away with a lot,” Ivo Daalder, the president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, told me. “All that stuff becomes easier when what used to be the exemplar, the city on a hill, is showing you the way.”