Democratic presidents usually have no problem making deals with the many dictators that rule around the world, for example King Salman of Saudi Arabia. The visits always follow a very predictable pattern. They meet in public where the democratic leader briefly lectures the dictator on human rights in front of the (democratic) media, the media in the dictatorship is heavily controlled anyways and nothing like this will be shown. Then they go into the backrooms where the actual politics is made.
This practice is quite problematic, even from a democratic point of view. One fundamental idea of democracy is that the leadership must represent the people. This right also holds universally; every human has the right to self-determination via democratic governance (whatever that is supposed to mean). Nations making deals should, by democratic standards, be the people of both countries sending their representatives find a compromise, where the politicians are only intermediaries.
As the typical narcissist the dictator will always claim to speak for the people, but quite obviously this is never the case. Democratically a deal between a president and a dictator makes no sense at all, as the dictator lacks any fundamental claim to be a suitable intermediary for negation. It is the same as me trying to buy a house for some candy by negotiating with the 5 year old kid living there with his parents. Or even better trying to buy another house on that road because the 5 year old claims the entire neighbourhood would be his kingdom. No sane person could attribute any value whatsoever to that negation, also not if that kid is a little tyrant that knows exactly what buttons to push with his parents to get exactly what he wants; a little mini-dictator.
Now people claim that this is the only thing that can be done and therefore we need to negotiate with dictators. Instead of simply ignoring the dictators and make projects actually helping the people, such as airdrops in Venezuela.
But there exists something that is rather close to a dictator, a cartel drug lord. They controll land, sometimes enough for a small country. Within this land they make the law. Really a cartel boss and a dictator are not that different. But for democrats is seems to be a whole different story. All I hear is war on drugs and we dont negotiate with criminals, we'll teach em respect for da law. I wonder why this difference in reaction?
It may not be directly obvious what is causing this. The only difference is that a dictator presents himself as having some sort of right to rule. Be that as strange a reason as you want, chosen by the gods, an ancestral lineage, the only saviour of the people, the last sane man left on earth, ... . The drug lord on the other hand does exactly the same as the dictator, but his only justification is because he can.
Dictators support the idea that there is a just cause to rule, while druglords claim no such thing. The are in for the power and the only reason they rule is that nobody else could challenge them yet. The difference between them is only philosophical.
And this is the crucial point. Democrats and Dictators in the end play the same game, the game of inventing some reasons why they have more rights than anybody else. They use different strategies but they can play together. A drug-lord is something entirely different that both despise. Somebody that questions their rights to rule, a cold realist and a threat to their hollow philosophy.
All of these logical loopholes are of course a direct consequence of the belief in a right to rule in the first place. There are no contracts between countries, only contract between individuals. The way to deal with a dictator is the way to deal with a democrat is the way to deal with a drug-lord. Ignore them as well as you can, claim your freedom and unite with others to protect ourselves.
Another reason why democrats are so happy to talk to dictators is because our democracies have become rather hollow. What is left is not much more than a mental cage, where the prisoners believe to be free because they cannot perceive the cage they are living in. Such a democracy is in reality a dictatorship, just very cleverly disguised. And therefore there are no problems to work together with dictators anyways.