What Trump learned from Putin
I like to think that I’m a smart and educated guy who is able to take a step back from the news as they unfold on the world stage. However, I’d be lying if I said I have been able to stay level-headed the entire time Donald Trump has been — back — in office. And that is the entire point.
I wrote a post on Trump’s intelligence days after his reelection which I stand by, let me now extend on that with a single focus: the notion of destabilizing your interlocutor.
The basics of trumpism, which are not quite his invention but rather inherited from many past dictators and populists, are this: it is easier to control a group of people if they lose their usual set of references. In other words, if you start questioning what were until then considered the norms, the rules of the game and, in this case, the core principles of modern democracy, you stand a better chance of having people fall for whatever story you are putting forth.
It happened time and time again before, famously in 1930’s Germany or more recently in 2000’s Russia — which I was actually there to witness. The process is always the same:
Start seizing executive power as much and as quickly as you can: in the case of Putin, that included naming state governors (who were democratically elected before then) and eventually controling election polls to a ridiculously obvious level*. In the case of Trump, this now includes deporting legal aliens with no legal ground whatsoever and questioning whether to subsequently follow a federal judge’s ruling;
Shut down dissenting media: in the case of Putin, that included random police raids on media groups’ offices and data centers, prompting the freer media to flee the country or stop operating altogether. In 2001, I saw the biggest independent Russian TV channel, NTV, stop broadcasting one evening, never to come back. In Trump’s America, you have the White House cancelling the AP’s credentials because they refuse to call the Gulf of Mexico anything other than its name;
Use the support of oligarchs until they become useless: this is the parallel I find most fascinating, because the hubris of billionaire businessmen seems to let them fall for the very same trap over and over again. The Krupps and Thyssens of 1930’s Germany thought they could control their Bavarian puppet, who turned out to use and misuse them to no end; the Berezovskys of 2000’s Russia thought they could have their little KGB colonel do their bidding, until said billionaire was sent to London never to come back — dying there in somewhat mysterious circumstances years later. Today Musk, an overt, ideological Trump supporter, as well as more cowardly opportunists like Zuckerberg or Bezos, are all seen kissing Trump’s ass, upending their DEI programs and promoting the return to masculinity (whatever that entails) in the hopes of getting to control government, having all sorts of cumbersome regulations taken down and, ideally, reaching juicy new federal contracts in the process. But what these men (no women) fail to realize is that they are entirely at the mercy of their newfound leader, who has the actual power to make things happen — or not, even more so now that Democrats let him get away with a funding bill that comes with extra discretionary measures. How long till Trump gets rid of these guys, starting with Musk? As soon as they no longer serve him, is the answer: most of his first term supporters are gone and/or in jail, the likelihood of Musk being sidelined at some point is thus fairly great. That one will ultimately boil down to whether or not he gets a pardon. But why would Trump do that?
In a system that gradually becomes less democratic, you tend to revert to basic power dynamics, things that Trump prefers because they are more easily understandable and pliable to his personal will. And the more people are shaken by the daily cycle news, the easier all of this gets.
That is why the safest way to ensure that democracy lives on is to try, as much as is humanly possible, to not get influenced by the nonsense that Trump and his cohort are trying to force on US citizens — and beyond. To resist this very real attempt at manufacturing chaos.
* I will always remember an article in The Moscow Times, one of those legit newspapers that fled, explaining how local election results were so obviously doctored that they came in round percentages (75%, 80%, 90%…), local officials not having even bothered to make up fake absolute numbers of votes. And that was back in 2008…