WaPo: "Trump Resembles American Putin"

by JASmius



Hmmm; not an unintriguing comparison, actually:

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump looks a lot Russian President Vladimir Putin in the way he promises to restore the country to its past glory while offering few specifics, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius says.

"Donald Trump is in some respects an American version of Putin," Ignatius writes.

"Brash self-confidence" propels such politicians, he says. "They don't explain the mundane details of national revival; they just assert it."

Oh, I'm not saying the parallel is a perfect one.  To my knowledge, Trump doesn't strip to the waist to flex his joggling pecs or oil-wrestle bears or keep his own personal zoo of carnivorous predators.  But we do know where this kind of what Ignatius calls "bullying authoritarianism" leads - rampant, galloping corruption at home and overt aggression abroad.  Which also may not be a perfect parallel, although Trump has talked about invading Iraq to "take its oil" not two months after having declared that Operation Iraqi Freedom was a "mistake".  Czar Vlad has never been this ideologically scattershot.

But one unequivocal asset of "bullying authoritarianism" is that Putin continues to enjoy massive popularity at home, while Trump is massively unpopular everywhere but among Tea Partiers.  Ignatius thinks even the latter of the latter can't last:

Ignatius said that, ultimately, the Putin routine won't last long.

"[T]he bullying authoritarian personality — the Putin style — usually doesn’t work here," he said. "This summer has been an exception, but history suggests that it won’t last."

I still agree with Ignatius on that point.  But then Trumpmania itself is more than a little unprecedented, and the more time that passes, the more durable its core irrationality becomes.  Maybe he's just refusing to "think outside the box," but I've got to hope that conservative sanity and political self-interest will kick back in at some point in the next five months and change.

Because otherwise, we will be in serious, serious trouble.