I love America. And I love Russia. I speak their languages; I know their histories and their people; I admire their cultures. I was a student at Harvard; I was a student in Leningrad. As a journalist, I was based in Washington for four years and Moscow for five.
What has happened to them since the turn of the millennium has filled me with sadness. And I hold two men responsible. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have inflicted incalculable damage on the countries they claim to hold dear. And, rather startlingly, they have used the same methods to do it.
Putin and Trump both came to power in nominally electoral democracies; then both proceeded to dismantle the pillars of democracy from within, one following confidently in the footsteps of the other.
For sure, there were differences. When Putin was elected in 2000, Russia had known barely a decade of liberal democracy after a millennium of autocratic rule – and the 1990s were hardly a paragon of democratic perfection. The USA, by contrast, had nearly 250 years of it. It was the world’s leading democracy.
That made it easier for Putin to destroy Russia’s proto-democracy and make himself the country’s autocratic ruler. It was harder for Trump, but it didn’t put him off. Expressing his admiration for the man in the Kremlin – “far more of a leader than Obama” – he tore fistfuls of pages from the Putin playbook to help him nix America’s democratic safeguards and seize power for himself.
Putin had weaponised the anger of the dispossessed to get himself elected and Trump would do the same. The overambitious democratisation of the 90s had left millions of Russians in poverty, resentful of the “liberals” they blamed for their country’s decline. Putin’s spin doctors referred to his 2000 presidential campaign as Operation Losers’ Revenge: he would avenge the betrayal by the liberals and “lift Russia from its knees”.
Trump fomented anger against the “liberal elites” and the “deep state” who had exploited the American people. Like Putin in Russia, he would “Make America Great Again”. Both had negative messages about the past; neither provided details of their promised future. Both pledged a return to former glories; both sent their countries down dead ends.
In his second term, Donald Trump has made clear he is no fan of free speech, criticised the judiciary and demonised the media. Putin had done it all 20 years earlier and Trump learned from the way he did it.
By appointing US Supreme Court justices more likely to be sympathetic to his way of thinking, Trump won himself immunity for acts committed in office and the go-ahead for his efforts to falsify elections. Russia’s equivalent, the Constitutional Court, had done the same for Putin, endorsing his accumulation of presidential powers and restriction of individual rights. Valery Zorkin, the Court’s long-time president, tore up the constitution to allow Putin to stay in power beyond all term limits and Trump has suggested he could ask Chief Justice John Roberts to do the same. The White House is marketing “Trump 2028: Rewrite the Rules” T-shirts.
Putin used the Russian judiciary to jail political opponents, some of whom died in custody. Trump harnessed the Department of Justice to harass those who criticised him. Both followed the authoritarian maxim: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” Both promised to end corruption, but both used their offices to enrich themselves. US foreign policy was no longer based on values but on greed. At home, there were lies, coercion and indoctrination. In both countries, the scandals came so fast, were so widespread and so blatant, that society felt powerless to respond. Rather than drain the swamp, they invited the creatures of the swamp into the halls of power.
Following media criticism of his handling of the Kursk submarine disaster in 2000, Putin set out to destroy independent journalism in Russia. Journalists who defied him were prosecuted or, in some cases, murdered. Writing the truth about the war in Ukraine now carries a 15-year prison sentence. Trump has vilified the US media, blamed them for his own failures, limited their access and sought to curb their ability to hold power to account. He brought lawsuits against ABC and CBS for their coverage of his presidential campaign and threatened to cancel their broadcast licences. He’s got some way to go before adopting Putin’s approach but his legal threats and money to support them have cowed the media.
Both leaders are adept at propagating false narratives. Russians call it pudrit’ mozgi, literally “sowing powder in people’s brains”; in Trump’s America it is “alternative facts” and “flooding the zone”. People are discouraged from seeking the truth. Many may not realise they live in an authoritarian society until it is too late.
Trump and Putin both look to God for backing, in countries where religion still matters deeply to voters. Putin’s wars against Ukraine, lax morals and the West were officially blessed by the Russian Orthodox Church, whose patriarch called his reign “a gift from God … mandated by the Almighty”. Trump’s claim after surviving an assassination attempt that he was “saved by God to make America great again” was endorsed by the leaders of the US religious right.
Fearing the wrath of the Russian people, Putin created his own praetorian guard, the Rosgvardiya, equipping it with attack helicopters and granting it the right to open fire on crowds. Trump armed ICE and attempted to deploy the National Guard to Democrat-run cities. He demanded the violent repression of protests and asked: “Can’t we just shoot them?”
The embattled despot’s traditional recourse has been to a short, victorious war. The second Chechen conflict worked wonders for Putin in the early 2000s, as did the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Trump’s decapitation of the Maduro regime in Venezuela convinced him that he could to the same. But both fell for their own propaganda and blundered into conflicts they could not control. Surrounded by enablers and yes men, both were starved of objective advice.
For 200 years, we regarded Russia and America as opposing poles in world politics. But the past decade has eroded those certainties. Having seen at first hand the remarkable parallels between what happened in Russia after 2000 and what is happening in America today, I have tried to point them out – and sound the alarm.
In Russia, the democratic checks and balances were never robust. Putin smashed through them with ease and the country returned to its old autocratic model. There was outrage and protest, but little prospect of reversing things.
In America, it is different. Trump has done a vigorous job of destroying democratic safeguards, but some at least remain in place. There is no guarantee that his autocratic power grab will survive – there could still be a return to democratic norms. But the danger is there and society must act. If it doesn’t, Putin’s Russia is the sobering vision of what America could yet become. This is not a drill.
‘Despots: How Trump is Turning America into Putin’s Russia,’ by Martin Sixsmith with Daniel Sixsmith, will be published by WH Allen on 10 September
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