Imagine that your teenage child has built a bomb and has just set it off in your house. The house is falling down all around you—and you are blaming the neighbor’s kid, who threw a pebble at your window. That’s what the recent Putin fixation is like—a way to evade the fact that Trump is a thoroughly American creation that poses an existential threat to American democracy.
Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist, is the author of several books on Russia, including The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. As a perceptive critic who has chronicled and opposed Putin’s rise, she has “spent the better part of [her] life working to convince readers that Vladimir Putin is a threat to the world as we know it.” Writing for the New York Review Of Books, Gessen believes that the “link” between Trump and Putin, as evidenced by Trump’s odd penchant for praising the gangster thug who totally dominates the Russian state, recently highlighted by his invocation of Putin as someone who could effectively snoop into Americans’ emails to determine the “truth” about Hillary Clinton, misses the essential point:
In fact, Trump is less like Putin, whose charisma is largely a function of the post to which he was accidentally appointed, than he is Mussolini or Hitler.
Gessen dismisses Trump’s strange effort to alter only a single plank of the Republican Party Platform—one that blocked an amendment that would pledge the Party to arming the Ukrainians (evidence cited by Josh Marshall and others as indicative of Trump’s Pro-Putin leanings), noting that it was the provision in the GOP platform for continued sanctions on Russia that Putin would have really sought to alter. She believes that this may have been attempt by Carter Page, one of Trump’s admittedly pro-Russian advisors, simply to curry favor with the regime to enhance his business prospects with Russia, but she doesn’t connect it directly to Trump. And while our intelligence services have increasingly concluded that the Russians were involved in the DNC email hack, this does not necessarily paint Trump as a “Russian agent" but more as a simple pawn for Russian interests.
What Gessen does believe is actually more disconcerting. While Trump may be saying exactly what Putin wants him to say, to attribute his actions to Putin himself glosses over the fact that, in Trump, we are essentially dealing with a wannabee Putin. In other words, Trump’s “philosophy’—if we can call it that—simply happens to align closely with the mindset of the Russian leader and this is why their interests appear to converge. Putin is, in point of fact “a real world version of the person Trump pretends to be on television.” This fixation on Putin is simply a product of Trump’s personality and bizarre, self-absorbed life experience—he doesn't care about anyone but himself, so its unsurprising that he could care less about alliances like NATO:
The man is uninterested in anything he doesn’t understand. He is incapable of strategic planning, and he has a particular distaste for paying debts. Of course he doesn’t see any reason for the United States to fulfill its obligations to other countries and organizations—just as Trump personally wouldn’t fulfill his obligations to other people, or to organizations.
Gessen believes that the conditions of modern capitalism create the environment—specifically the pre-conditions—for the rise of fascism and a proto-fascist like Trump. And it is a human condition, specifically a lack of imagination—or more precisely, a lack of people’s ability to imagine—that can permit it to happen:
Lack of imagination is one of our greatest handicaps as humans and as citizens. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of the richest men in the world, could not imagine that Putin would put him in jail, and this was one of the reasons he ignored repeated warnings and stayed in Russia. Then he spent ten years in a Russian prison. David Cameron could not imagine that his fellow citizens would vote to secede from the European Union, so he called for a referendum.
Similarly, a substantial portion of the American electorate simply cannot imagine that Trump will “be that bad." They cling to the false notion that the institutions we are familiar with in our democracy could somehow check or restrain someone like Trump, who has shown no allegiance whatsoever to those institutions. But, as Gessen points out, a fascist leader does not need, and in fact will spurn the normal avenues of “change” in American society, passing of legislation-- the process taking far too long for his mercurial attention span--even with a compliant, willing and eager Republican Congress.
Gessen argues that What Trump needs to satisfy his desire to dominate the country is mobilization of the populace. He has the white supremacists, the nationalists, the anti-Semites on his side already. They are willing, eager, ready to march once they have a leader in place who validates their ideas. But the best way to mobilize the American public, as any fascist will tell you, is through war. And there will be wars with Trump in charge, because he will have the sole ability to start them. Americans will fight amongst themselves about the legitimacy of these wars, but the wars will happen. And as they fail and falter (as they always do) the anger and discord will increase, setting Americans at each others’ throats and further poisoning the country.
Gessen paints a clear picture of what would occur this November if Trump was elected President:
The day after the election, the stock market will crash. Then, there will be a lull. For one thing, Trump will not have taken office yet. But life will seem conspicuously unchanged. The stock market will recover some. On inauguration day, there will be large anti-Trump protests in some American cities. But in some others, including Washington, there will be large celebrations that will make your skin crawl. On the other hand, they will not be wearing black shirts, and that will make what has happened seem a little less real. In some cities, there will be clashes. The police will do their jobs, and this will be reassuring.
No, the people celebrating won’t wear black shirts, but their targets will be black, Latino or Hispanic. Wealthy white Americans will continue to watch it all unfold on TV, clucking their tongues and “debating" the latest outrage, but they will gradually become used to actions like banning the Washington Post or other critical media from his press conferences, things that would seem shocking at first but will gradually be accepted as the “new normal” takes over in the minds of the greater public. This is what happened in Putin’s Russia and this is what Gessen sees happening here.
The ”mobilization” will begin with attacks on specific groups of people who oppose Trump: Gessen believes the first target will be the LGBT community because their rise and visibility has represented the most dramatic change in American society over the past decade, and the one that may, deep down, be most disconcerting to the people that make up Trump’s base. They also lack the numbers of the racial groups Trump has vilified in his campaign, so they have less ability to defend themselves.
But there really is no way to predict which group he will go after to mobilize his support:
There is no way to tell who will be targeted by the wars at home. Muslims and immigrants are, of course, prime candidates, but any group of people will do—including a group that is not currently constituted as a group. Notwithstanding the awkward outreach in Trump’s convention speech last week, my money is actually on the LGBT community because its acceptance is the most clear and drastic social change in America of the last decade, so an antigay campaign would capture the desire to return to a time in which Trump’s constituency felt comfortable. But there are also Jews, bicyclists, people who studied a foreign language in college—the possibilities are limitless.
As widespread and varied as American society has become, there are so many opportunities to exploit division and hatred. The possibilities are indeed endless. It’s the perfect breeding ground for someone who has no other plan, no other purpose, but to amass power for himself at the expense of the rest of us, without a care about the damage he does to our country, its people, or its culture.