Vladislav Surkov is someone to study. He is Putin’s and Bannon’s template for Trump.
Vladislav Surkov
He is the architect of what we are seeing in Trump’s first few days of Gish gallop policies.
In an editorial for the London Review of Books quoted by Curtis, Peter Pomerantsev describes Putin's Russia thus:
In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It's a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it's indefinable.
See a pattern?
Surkov is a proponent of what’s called “Sovereign Democracy”, which labels itself as Democracy while hollowing it out.
On the public relations side, one of the most influential Kremlin aides, Vladislav Surkov, met with Western journalists to explain that Russian "sovereign democracy" is not much different from democratic practices of the Western countries. "Sovereign democracy" is a Kremlin coinage that conveys two messages: first, that Russia's regime is democratic and, second, that this claim must be accepted, period. Any attempt at verification will be regarded as unfriendly and as meddling in Russia's domestic affairs.
From: Putin's 'Sovereign Democracy
For even more, read this piece from the Atlantic on Surkov… : The Hidden Author of Putinism
Another quote about Surkov,
Surkov likes to invoke the new postmodern texts just translated into Russian, the breakdown of grand narratives, the impossibility of truth, how everything is only “simulacrum” and “simulacra” ... and then in the next moment he says how he despises relativism and loves conservatism.
This is the guy who pulls Bannon’s strings. Pay close attention!