The Trump-Berlusconi Syndrome
Nobody who knows Berlusconi and has watched the rise and rise of Donald Trump can fail to be struck by the parallels. It’s not just the real-estate-to-television path. It’s not just their shared admiration for Vladimir Putin. It’s not just the playboy thing, and obsession with their virility, and smattering of bigotry, and contempt for policy wonks, and reliance on a tell-it-like-it-is tone. It’s not their wealth, nor the media savvy that taught them that nobody ever lost by betting on human stupidity.
No, it’s something in the zeitgeist. America is ripe for Trump just as Italy was ripe for Berlusconi. Trump, too, is cutting through a rotten political system in a society where economic frustration at jobs exported to China is high. He is emerging after two lost wars, as American power declines and others strut the global stage, against a backdrop of partisan political paralysis, in a system corrupted by money. To Obama’s Doctrine of Restraint, Trump opposes a Doctrine of Resurgence. To reason, he counters with rage.
.. Stille went on to make an important point about how the deregulation of broadcast media in the United States and Italy .. has fostered the fact-lite free-for-all of “alternate realities” conducive to Trumpism
.. The man known as “The Knight” ended convicted of tax fraud and of paying for sex with an under-age prostitute — but it took 17 years of intermittent scandal and incompetence, from 1994 to 2011, for Italy to rub the stardust from its eyes.