Donald Trump is America’s Silvio Berlusconi

Calculated buffoonery is a longstanding tactic for right-wing demagogues looking to alter national political calculations to their own advantage — masking as farce the tragedy they portend.

.. Berlusconi started out as a wealthy demagogue on the brink of bankruptcy, whose celebrity was — like Trump’s — rooted in both real estate and popular entertainment culture. Berlusconi presented himself as Italy’s strongman, speaking like a barman, selling demonstrably false promises of wealth and grandeur for all.

..  Presaging Trump, the Italian media mogul cast himself as the only viable savior of a struggling nation: the political outsider promising to sweep in and clean up from the vanquished left and restore the country to its lost international stature. “I am the Jesus Christ of politics. I sacrifice myself for everyone,”

..  just as Berlusconi promised Italians to make them as rich as he was, while in reality his companies were deeply in debt at the time he first ran,

.. reminiscent of Berlusconi’s history of misogyny. He once dismissed opponents as “too ugly to be taken seriously” and insulted a fellow European leader during a conversation with a newspaper editor, referring to German Chancellor Angela Merkel as “an unf—able fat bitch.”

..  But, like Berlusconi, he responds to tough questions with scandalous insults so as to focus the conversation on those insults rather than on his platform.

.. Trump’s political path has been carved by a media culture that favors entertainment over news.

.. Berlusconi’s opponents fell into his PR trap in the same way in Italy, rushing to condemn his gaffes and his deliberately provocative statements calculated to rouse the far right. Like Berlusconi, Trump has already succeeded in making himself the center of the conversation.

.. Berlusconi appeared on my TV news show and proceeded to deny having ever supported the Iraqi war, going as far as to claim that he had tried — in vain — to dissuade President George W. Bush from undertaking the ill-fated venture. If necessary to avoid a potential pitfall, Berlusconi was willing to deny in the evening precisely what he had stated that same morning.

..  in an apparent effort to ingratiate himself to me, Berlusconi cited the fact that he had dated Arab women as “proof” that he did not actually believe Muslims to be inferiors.

.. Trump’s bullying of Univision’s Jorge Ramos also has a Berlusconi antecedent — Italy’s best journalists, such as Marco Travaglio, Michelle Santoro and Enzo Biagi, were either sued or fired from their jobs because they dared to challenge Berlusconi’s policies.

.. Trump, meanwhile, sued HBO’s Bill Maher for mocking the tycoon’s hairdo.

 .. Ultimately, it was the leaders of the European Union who forced him to resign, in exchange for rescuing Italy’s tanking economy during the debt crisis. Berlusconi stepped aside amid fears that the Italian economy, the third largest in Europe, was headed the same way as Greece. 

Why Can’t Hillary Stop Fudging the Truth?

Email-gate is only the latest instance in a 25-year habit of dissembling.

Over the past quarter-century she has all too often offered up pained and partial answers to controversies, too often seeming to hide more than she is willing to reveal, only to find that, again and again, the issue blows up in her face.

.. The pattern is unmistakable, from the Whitewater inquiry (when she resisted disclosing documents about a failed Arkansas land deal) to her 10,000 percent profits in commodity trades (which she explained by saying she’d read The Wall Street Journal) to the Rose Law Firm billing records (which infamously and mysteriously turned up in the White House residence after she’d said they were missing) to the Monica Lewinsky affair and the State Department emails themselves.

.. Moreover, dissembling is not always a bad trait in a president. Some of the greatest, most notably Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who enjoyed playing his aides off against each other by letting each think he’d sided with them on a given issue, have been masters of the art. Even Abraham Lincoln was not immune.

.. And if she wins, it is a reality that would seem to presage a presidency of unusual secretiveness.

.. Bill Clinton was routinely distrusted by a majority of voters during his time in office, but when he ran for reelection in 1996, polls nevertheless showed that as many as 65 percent of voters believed he cared about them—an advantage of some 20 points over his rival Bob Dole.

.. It is quite another for a former attorney general of the United States to say—as Michael Mukasey did at the GOP convention—that Clinton would become “the first president in history to take the constitutional oath of office after already having violated it,” by her handling of the email server and her shifting, inconsistent and ultimately inaccurate explanations of why she did so.

.. She is a literal, linear thinker.

.. Clinton’s resilience—her ability to slog on in the face of the worst possible reverses—is the trait that has helped her get within reach of the biggest prize of her life. The flip side is that her capacity for a level of defensiveness and denial that sometimes seems to border on magical thinking might yet keep the ultimate goal out of her grasp.

 

Donald Trump’s Convention: Day 4

Screaming matches between delegates. Past nominees who refused to attend. Speakers who seem allergic to mentioning the nominee’s name – or policies. The runner-up refusing to endorse the winner.

Plagiarism. Lies about plagiarism. Talk of Lucifer from the stage. Humanizing stories about the nominee relegated to obscure time slots. Multiple speakers calling for the jailing of the opposing nominee. A prominent delegate calling for that nominee’s execution by firing squad.