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.
Donald Trump’s Presidential Run Began in an Effort to Gain Stature
Repeatedly underestimated as a court jester or silly showman, Mr. Trump muscled his way into the Republican elite by force of will. He badgered a skittish Mitt Romney into accepting his endorsement on national television, and became a celebrity fixture at conservative gatherings. He abandoned his tightfisted inclinations and cut five- and six-figure checks in a bid for clout as a political donor. He courted conservative media leaders as deftly as he had the New York tabloids.
.. “I realized that unless I actually ran, I wouldn’t be taken seriously,”
.. he tested the themes that would one day frame his presidential campaign: American economic decline, and the weakness and cluelessness of politicians in Washington.
.. Over the next few months, Mr. Trump met quietly with Republican pollsters who tested a political message and gauged his image across the country
.. Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, wrote a column on his website envisioning a Trump candidacy steamrolling to the nomination, powered by wall-to-wall media attention.
.. While he saw himself as an important spokesman on economic issues and a credible champion for the party, the Romney campaign viewed him as an unpredictable attention-seeker with no real political foundation.
.. Mr. Trump was drawing presidential candidates seeking his support to his Fifth Avenue high-rise. In September 2011, Mr. Romney made the trip, entering and exiting discreetly, with no cameras on hand to capture the event.
.. Mr. Trump reached out to say he wanted to endorse Mr. Romney at a Trump property in the state. Wary of such a spectacle in a crucial state, Mr. Romney’s aides began a concerted effort to relegate Mr. Trump’s endorsement to a sideshow.
The Romney campaign conducted polling in four states that showed Mr. Trump unpopular everywhere but Nevada, and suggested to Mr. Trump that they hold an endorsement event there, far away from Florida voters
.. In an appeal to Mr. Trump’s vanity, the Romney campaign stressed that his endorsement was so vital — with such potential to ripple in the media — that it would be a mistake to dilute the impact with a question-and-answer session.
.. Mr. Obama, in a speech on Friday, said Republicans had long treated Mr. Trump’s provocations as “a hoot” — just as long as they were directed at the president.
.. Mr. Trump had struck up a friendship in 2009 with David N. Bossie, the president of the conservative group Citizens United, who met Mr. Trump through the casino magnate Steve Wynn.
.. Mr. Trump began a relationship with Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, who was trying to rescue the party from debt.
.. In 2014, he cut a quarter-million dollar check to the Republican Governors Association, in response to a personal entreaty from the group’s chairman — Chris Christie.
.. Mr. Trump peppered Mr. Gingrich with questions about the experience of running for president, asking about how a campaign is set up, what it is like to run and what it would cost.
.. Pundits seemed unaware of the spade work he had done throughout that spring, taking a half dozen trips to early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and using forums hosted by Mr. Bossie’s group to road test a potential campaign.
How David Duke’s (Very Live) Ghost Haunts Donald Trump
On a moonlit night 39 years ago outside of San Diego, three sedans sped along back roads to pass on claims of illegal alien sightings to federal border agents. In the lead vehicle was David Duke, the mediagenic grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and attached to his sedan was a white hand-painted sign: “Klan Border Watch.” Trailing Duke were three dozen reporters, photographers and TV cameramen who captured a carefully manufactured scene that resonated with those who feared, then as now, hordes of immigrants illegally crossing into the United States.
.. I don’t think Trump equivocated over Duke by chance. As Duke’s biographer, I find many echoes of Duke in what Trump says and does, and in their similar appeal to disaffected white voters.
.. I find many echoes of Duke in what Trump says and does, and in their similar appeal to disaffected white voters.
.. his Klan past obscured his true obsession—combatting Jews who he believes are bent on using blacks and brown-skinned immigrants to undermine the white race.
.. “He’s getting the same kinds of votes that I have gotten in Louisiana,” Duke told his listeners. “He’s getting the same kinds of votes that [Pat] Buchanan got. He’s getting the same votes as George Wallace.”
.. “Although nominally a Republican, Duke did not win by assembling the pieces of a traditional Republican coalition,”
.. When Duke was stopped for speeding while he raced around the state, not once did a state trooper give him a ticket. “Let me tell you something,” his campaign aide later told me, “those troopers were all for David.”
.. But his guiding light is actually the profound conviction that Jews are using their control or ownership of big media outlets (think of the New York Times and the Newhouse family) to force whites to live, study and work with blacks, who he believes are genetically inferior. When all those folks rub elbows, miscegenation inevitably results, he believes. The white gene pool is weakened.
.. It’s about what he calls “the demographic threat to America,” and he’s convinced Jews are behind it. “When he’s taking on the immigration, the open borders,” Duke said on the radio, “he’s really taking on the Jewish establishment and he’s taking on the neocons who control the Republican Party.”
.. “The reason we have this incredible destruction of both Europe and America,” he said on the radio, “is because we have an alien race, an alien people who have taken over our countries, taken over our media, taken over our banking, and only Donald Trump of any Republican has spoken up against Wall Street and the Jewish banks like Goldman Sachs.”
.. created his own faction of the Klan after graduating from Louisiana State University because he saw the Klan as a way to generate news coverage to get out his white-rights message.
.. While he ran for the state Senate, I reported that for years he had celebrated Hitler’s birthday (complete with a cake) and had said repeatedly that the Holocaust was a hoax trumped up by Jews to win sympathy. I reported that he sold Mein Kampf and neo-Nazi books out of his legislative office. I even reported that he had dodged the draft during the Vietnam War and hadn’t paid all of his taxes.
His supporters didn’t care. They accused me and the Times-Picayune of being part of the liberal political establishment.
.. He’s not just appealing to the old Klan constituency, he’s appealing to the white middle. And don’t think that he or somebody like him won’t appeal to the white middle class of Chicago or Queens.”
Donald Trump has disavowed Duke. But in important ways he still acts and sounds like him.
Trump will ‘look in to’ paying legal bills for man who punched protester
Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, said Sunday he would consider paying the legal bills for an elderly man who was arrested after sucker-punching a protester at a Trump rally in North Carolina ..
.. Cumberland County Sheriff’s deputies arrested 78-year-old John McGraw on Friday after video of him sucker-punching a young black man who had been protesting at the rally rippled across the Internet. McGraw told “Inside Edition” he didn’t regret throwing the punch because the man “might be with a terrorist organization.”
Trump said he doesn’t condone violence, but also said the punch may have been justified because the victim flipped off the crowd before the punch was thrown.
“From what I understand, he was sticking a certain finger up in the air,” Trump said. “And that is a terrible thing to do in front of somebody that frankly wants to see America made great again.”
NBC’s Chuck Todd asked Trump about the legal bills after quoting Trump telling told a crowd he would pay for the legal bills of anyone who attacked a protester. Trump said his stance was justified at the time because protesters were threatening to throw tomatoes at him.
“He was dragging a flag along the ground and he was playing a certain type of music. And supposedly, there was chatter about ISIS,” Trump said. “Now, I don’t know. What do I know about it? All I know is what’s on the Internet.”