[LINK] "Donald Trump’s Russian cousins"

[rfmcdonald]

Over at Open Democracy, one Alexander Groce has a compelling argument for placing Donald Trump in the context of Russian peers, not only Vladimir Putin but Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky is a perennial presidential candidate, a member and former vice-speaker of the Russian Duma (Russia’s primary legislative body), and the unrivalled king of trash-talk politics, Russian style. Zhirinovsky’s outbursts have lit up Russian television screens since his first outing in electoral politics over 25 years ago. His first experience in democratic politics found him allied with the Democratic Union, a short-lived movement of dissidents and human rights activists that heralded the experimental politics of the coming decade, when Russia was awash with both the novelty of democracy and the roiling corruption of gangster capitalism.

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Zhirinovsky’s party, and its notorious campaign tactics directly reflects his own insatiable appetite for notoriety and attention. When Zhirinovsky declined to run against Vladimir Putin in 2004, he ran his personal bodyguard in his place. Zhirinovsky’s real staying power, it turns out, is derived from his penchant for outlandish statements as well as vitriolic, even pugilistic, encounters with any form of journalist or politician. His most famous encounters are Russian Youtube viral sensations, featuring bombastic rhetorical performances and sometimes profanity-laced outbursts.

In a recent speech to the assembled elite of the Russian capital, speaking before Vladimir Putin, Zhirinovsky revelled in his status as the idiot savant, ticking off a list of playful, but mostly incomprehensible, pronouncements about the dilapidated state of Russian culture. He suggested that literary creativity is born of the combination of long years of hard labour in prison camps (a trope in the biographies of famous Russian writers like Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn) and of belonging to a persecuted sexual minority, handily combining the two ‘muses’ in a prescriptive programme for the reinvigoration of Russia’s literary industry. This was not the harmless babbling it might otherwise have seemed, given the recent spate of persecutory anti-homosexual legislation passed in Russia.

Zhirinovsky, whose father was Jewish, has also openly made anti-Semitic remarks, and is well-known for his misogynistic views regarding polygamy and the role of women in modern Russia. He recently said that women who drive cars are more likely to commit adultery, and, on another occasion, urged his bodyguards to sexually assault a pregnant female reporter who had the audacity to ask him a tough question.

Such statements seem to be beyond even Donald Trump. What they both share, however, is the showman’s appetite, which seems to drive the media frenzy that has inevitably formed around the two unorthodox figures. Trump’s fluid segue into politics seems to confirm the new dominant axis of American political life: the politico-entertainment complex, where the trend towards endless information overdrive converges with an increasingly fluid understanding of the boundary between entertainment and politics.

The format that best suits Trump’s didactic bombast, the scripted ‘reality’ setting of blockbuster shows like Celebrity Apprentice, creates an image of the businessman as a fresh paragon of management and leadership in the entertainment age. Everything about the setting is designed to enhance Trump’s credibility as a leader without dulling his edge with the tired diplomatic attributes of moderation and circumspection.