Debunking the Putin-Trump Analogy

[PSPS]

The Trump-Putin Fallacy
Masha Gessen

In the earlier months of the Donald Trump campaign, many people I knew asked me to comment on the similarities between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Recently I have been asked to comment on direct connections between Trump and Putin. And now, with the release of nearly 20,000 emails apparently stolen from the Democratic National Committee’s email server by Russian hackers, has come the suggestion that Putin may actually be interfering in the US election to help get Trump elected. These ideas—that Trump is like Putin and that he is Putin’s agent—are deeply flawed.

Imagine that your teenage child has built a bomb and has just set it off in your house. The house is falling down all around you—and you are blaming the neighbor’s kid, who threw a pebble at your window. That’s what the recent Putin fixation is like—a way to evade the fact that Trump is a thoroughly American creation that poses an existential threat to American democracy.

More at: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/07/26/trump-putin-fallacy-failure-of-imagination/

On the Media inteview with the author about this is here: http://www.wnyc.org/story/debunking-putin-trump-analogy

Debunking the Putin-Trump Analogy

Political A-listers and celebrities met in Philadelphia this week to rally behind Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention. But the event was nearly overshadowed by the release of hacked DNC emails and the ensuing claim that the Russians were trying to tilt the election in favor of Donald Trump. It was a story that fit nicely into an ongoing media narrative that Trump is all too cozy with Russian president Vladimir Putin--if not, in fact, working directly for him. It's an exciting story, but, as journalist Masha Gessen wrote in The New York Review of Books this week, one that is almost certainly too good to be true. Speaking with Brooke, Gessen said that the Manchurian candidate narrative is both inaccurate and a distraction from the true threat Trump poses to American democracy.

[emulatorloo]

1. It is not an analogy. It is a simile. Trump is similar to Putin in ways.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. Trump won the Republican primary -- no doubt. But he is Putin's Useful Idiot, not his agent.

Putin is moving chess pieces on the board playing against Hillary, who he hates because she compared him to Hitler.

Trump did not ask Putin to release the emails. And Putin did not call up Trump and tell him to support his takeover of Crimea or to propose demolishing NATO. But rest assured that there are many ways to plant such ideas in places for Trump to pick up and ways to ensure that he gets yes-men agreeing to them.

Such leverage is made easier when Trump has visited Russia as many times as he has and undoubtedly has heavy loans from Russians because US banks will not lend to him. In one year recently he increased his indebtedness from $350 million to $630 million. That money came from somewhere. When you have lots of Russians and pro-Russian Ukrainians, etc., circulating around Trump, then Russian ideas rub off.

Trump is home-grown but is too doorknob stupid to realize that he is playing into Putin's hands.

Trump thinks he is making artful deals and controlling the media, but in fact he is playing tiddlywinks. He was lucky his strategy was suited for the primaries but he is not enough of a thinker to realize that the General Election is a much different beast and a much bigger beast.

[2banon]

3. I missed Hillary comparing Putin to Hitler

Do you mean that literally, or are you referring to statements that's he's dangerous, unfit etc?

Because IF Hillary actually compared Putin to Hitler... considering history, that would be a rather , um,,, unfortunate remark let's just say. considering World History. and all.

ETA I agree with your general summation wrt to both Putin and Trump

[Bernardo de La Paz]

4. It was in 2014 about Ukraine. Hillary knows more about World History than Trump.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2014/03/05/hillary-clinton-says-putins-action-are-like-what-hitler-did-back-in-the-30s/

Hillary Clinton says Putin’s actions are like ‘what Hitler did back in the ’30s’
By Philip Rucker March 5, 2014

Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday compared Russian President Vladimir Putin's aggression in Ukraine to actions taken by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler outside Germany in the run-up to World War II.

Making her first extensive comments about the crisis in Ukraine, Clinton said at a private fundraiser in California that Putin's campaign to provide Russian passports to those with Russian connections living outside his country's borders is reminiscent of Hitler's protection of ethnic Germans outside Germany, according to a report published overnight.

"Now if this sounds familiar, it's what Hitler did back in the '30s," Clinton said Tuesday, according to the Long Beach Press-Telegram. "All the Germans that were ... the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they're not being treated right. I must go and protect my people, and that's what's gotten everybody so nervous."

[2banon]

5. Oh shite. That was huge misstep on her part

it's one thing to put out a statement of condemnation, it's quite another to compare Putin to Hitler particularly considering we're not exactly clean in that regard either.

Things are bad enough, why was she provoking him on that level for the sake of establishing war hawk creds domestically?

jeeze

[Bernardo de La Paz]

6. No. Putin needs to be countered and called to account. . . . nt

[geek tragedy]

7. Trump and Putin are ethnonationalist oligarchofascist demagogues.

Seems like a fair comparison to me.

The article, while it says it debunks the comparisons, seems to more refine them--casting Trump as a Putin wannabe and seeing them as allies of convenience.

[yurbud]

8. Trump doesn't have the political resume of Putin, which isn't meant as a compliment to Putin

The same could be said of Trump/Hitler or Trump/Mussolini or Trump/fill in the blank Third World dictator analogies.

Any and all of those people had some political experience before leading their countries even if we strongly disliked what they did.

Putin is also capable of realpolitik while Trump is capable of real parroting of political talk radio.