“Russian mathematician and Putin critic Andrey Piontkovsky characterized Putinism as "the highest and final stage of bandit capitalism in Russia; and also as a war, 'consolidation' of the nation on the ground of hatred against some ethnic group, attack on freedom of speech and information brainwashing, isolation from the outside world and further economic degradation". Wikipedia
The latest Ukrainian peace proposal was negotiated between President Trump and Vladimir Putin without Ukraine’s involvement. This is another example of Donald Trump’s attempt to curry favor with Vladimir Putin by literally allowing Putin to dictate the terms of the peace proposal.
Why has Trump turned into Putin’s messenger, whose policies mirror Putinism? Why has the oldest liberal democracy in the world, a nation of immigrants founded on the principle of every member’s inalienable right to be free become the “bandit capitalism” of Vladimir Putin, a dictator who allows no freedoms and kills his own people?
Late-stage capitalism doesn’t fully explain why Donald Trump, a real estate developer with no political experience, could convert a weakened American Democracy into a version of capitalism that concentrates power and wealth in the hands of his oligarchic supporters blatantly ignoring America’s founding principles and laws of the land.
But epidemiologic disease models studied by medical researchers can explain how capitalism could morph into Putinism and bandit capitalism. Such models have shown that there are predictable paths that all epidemics, pandemics, or other contagious disease outbreaks follow from beginning to end.
The body politic of countries and regions (i.e., “the people of a nation, state, or society considered collectively as an organized group of citizens) have endured political outbreaks with similar characteristics. Even civil wars fit this infectious disease model, because they originate internally—brother or sister against each other—and may last longer than years, and suddenly end in unexpected ways.
How do diseases infect? The Black Plague epidemics usually infected people that had been weakened by famines or dysfunctional governments, and the more recent Spanish Flu and COVID-19 pandemics as well that infected and killed millions.
When do such pandemics wane or disappear? They run a recognizable course from inception to a maximum infection rate, then subsided when disease-infected populations eventually found ways to cause their decline. It was quarantines in early times, and vaccines in modern times.
Trumpism, Putinism, and like autocracies or dictatorships have captured weakened political systems. In Russia it was breakup of communism and the Soviet Empire that fostered a Vladimir Putin. In Trump’s case, he took advantage of a democratizing order that had united to win World War II but no longer served many Americans.
Oligarchism, or the Gilded Age model has supported Trump’s version of bandit capitalism with his illegal tariffs that are creating the worst income inequality in the developed world. Trump is promoting a similar hatred of immigrants as Putin, also non-white ethnic and religious groups, attacks on freedom of speech in universities, and Depression-level tariffs that is isolating America from the “outer world”.
The AP just reported that President Donald Trump says he wants to “permanently pause migration” from poorer nations and is promising to seek to expel millions of immigrants from the United States by revoking their legal status. He is blaming immigrants for problems from crime to housing shortages as part of “social dysfunction” in America and demanding “REVERSE MIGRATION.”
He has also followed Putin’s strategy by weakening foreign alliances such as NATO, and breaking up long held foreign trade alliances, all to centralize his power.
But the MAGA movement itself may be in a late-stage decline, as it is slowly disintegrating from internal divisions, with the resignation of major leaders such as Marjorie Taylor Green, growing disputes over policies including tariffs and the treatment of immigrants.
And Donald Trump, its leader, is showing signs of declining health—with fewer public appearances (that also afflicted former president Biden), irrational outbursts and making sudden policy changes without explanation. The MAGA movement has blindly followed him, believing in totally irrational conspiracies until the conspiracies are debunked or and fade away (just as did the flu and COVID-19 pandemics).
The first Gilded Age was defeated by the election of President Teddy Roosevelt riding on the wave of a progressive movement that uncovered the corruption and concentrated wealth of the time.
Trump doesn’t even attempt to hide his blatant corruption nor his promotion of the disease of Putinism that is attempting to destroy American Democracy. So it will take constant vigilance to identify and combat such a widespread contagion, as we have defeated past diseases of the 'body politic', and bring Americans together once again in common purpose to preserve our democracy.
Harlan Green © 2025
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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