Trump Imitates Putinism

Popular Economics Weekly

“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

Medium.com

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

 

Where is Robin Hood?

 

Financial FAQs

“List and hearken, gentlemen,

That be of free-born blood,

I shall you tell of a good yeoman,

His name was Robin Hood.”

 

FRED%gdp

Where is a modern Robin Hood when we need him or her, someone who can stop ‘King’ Trump from robbing the poor as the evil King John pillaged his people in medieval times? One legend says it wasn’t until the return of Richard the Lionhearted from the Crusades who usurped King John and brought justice back to the people of his kingdom.

King John impoverished his subjects with prohibitive taxes to support himself and his noblemen, just as ‘King’ Trump is levying excessive tariffs to pay for the tax cuts that are enriching himself, his oligarchs, and ballooning our national debt.

The massive public debt that Trump and his Republicans have deemed a national emergency is really of their own creation; tax cuts that weren’t paid for by successive Republican administrations.

The FRED graph shows the large jump in debt to 120 percent of GDP from successive Republican administrations since 1980 (Reagan), 2000 (GW Bush) and 2016 (Trump I). Gray bars are recessions.

It was the beginning of the domination of big business and globalization of whole industries, as well as the suppression of working Americans’ rights with the breaking up of the labor unions.

It was the very same tax cuts and deregulation that either ignored the laws or evaded them that Republicans have done since Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down schemes in 1980 that gave us the first real national debt ($400 million).

GW Bush continued the tax cuts which added the first $1 billion deficit, President Trump added another $5 billion in debt during his first term and is adding another $4-$5 billion in his just passed big ‘beautiful’ tax cut bill.

Teddy Roosevelt was the first Robin Hood in modern times to root out the Robber Barons of the First Gilded Age by busting their monopolies and prosecuting the lawbreakers. It initiated the Progressive Era that led to FDR’s New Deal for the American people.

The only dip in debt (as percentage of GDP) portrayed in the graph was the Clinton Democratic administration’s four budget surpluses (1996-2000) that would have practically abolished the debt altogether if GW Bush and his Republicans had not pushed through two more tax cut bills that weren’t paid for.

This has resulted in at least a $2 trillion transfer in wealth from working class folk that has enriched Big Business and corporate CEOS immeasurably since 1980. Their huge wealth and support made another Trump administration possible.

It’s time for Democrats to find their own Robin Hood who can reverse the theft in the courts and win elections by exposing Trump’s Oligarchs for what they are, Robber Barons.

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Is This Another Upswing?

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

Something is going on in the American culture and psyche, a change that I believe will return us to a more optimistic era of hope and possibilities.

I see what Pulitzer prize-winner and Political Scientist Robert Putnam (author of Bowling Alone) and co-author Shaylyn Romney Garrett describe in their new book, The Upswing; How America Came Together a Century Ago and How WE Can Do It Again, as a return to a more progressive “We” era, a societal coming together with less divisiveness than we have experienced in recent decades.

Simon&Shuster

“Americans Hate Divisiveness, We Need to Demand More,” is the headline of a recent PEW Research poll, in which: “57 percent of Americans believe that partisan conflicts receive too much attention these days. And 78 percent say there is too little focus on important issues facing the country. But if we want something different in the political dialogue, we the people need to demand it by rejecting divisive rhetoric and rewarding substance and solutions.”

I have called recent decades the Age of Narcissism. It was a time when “what’s in it for me” topped “what’s in it for us.”

Putnam and Garrett describe American history over the past 125 years with the “I-We-I” curve, using a series of bell-shaped curves to evidence the history of “a gradual climb into greater interdependence and cooperation, followed by a steep descent into greater independence and egoism.”

There is mounting evidence we have begun such a change that resembles earlier, more progressive eras. Putnam and Garrett have called it “The Upswing”, a return to the “We” era that we last experienced in the 1960s, before the Vietnam War and killings of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr., tore our country apart in a de facto civil war of red states vs. blue states.

The Kennedys and MLK, Jr. were the upholders of the last “We” era before we descended into our dark ages, accompanied by a greater lawlessness and distrust of our laws and institutions.

The sixties was the decade of greater voting and civil rights, income equality, and equal opportunities in education and the workplace with the enactment of anti-discrimination laws.

I came of age when President Kennedy promised a New Frontier of peace and end to the cold war that I also believed would happen after listening to him as a student and then volunteering for the Peace Corps. Kennedy instilled a ‘can do’ spirit that anything and everything was possible when he said there were better ways to serve the country than war: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Sarge Shriver, the Peace Corps first director, then adopted Rotary’s motto for PC Volunteers, “Service Above Self.”

The descent into darkness was also a time when many Americans were in the throes of “Deaths of Despair…” said Nobel Prize-winner Angus Deaton and Anne Case, who uncovered the damage done by drug use and suicides among the rust-belt workers who had lost their industrial age jobs.

Maybe the change from the darkness to light was first noticeable during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the weaknesses of excessive individualism became evident in the partisan divide over the treatment of its victims—when literal survival required cooperation over competition, regardless of the politics or religion.

Positive changes also occurred with modern technologies such as the Internet that enabled Americans to talk to each other more freely. This may sound counter-intuitive with the ‘anything goes’ frontier mentality of its abusers and propagandists, but it has enabled the younger generations to be seen and heard much more than older generations.

Pollsters have seen the changes in our younger generations towards more communality. They are the Internet generations that communicate and get their news via cell phones and laptops, are more ethnically diverse, and less intolerant.

PEW reported in 2020, “Generation Z represents the leading edge of the country’s changing racial and ethnic makeup. A bare majority (52%) are non-Hispanic white – significantly smaller than the share of Millennials who were non-Hispanic white in 2002 (61%). One-in-four Gen Zers are Hispanic, 14% are black, 6% are Asian and 5% are some other race or two or more races.”

The earliest era of great change described by Putnam and Garrett was when citizens and parties come closer together in the turn of the last century, the Progressive era, which gained full force when Vice President Teddy Roosevelt became the President with the assassination of William McKinley in 1901.

“The Progressive movement did not eliminate polarization, to be sure, but in reflecting reformist, egalitarian, and even communitarian sentiments among leaders of both major parties, it laid the groundwork for decades of declining polarization,” they said.

There is something else bringing people together, much of it involuntary—the growing threat of climate change. The overheating and droughts in major regions of planet Earth have caused massive migrations from areas of famine and overpopulation that is creating a more global population mix.

There’s a consequent backlash that is creating anti-immigrant policies such as Brexit, but it is being countered with the so-called DEI policies (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) policies created by progressives that increase egalitarianism, which is another way of saying it means to reduce the record wealth and income inequality fostered during the dark ages.

It will require more egalitarianism among developed countries with labor shortages such as the U.S. as we become even more ethnically and racially diverse. We have no choice but to welcome immigrants to maintain economic growth.

In fact, we see it already happening with the younger generations.

“A recent online survey found that younger generations are more optimistic than older generations about becoming wealthy in the future.  Fully 69 percent of Gen Zers and 54 percent of millennials who don’t consider themselves wealthy now said that they think that they will be wealthy someday, a survey by Lending Tree revealed, as opposed to 41 percent overall. The survey, conducted by Question Pro in early September was taken by 2,000 U.S. consumers ages 18 to 77.”

I have listed just a few of the changes for good that are coming. It’s happened in the past and WE are doing it again!

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen