Donald Trump has finally managed to emulate the one world leader whose perceived toughness he has envied for decades—but it’s desperation the two now share.
The primetime speech the 80-year-old U.S. president delivered on Thursday night may have shocked some Americans with its brazen promotion of lies, but it’s a scene Russians have watched play out for years–they are deeply familiar with Vladimir Putin taking over primetime broadcasts to tell them falsehoods as a pretext for the next big power grab.
But Trump and Putin aren’t simply feeding their people lies: They are fueled by delusions even as chaos and unrest build up around them, and they are more dangerous and unpredictable than ever.
As Trump seeks to amplify election conspiracy theories that have long been debunked in an apparent quest to cling to power, Putin is hellbent on keeping his war alive even if he has no country left afterwards.
“No matter how much Trump’s and Putin’s public support fades away, they will continue to live in their bubbles, fed lies by their closest circles,” Russia’s leading economist, professor of the University of Chicago Konstantin Sonin, told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview.
In the early 2000s Sonin was involved in preparing analytical reports for the Russian Center for Strategic Research, and he met with Putin to discuss economic issues and reforms. He understood the inner workings of the Kremlin and is surprised now to see the similarities between Putin’s and Trump’s entourage.
“We have seen Putin rule Russia out of a bubble since the early 2000s and surprisingly, they are creating the same bubble for Trump in Washington. Both Putin and Trump don’t care about their cracking facades, ratings – they won’t pay attention until their public support collapses to 5 percent,” he said.
Faced with sinking approval ratings over the economic fallout of their respective wars, both Putin and Trump have ignored the writing on the wall–and in some cases advice from their own aides–and instead forged ahead with new legislative changes to cling to power.
As the White House works to restrict mail-in voting ahead of November’s midterm elections, the Kremlin’s “strong men” reportedly try to convince Putin to postpone the parliamentary elections scheduled for September. Russians who were eyewitnesses to their country’s descent into dictatorship say the likeness between Putin and Trump should trigger alarm bells in America.
Surrounded by sycophants and inundated with flattery, they both ignore the cracks in the facade of their power, so detached from reality that they’re convinced they’re winning when all evidence points to the contrary.
Putin, faced with ever-sinking approval ratings and growing outrage over gasoline shortages linked to his war, has doubled down on fulfilling his fantasy of seizing more Ukrainian land even as it becomes increasingly laughable.
Trump, too, has ignored calls to prioritize domestic issues and the U.S. economy, choosing instead to barrel ahead with a war against Iran that most Americans didn’t support to begin with, while also amplifying long-debunked election conspiracy theories in an apparent bid to control the outcome of upcoming midterm elections.
Both are obsessed with their legacies, even as it becomes increasingly clear that the damage they leave behind will be devastating.
Russian historian Andrey Zubov says about Putin in Ukraine: “The war is lost, that’s clear; when he leaves Ukraine, his regime will fall.” But neither Putin, nor Trump listen to the historians, preferring instead to double down on their claims that everything is going great.
Even as Putin praised Russia’s economic success at a summit in Kazan last month, Ukrainian drones rained on Russia’s capital in one of the biggest attacks on Moscow since 2022, the year Putin started the war. In Russian memes on social media, Putin’s famously long table for official meetings was shown flying over a burning oil refinery.
Putin’s former adviser and image maker, Marat Gelman, says the two leaders of the world’s biggest nuclear powers share the same predatory hunger for “hegemony in global affairs.” Kremlin officials tell Putin and Russians: “If there is no Putin, there is no Russia.” Likewise, Trump tells Americans that instead of putting trust in each other, they should put it in him, suggesting: “I alone can fix it.”
The two leaders also share friends.
The UFC fight at Trump’s White House birthday bash last month was perceived in the Kremlin as something familiar and habitual. It was praised as “the most spectacular show in the history of the White House” by state-controlled media. At the party, the 80-year-old U.S. president chatted with a muscular 37-year-old man whose face is well-known in Moscow. Eight months into Putin’s war in Ukraine, when dozens of U.S. companies were leaving Russia, Justin Gaethje visited Putin’s pocket republic of Chechnya to shoot guns and hang out with Chechen leaders considered war criminals in many Western states.
To project a macho image, Putin often surrounds himself with much younger strong men, too. In the past few weeks, Putin met with judo champions and with a Russian 32-year-old boxing star, Murat Gassiev. It was a rare occasion when somebody made Putin laugh and joke about drinking champagne.
“Putin turned into a Russian Tsar during his third presidential term that started in 2012 – that’s Trump’s dream, the changed constitution, the day he can reign in America, the way Putin does in Russia,” Gelman told the Daily Beast. As a member of the Russian Anti-War Committee, founded by exiled Russians, Gelman recently presented artworks by Russian political prisoners at a conference in Strasbourg. In March, Russia’s Supreme Court designated the Russian Anti-War Committee “a terrorist organization.”
Trump has openly expressed a desire to target his own critics in a similar manner, reportedly urging his attorney general to use the threat of treason charges to investigate media leaks that involved criticism of his war in Iran.
“Both Trump and Putin are building a new world, where the state and oligarchy are grown together and rule, eliminating the role of the middle class – America is going that way, that’s dangerous,” the former Kremlin insider warned.
Despite their tough-guy personas, Trump and Putin have revealed themselves to be remarkably thin-skinned. Trump has famously waged a war against late-night comedy shows where he was often the butt of the joke. Last year, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” was suspended for several days after pressure from conservatives and Trump’s administration.
Putin banned the political “Puppets” show in his first presidential term, in 2002. And last month, Poland arrested a suspect in the murder of an exiled Russian satirist who had mocked Putin; investigators are looking into whether Moscow ordered the assassination.
Svetlana Gannushkina, a well-known human rights activist based in Moscow, was designated a “foreign agent” after she joked about Putin’s mental health. She said she sees similarities in Putin’s and Trump’s behavior.
“They are both sick with megalomania and a mission of making their countries great,” she said, “while citizens’ suffering deepens.”
