Washington Post
By Rula Jebreal
September 22, 2015
The
lessons of Italian history ought to make Americans a lot more nervous
about Donald Trump than they seem to be. Calculated buffoonery is a
longstanding tactic for right-wing
demagogues looking to alter national political calculations to their
own advantage — masking as farce the tragedy they portend.
Ask
Italian voters, who spent a total of nine years between 1994 and 2011
being governed by Silvio Berlusconi. Italy’s longest-serving prime
minister, Berlusconi started
out as a wealthy demagogue on the brink of bankruptcy, whose celebrity
was — like Trump’s — rooted in both real estate and popular
entertainment culture. Berlusconi presented himself as Italy’s
strongman, speaking like a barman, selling demonstrably false
promises of wealth and grandeur for all. He made the electorate laugh
while stoking fears of communists and liberals stripping privileges and
increasing taxes. Presaging Trump, the Italian media mogul cast himself
as the only viable savior of a struggling
nation: the political outsider promising to sweep in and clean up from
the vanquished left and restore the country to its lost international
stature. “I am the Jesus Christ of politics. I sacrifice myself for
everyone,” Berlusconi said. Now we find Trump promising
“to make America great again,” pledging to become the “greatest jobs
president […] ever created.”
Like
Berlusconi, Trump is running on his claim of being a rich, successful
businessman, despite the fact that he was the owner of at least four
bankrupt companies — just
as Berlusconi promised Italians to make them as rich as he was, while
in reality his companies were deeply in debt at the time he first ran,
as extensively documented in Marco Travaglio’s book “Clean Hands.” Both
men exploited voters’ rage at a discredited,
gridlocked political establishment. Trump encourages voters’ fearful
nativism and legitimizes racist and sexist anxieties called forth by
claims to equality for women and minorities. He styles himself as the
man willing to bluntly state “truths” held to be
self-evident by fearful white conservatives, abandoning the politeness
and political correctness of mainstream candidates who know they can’t
win elections if they sound too much like Archie Bunker.
Like
Berlusconi in Italy, Trump has built a political campaign employing
unvarnished language and jaundiced humor, which has succeeded in the
United States, a country
that — embarrassingly — ranks second among wealthy industrialized
nations, only behind Italy, in terms of being uninformed on key issues
of the world.
Trump’s
crude attacks on female candidates and journalists — such as
characterizing Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly as having “blood coming out
of her… wherever” and attacking
presidential candidate and opponent Carly Fiorina’s appearance — are
reminiscent of Berlusconi’s history of misogyny. He once dismissed
opponents as “too ugly to be taken seriously” and insulted a fellow
European leader during a conversation with a newspaper
editor, referring to German Chancellor Angela Merkel as “an unf—able
fat bitch.” (Il Giornale, Berlusconi’s own newspaper, characterized the
allegation as “gossip.”) Berlusconi was known to advise U.S. businessmen
to invest in Italy because they have “beautiful
secretaries … superb girls.”
Like
Trump, Berlusconi relied on the fact that Italy’s liberal mainstream
would treat him as a joke, using his ugly gaffes as an effective,
disruptive campaign strategy
to distract both from his lack of well-thought-out policy ideas, as
well as his dangerous ignorance on foreign policy. That seems to be
Trump’s plan, too. They both turned the jokes on the political elite by
stirring up the electorate’s disdain for their critics.
Challenged about his complicated personal life, the twice-divorced
Berlusconi contemptuously and proudly stated, “it’s better to be fond of
beautiful girls than to be gay.” Meanwhile, Trump, who has been twice
divorced and thrice married, opposes gay marriage
on the grounds that it’s not traditional.
Berlusconi
sold an impossible dream, convincing Italian voters that all that stood
between them and the sort of wealth and grandeur he enjoyed was a
hapless, self-serving
political class. He promised to amend the constitution, deregulate
markets and shrink government, thus packaging a billionaire’s dream
agenda as if it offered salvation to “the average Giuseppe.” Trump has
been vague about his economic policies, other than
to bluster that his business experience means voters should trust him.
But, like Berlusconi, he responds to tough questions with scandalous
insults so as to focus the conversation on those insults rather than on
his platform.
Trump’s
political path has been carved by a media culture that favors
entertainment over news. Political debate and discussion on TV have been
reduced to mud-wrestling,
with the recent “Trump vs. Rest of GOP” debates being a perfect
illustration. Berlusconi’s opponents fell into his PR trap in the same
way in Italy, rushing to condemn his gaffes and his deliberately
provocative statements calculated to rouse the far right.
Like Berlusconi, Trump has already succeeded in making himself the
center of the conversation.
Berlusconi
may have been even more shameless than Trump. In 2005, I was one of
five journalists from the Middle East invited to brief Berlusconi on how
to improve his
relationship with the Muslim world — whose civilization he had
dismissed as inferior and backward. Berlusconi feared that Italy would
be targeted for terrorist attacks similar to those seen in London and
Madrid, the latter of which immediately preceded the
ouster by Spanish voters of Berlusconi’s ideological analog, José María
Aznar. My journalist colleagues and I unanimously advised him to
distance himself from the Iraq invasion, of which he had been an
enthusiastic backer. The following day, Berlusconi appeared
on my TV news show and proceeded to deny having ever supported the
Iraqi war, going as far as to claim that he had tried — in vain — to
dissuade President George W. Bush from undertaking the ill-fated
venture. If necessary to avoid a potential pitfall, Berlusconi
was willing to deny in the evening precisely what he had stated that
same morning.
Before
the interview, in an apparent effort to ingratiate himself to me,
Berlusconi cited the fact that he had dated Arab women as “proof” that
he did not actually believe
Muslims to be inferiors. (That was before it was made public that one
of those Arab women was “Ruby the Heartstealer,” an underage Moroccan
prostitute whose services Berlusconi had previously engaged.)
As
with Trump, Berlusconi’s antics make mockery of the idea of politicians
being guided by convictions. Nonetheless, Italians were endlessly
entertained by the comedy
he brought to politics. Trump’s bullying of Univision’s Jorge Ramos
also has a Berlusconi antecedent — Italy’s best journalists, such as
Marco Travaglio, Michelle Santoro and Enzo Biagi, were either sued or
fired from their jobs because they dared to challenge
Berlusconi’s policies. Even comedians like Daniele Luttazzi were not
spared. Trump, meanwhile, sued HBO’s Bill Maher for mocking the tycoon’s
hairdo.
It
is precisely that authoritarian demagoguery wrapped in comedy that
Trump has brought to American politics. So it’s now urgent that America
learns the lessons taught
(and havoc wrought) when Italy’s political and media establishment
underestimated Berlusconi. They viewed him as a joke, an ignorant
buffoon, and he was widely dismissed as a comical figure, unfit to lead a
serious country. None of that stopped him.
Trump
has managed to tap into real anger and disillusionment with an American
political class owned by billionaires like him. He’s taken populism to
new depths, tacitly
embracing a call to “get rid of” all American Muslims. Even worse, he
communicates his backward views with a tone and tenor that screams of
rejection and disregard of America’s civil rights achievements of the
past century. The gridlocked political system
is incapable of taking action to relieve the plight of middle class
Americans, much less help the poor.
In
Italy, it was their own poor reputations in voters’ eyes that prevented
established politicians from fending off Berlusconi’s challenge. They
were viewed as inept,
corrupt, boring and uninterested in the concerns of ordinary Italians.
Berlusconi appealed to their most base instincts and sanctified their
prejudices, rendering them willing to overlook the obvious hypocrisy and
fallacy of his promises. So effective was
Berlusconi’s narrative that the electorate was willing to forgive —
repeatedly — his utter failure to deliver on his economic promises.
Ultimately,
it was the leaders of the European Union who forced him to resign, in
exchange for rescuing Italy’s tanking economy during the debt crisis.
Berlusconi stepped
aside amid fears that the Italian economy, the third largest in Europe,
was headed the same way as Greece.
It
would be a terrible mistake for America’s political establishment to
dismiss Trump’s populist appeal and presume him unelectable. Even if he
doesn’t win, he’s already
done damage: Laughing at, or simply ignoring his rhetorical, xenophobic
bellowing can, perversely, further kindle Trump’s resentment-based
politics, allowing them to fester unchallenged. The poisonous impact his
campaign and antics are having on the country’s
politics are exploiting and galvanizing broad, deep-seated, toxic
resentment of the status quo, which has already defined this campaign —
and which may well outlive Trump’s candidacy.
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