How Putin fell into the Trump trap

Vladimir Putin used to be able to convince his people he was dominant just by taking dominant actions. Now he’s reduced to holding rallies to try to pitch himself as a dominant leader, and he’s clearly uncomfortable at it. He’s aiming for a Nuremberg rally, but it’s coming off more like an ineffective Trump rally.

The most underreported aspect in all this is how Putin, who was successfully evil for decades, has now devolved into a Trump-like figure: clueless at strategy, taking stupidly self defeating risks, playing to Fox News talking points in a way that doesn’t gain him a single supporter he didn’t already have, and holding rallies that aren’t politically effective.

Of course the media can’t admit that Putin has become just as clueless and ineffective as Trump, because the media still doesn’t want to admit that Trump was always politically clueless and a highly ineffective campaigner. It goes against the media’s current ratings driven hype about Trump 2024, which it still hopes to milk for another year or two before finally admitting that Trump is toast.

But in reality Trump ran a highly ineffective 2016 campaign and only “won” (while losing by three million votes) due to Putin, Comey’s letter, the media’s complicity in the phony email scandal, and other external factors. Trump then also ran a highly ineffective 2020 campaign and got blown out by seven million votes.

If you’ve been wondering why Putin wasn’t there in the end to help prop up a helpless and clueless Trump, now you see it: Putin has himself become as helpless and clueless as Trump always was.

We may never know for certain what’s been going on in Putin’s mind of late. But the sum of his actions is unmistakable: he’s devolved from a savvy evil villain who always knew how to cover his ass, into a guy who’s now as un-savvy and self defeating as his own puppet Trump.

Putin’s sudden collapse, on the heels of Trump’s downfall, is a reminder that Trump-like strategies don’t work. You can’t take risks that could finish you off. You can’t play to your own base at the expense of the middle. You can’t just pander to Fox News narratives. And so on.

The media has spent the past five years insisting that because Trump accidentally won in 2016, it means his approach to politics was highly savvy. But now that Putin is losing everything by behaving like Trump, it’s time to admit Trump’s strategy was always an ineffective joke.

It’s almost enough to make you wonder if Putin’s current self defeating behavior is a result of having watched too much American cable news, and having come away with the fictional impression that Trump knew what he was doing. Putin, at one point, certainly knew Trump was an ineffective idiot. Trump was his ineffective idiot. But as Putin’s mind unravels in whatever manner it’s unraveling, he appears to believe that behaving like Trump is somehow going to save him. Instead it’s helping finish him off.