Our "Grab Them By the Pussy President," is our Slobodan Milosevic!

This seems like essential reading from John Schindler, former National Security Agency Analyst and Counter-Intelligence Officer. Question: What Authoritarian Dictator is our Current President Most Like? Answer: Slobodan Milosevic!

"By the time Serbs figured out they had been conned, it was too late; the country was already wrecked, and Milošević managed to hold on until the fall of 2000, thanks to his control of the media and the police, enriching his family and his hangers-on every step of the way. That he was eventually extradited to The Hague to face justice seems inadequate compared to the devastation which Slobodan Milošević left in his wake.

You can understand the remarkable rise of Donald Trump in 2015-16 by simply exchanging “Serbian nationalism” for “white nationalism”: the parallels are eerie and disturbing. Trump, who never had shown the slightest interest in the plight of the white working class while he built his flimflam empire of gauche condos and casinos, suddenly reinvented himself as their champion. By telling angry and alienated people just what they wanted to hear, Trump created a political movement overnight and mysteriously rode it right to the White House.

Now that’s he’s there, President Trump has failed to deliver on his grandiose promises to his base. Chants of “Build the Wall” to preserve America’s current demographics have gone silent, while Trumpian populism turns out in practice to mean a cabinet packed with Goldman Sachs alumni and tax cuts for the rich. At this point, Trump’s manipulation of white nationalism seems every bit as cynically dishonest as Milošević’s Serbian patriot act.

So far, of course, America has avoided the fate of Yugoslavia. We’re a much bigger and richer country, and our economy, for all its structural problems, is a lot less troubled than Yugoslavia’s was in the 1980s. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Donald Trump has opened the same can of ethno-nationalist worms that Slobodan Milošević did, and if he keeps stoking those fires while doing nothing for his angry and alienated base, America could yet wind up resembling Yugoslavia a lot more than anybody sane should want." - John Schindler, The Observer