[Peace-discuss] Trump the Autocrat

[Szoke, Ron]

‘The word fascist is perfectly accurate when applied to Donald Trump’
The writer Masha Gessen sees parallels between the US and Russia under Putin
 —  Hugh Linehan,  The Irish Times, Thu, Jun 25, 2020 

 As we hurtle towards one of the most divisive, ugly and consequential elections in American history, the flow of books about what’s happening in the United States right now is on a similar upward trajectory.
Masha Gessen brings a very particular perspective to the task. The author, activist and New Yorker magazine journalist first came to the US as a teenager, in the 1980s, from what was then the USSR, before returning to Russia a decade later as an investigative reporter, getting a ringside view of the country’s transition from post-Soviet chaos to a new model of undemocratic, autocratic government. It was the Putin regime’s assault on LGBT+ rights that finally forced Gessen and their family to leave again for the US, seven years ago. (Gessen, who identifies as nonbinary, has said they were “probably the only publicly out gay person in the whole country”.)
   Gessen was one of the foremost chroniclers of Russia’s descent under Vladimir Putin into a kleptocratic “mafia state”, and that perspective informs their new book, Surviving Autocracy. The title has its origin in a piece they wrote for the New York Review of Books in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, laying out a set of rules for maintaining sanity in a bewildering time.
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“ Donald Trump would like to be a totalitarian leader if he could. He really wants the whole country to be one giant Trump rally ” 

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