The recent worldwidestock market meltdown triggered by Donald Trump’s ill-conceived trade warreminded me of Silvio Berlusconi’s final days as Italy’s prime minister in November2011, when interest rates on Italian Treasury bonds spiraled exponentially eachday to a point where they threatened to cripple the country’s economy.Coming18 years after Berlusconi’s entrance into politics—and after 18 years of economicstagnation—it was as if the market were screaming: We cannot live with thisin power one more day. And so the man who had presented himself as an economicmiracle worker was done in by the thing he supposedly understood best: themarket.
While the parallelsbetween Berlusconi and Trump are striking—arguably, Berlusconi wrote theplaybook for billionaire populism—what we are witnessing in the first threemonths of the second Trump administration is a populist demagogue morphing intoa would-be autocrat. In the process, Trump has taken on a decided resemblanceto another Italian politician: Benito Mussolini.
The comparisons betweenTrump and Berlusconi, who dominated Italian politics between 1993 and 2011, areobvious and help us understand Trump’s initial political ascent and his firstterm in office. Both made their initial fortune in real estate, were bettersalesmen than businessmen, and developed a second career in television:Berlusconi as owner of Italy’s three largest private TV networks; Trump as thestar of an extremely popular reality TV show. Berlusconi created a new kind ofpolitical actor, the media-savvy businessman turned politician who won overworking-class voters.
But Berlusconi’spolitical aims, by comparison, were comparatively modest. Despite his promisesof being the Italian Margaret Thatcher, he did not try to remake Italiansociety or its place in the world and did not pursue a particularly ambitiouseconomic or political agenda. It often seemed his main goals were preservinghis financial empire and avoiding criminal prosecution. Berlusconi’s ownparticular brand of narcissism—the need to be loved and adulated—actuallyprevented him from becoming the transformative figure he promised. Italy neededdeep structural reforms—to the labor market, the pension system, for example.But undertaking them would have required Berlusconi to risk becoming unpopular,which was something he could not stomach.
Trump’s narcissism isvery different from Berlusconi’s. Like Mussolini’s, it involves a desire fortotal dominance and an increasingly unhinged delusion of omnipotence: hence hisrepeated threats to take over Canada and invade Greenland; to turn Gaza into anAmerican beach resort. Mussolini, like Trump, had a keen instinctive animalcunning that helped him intuit the public mood and vanquish his domesticpolitical opponents. He was a brilliant demagogue who could electrify the crowdand who shrewdly understood and exploited his domestic opponents’ weaknesses.
All this served him wellat first. But when he began to move outside of Italy—creating an Italian empire and forcing Italy into World War II—his fundamental provincialism,his deep ignorance of the outside world, and his overestimation of his owninstincts over objective facts did him in. After years in power, surrounded bytoadies and yes-men, Mussolini began to believe his own rhetoric about Italy’s“eight million bayonets,” preferring to ignore his generals’ warnings thatItaly was nowhere near ready to fight a world war. Mussolini was convinced that“national character” mattered more than industrial capacity, causing him tobadly underestimate both Britain’s and America’s ability to wage war. LikeTrump, Mussolini insisted on taking personal charge of most importantnegotiations. He insisted on meeting alone with Hitler, relying on his ownsomewhat shaky German to deal with the Nazi leader, who, not surprisingly,dominated their talks. This is reminiscent of Trump’s personalistic approach tohandling Vladimir Putin, in highly secretive, one-on-one meetings that theRussian seems to always get the better of.
Like Trump, Mussoliniwas an ardent protectionist, adopting a policy of “autarky,” demanding thatItaly should consume only products made in Italy. The policy was initially a peevish responseto the boycott that other nations leveled at Italy following its unprovokedinvasion of Ethiopia. But Mussolini elevated the practice to a central featureof Italian economic policy, even though it did little to improve the standard ofliving for Italians.
Piqued by Hitler’smilitary successes, Mussolini impetuously invaded neutral Greece, only to bebeaten back by Greek troops and bailed out by a German invasion. OvercomingGerman reluctance, Mussolini insisted on sending some 200,000 Italian troops toparticipate in the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union—because he wanted creditfor the defeat of Bolshevism. Never mind that the Italian Army had its handsfull in the Balkans and North Africa. The Italian troops were not properlyequipped for the Russian winter, and when the invasion failed, Italy lostalmost 60 percent of its expeditionary force. Many troops were forced toliterally walk back from Russia as much of their motorized transport broke downor was destroyed. When Mussolini’s government fell in 1943, many of these menwere captured by their Nazi allies and sent to German concentration camps.
In the first Trumpgovernment, he was surrounded by “adult supervision,” experienced members ofthe political, economic, and military establishment who kept his most dangerousimpulses in check. He inherited from Barack Obama an economy in full recovery and pursued the usual Republican formula of tax cuts, which, while adding tothe national debt, kept the economy humming. His long-cherished tariff policywas mostly bluster. His mishandling of the pandemic, during which the UnitedStates lost more than a million lives, may have cost him reelection.
This conviction ofknowing better than the experts was a characteristic of Mussolini’s rule, aswell: At different moments, along with being prime minister, Il Duce assumedthe Cabinet positions of foreign minister, minister of war, minister of the interior, minister of the navy and the air force, as well as minister ofItalian Africa. Trump in his second term has removed anyone who might check hisworst instincts and has filled his Cabinet with people whose only realqualification is personal loyalty to the chief.
Having pulled off amiraculous political comeback following his loss to Joe Biden and the disgraceof his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, Trump retook power with an auraof indomitable power. He and many of his supporters literally believed that hehad survived an assassination attempt through divine intervention and that hepossessed the superpower to Make America Great Again. More cynically,Republican leaders in Congress believed, quite credibly, that he possessed thepower to ruin the career of anyone who opposed or criticized him. The Republican Partyhas thus assumed a cultlike quality. Elon Musk has taken to wearing a hat withthe words “Trump Was Right About Everything,” which eerily echoes the fascist slogan “Mussolini Is AlwaysRight.”
The public and many of Trump’sfollowers mistook his charisma for genuine ability and economic acumen,accepting the fabricated image of Trump as the hero of The Apprentice,master dealmaker, entrepreneur with the infallible Midas touch. In our badlydegraded information environment—in which a majority of Americans now gettheir information from social media and not reliably sourced, factual news—millions of Americans were somehow able to ignore Trump’s abysmal record as afailed businessman as well as his record in office of capricious, autocratic,and reckless behavior that earned him two impeachments. Between 1985 and 1994,as The New York Times reported, Trump lost more money than any singletaxpayer in the United States, even as he published his self-congratulatory Artof the Deal.
The past several dayshave been an Emperor Has No Clothes moment, in which Trump essentially blew upthe world’s system of commercial trade, provoking the biggest drop in the stockmarket since the Covid-19 pandemic paralyzed the world economy. And after theadministration was forced to admit that it had unlawfully deported a gainfullyemployed father of three to a brutal prison in El Salvador, Trump doubleddown by rejecting a court order that the government help repatriate Kilmar AbregoGarcia. In fact, Trump insisted on Mondaythat he’d like to send “homegrown” criminals to CECOT prison, which wouldbecome a kind of offshore gulag. He did so during a surreal White Housemeeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele—who calls himself “the world’scoolest dictator”—in a muscle-flexing show of defiance toward any notion ofrule of law.
The public might have initially been confused or impressed by the flurry of nonstop activity ofTrump’s first weeks. Seeing it as shock and awe, the unequivocal flunking gradethe stock market gave to his trade policy made clear that Trump has no ideawhat he is doing and is simply making it up as he goes along. The markets in2011 were essentially screaming their judgment that they had no confidence inBerlusconi’s economic leadership and they could not tolerate his presence aday longer. Falling as it does at the beginning of his term, it will not endTrump’s time in power as it did Berlusconi’s, but it suggests that Trump’sdownfall is likely to come not from moral opprobrium but from economic failureand rank incompetence.
Mussolini careened fromcrisis to crisis—the invasion of Ethiopia, the civil war in Spain, theinvasion of Albania and, finally, the entrance into World War II. If his careeris any guide, we can expect four years of constant crisis. Autocrats requirecrisis to justify the extraordinary—and often illegal—measures they takeand to distract the public’s attention from the fact that they are not actuallyimproving the lives of ordinary citizens.
