Day by day, the news about what is happening in America becomes more and more like the news from Russia. Some news tends to overlap so much that it becomes impossible to distinguish between what is coming from the country led by Trump and what comes from Putin’s Russia.
ICE troops appear to be related to OMON (a system of military special police units within the National Guard of Russia) and the suppression of the smallest protests is similar in the US and Russia.
In fact, there are times when Trump’s America gives lessons to Putin’s Russia as in the case of two citizens who took to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with abuses committed under Trump were executed (that’s the term) on the spot. In Minneapolis, less than three weeks apart, a woman was shot in her car and a man was shot several times while he was on the ground, immobilized.
After both episodes, President Trump and other officials praised the killers and tarnished the memory of the victims.
In Trump’s America, the prosecutor general has become in the 12 months of his first term the copy of Putin’s Russian prosecutor general.
For the attorney general in these country’s, only the president’s whim matters. From that perspective, it’s hard to tell the difference between the White House and the Kremlin.
In the US, however, the situation has deteriorated so much in recent days that the attorney general has just announced that he has ordered the arrest of a former CNN journalist, Don Lemon, and the reason for his arrest is related to his press activity: he reported an anti-ICE protest held in a church.
CNN, Don Lemon’s former employer, accused the Trump administration of violating the First Amendment and press freedom, another layer of abuse, as a judge had already twice rejected the issuance of an arrest warrant.
It is also worth noting that other journalists in Minnesota have also been under the kind of pressure exerted on Lemon.
The step taken by the U.S. attorney general regarding these journalists – an incredible step for a minimally democratic society – came shortly after Tom Hofman, the Trump-appointed border tsar, had taken direct management of ICE’s operations in Minneapolis; and shortly after threatened to change tactics, stating dryly, “Justice is coming.”
And the justice of the Trump administration did come, only it came in the spirit in of justice for which Moscow and Minsk and other dictatorships are known.
In Russia, state-orchestrated repression rocketed once Putin realized that he could lose the war in Ukraine or, at best, it would be a long, drawn-out and difficult war. This is how denigrating the army and calling the war in Ukraine “war” became a crime.
In the US, the repression orchestrated by the federal state increased in intensity only when Trump understood that, in the short-term at least, he had begun to lose his war on immigration, politically and in the media. It’s also possible that victory will not come in the long run either.
Peaceful civilians shoved and thrown to the ground, innocent civilians sprayed at close range with toxic substances; civilians killed on the spot; masked troops, with big biceps and small brains – is what you see today on the streets of Trump’s America and on the streets of Putin’s Russia.
And more recently, you see journalists arrested on political orders in America, as is the custom in Russia.
On the issue of ICE, and also Ukraine, Trump and Putin acted and reacted identically to the same stimuli.
It’s dramatic, but it’s a new reality: in the US, peaceful protesters risk being killed, and journalists risk being arrested for denigrating ICE. In Russia, this is what happens when the military is denigrated.
The gap between Trump and Putin is narrowing at a frightening rate.
It is probably no coincidence that a photo of Putin has just been spotted on a wall in the White House. Putin is next to Trump, of course.
And it is all the more telling that the photo of an internationally recognized criminal was placed by Trump next to the photo of the US president with one of his granddaughters. How cute!
This is also a way of officially acknowledging that the Russian dictator has been accepted into the great Trump family; and that America is on the road to an odious transformation.
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