Syndrome Berlusconi - Trump

Berlusconi. The mid-1980s, when I was covering Italy for The Wall Street Journal, I profiled a brash, bruising, billionaire businessman named Silvio Berlusconi who had made a fortune in real estate and parlayed that into control of an almost unrivaled private television empire.

Berlusconi invited me to the book-lined office in his Milan mansion. He’d made his money building a garden city called Milano 2 on the eastern outskirts of Italy’s financial capital. Then he’d made his real money — billions of dollars — through TV networks gathered in a controlling company called Mediaset. By the time I met him, a big chunk of Italy’s television advertising revenue was going into his pocket.

What I recall is the talk — a lot of it — and the voice — he’d worked as a crooner on cruise ships — and the self-confidence and the vulgarity (I had the impression that there was nothing inside the leather-bound books on the shelves). Berlusconi whisked me off in his private jet, and as we climbed over Milan he gestured to the urban sprawl beneath him and told me he was by far the “richest man in Italy.” I countered that surely Giovanni Agnelli, then the head of the Fiat group, was richer. Berlusconi scoffed. There was a lot more of his new money than that old money.

Within a decade or so, in 1994, Berlusconi was prime minister, at the head of a right-of-center political party he’d concocted the previous year, thrust to power on the basis that he would break with Italy’s dysfunctional politics and that, as a self-made billionaire, he knew how to fix problems. He used television unsparingly to buttress his meteoric rise through the wreckage of Italy’s post-1945 political order, which had recently collapsed with the end of the Cold War.

Widely ridiculed, endlessly written about, long unscathed by his evident misogyny and diverse legal travails, Berlusconi proved a Teflon politician. Nothing stuck. He had the gift of the gab. He had a tone. He connected. He owned a soccer club, for heaven’s sake. Many Italians thought they saw in him one of their own. He served three terms and nine years as prime minister before an ignominious downfall.

Nobody who knows Berlusconi and has watched the rise and rise of Donald Trump can fail to be struck by the parallels. It’s not just the real-estate-to-television path. It’s not just their shared admiration for Vladimir Putin. It’s not just the playboy thing, and obsession with their virility, and smattering of bigotry, and contempt for policy wonks, and reliance on a tell-it-like-it-is tone. It’s not their wealth, nor the media savvy that taught them that nobody ever lost by betting on human stupidity.

No, it’s something in the zeitgeist. America is ripe for Trump just as Italy was ripe for Berlusconi. Trump, too, is cutting through a rotten political system in a society where economic frustration at jobs exported to China is high. He is emerging after two lost wars, as American power declines and others strut the global stage, against a backdrop of partisan political paralysis, in a system corrupted by money. To Obama’s Doctrine of Restraint, Trump opposes a Doctrine of Resurgence. To reason, he counters with rage.

In the same way, Berlusconi emerged as Italy ceased to be a Cold War pivot and the Christian-Democrat-dominated postwar political alignments imploded. Everything was in flux as the “mani pulite” (clean hands) investigation started by Milan magistrates in 1992 exposed what everyone knew: that graft and corruption were cornerstones of Italian politics. No matter that Berlusconi was also a target of the investigation: He was new, he talked the talk, he would conjure something!

As Alexander Stille wrote recently in The Intercept of Trump and Berlusconi: “Entering politics, both have styled themselves as the ultimate anti-politician — as the super-successful entrepreneur running against gray ‘professional politicians’ who have never met a payroll.”

Stille went on to make an important point about how the deregulation of broadcast media in the United States and Italy — in contrast to Britain or France or Germany where state media companies still “act as a kind of referee for civil discourse” and “commonly accepted facts” — has fostered the fact-lite free-for-all of “alternate realities” conducive to Trumpism.

If elected president, Trump would have his finger on the nuclear button. Berlusconi did not. Trump would also face strong institutions, including judicial institutions. Berlusconi did not. Trump would be the leader of the free world. Berlusconi ruled from a city, Rome, whose lesson is that all power, however great, passes.

What Berlusconi teaches is that Trump could go all the way in a nation thirsting for a new politics. The man known as “The Knight” ended up convicted of tax fraud and paying for sex with an underage prostitute — but it took 17 years of intermittent scandal and incompetence, from 1994 to 2011, for Italy to rub the stardust from its eyes.