Power and spells: the alternate universes of Trump and Putin

Dagbladet Store Dusteforbundet’s humorist and father, Fredrik Stabel, believed that women and men have one thing in common, the opposite sex. As we know, the female and male universes create entanglements in everyday life. And that can be quite disturbing. But at least as disturbing is the fact that Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have in common, each their own alternate universe. And if Stabel’s observation of women and men was a joke with certain clues in reality, then the alternate universes of Trump and Putin are not a joke at all, and hardly have enough clues in reality.

Is well documented that Donald Trump has cultivated lying as a business method and lifestyle throughout his adult life. This has intensified since he took office nearly four years ago. He approved 20,000 lies as president on July 9 of this year, according to The Washington Post. That is, an average of 23.8 lies every day. By turning lies into “truth”, in black and white, he has managed to go beyond the limits of political struggle. Trump’s lies in political controversy are often equated with fact, in what has gradually become Trump’s alternate universe.

It started immediately. After the presidential inauguration in January 2017, Trump complained that the media reported that fewer people were present at the inauguration than at the inauguration of his predecessor Barack Obama eight years earlier. Despite photographic and other evidence documenting that Trump was wrong, Trump’s media strategist Kellyanne Conway explained her disagreement with what she called Trump’s ‘alternative facts’. The term was initially perceived as a joke, but over time, Trump’s many alternative facts have become part of “reality.” Thus, the Trump circus was in full swing. And so far this year, the most serious of Trump’s lies is that of February 27, when he said about the coronavirus: “It will go away. One day it is like a miracle, it will disappear.”

The lie used as a kind of enchantment, as Trump usually does, did not work in the face of the reality that the virus represents. By dismissively dismissing Fake News and Main Stream Media, Trump has miraculously managed to build an alternate universe for his followers, based on lies and falsehoods. But it did not work in relation to the rogue virus. And so, of course, Trump needed a new lie, namely, that from day one he had effectively fought the virus.

In Russia, Putin is more subtle alternate universe. It certainly contains lies, like that of Putin who denied for a whole year that Russian troops had annexed Crimea in 2014, before describing it all as a successful security operation. The persistent attempts by the regime to find alternative explanations for the airliner that was shot down over eastern Ukraine, and the poison and other murders of opponents of the regime, belong to the same class of alternative universes.

But Putin’s alternative the universe is also about building a political system that is a “kind of democracy” with political parties playing roles like in a play, and elections organized in such a way that power can never lose, as ideology builders they call it “sovereign democracy.” The system is insightfully described, among other things, in a 2014 analytical report book in a surreal world by Peter Pomerantsev, with the revealing title: “Nothing is true and everything is possible.”

How to build a quasi-democracy in the Russian parliamentary system. Because despite the fact that there are elections, and different parties, in reality all criticism of the system is prohibited in parliament, and the poisoned opposition leader who is in a coma in Germany, Alexei Navanlyj, of course, has no place there either. For Parliament, the Duma is a well-run political theater in a like-minded world. The ideologue of the play is Vladislav Surkov, who for a long time sold his project, which Putin voluntarily bought, as a success.

The fox shows his face

But the bright picture he is now on the verge of disappearing, after Governor Sergei Furgal in Khabarovsk, on the Black Sea coast, was arrested in early July. Since then, people have demonstrated by the tens of thousands every week, against the arrest of “her husband”, who is not a member of Putin’s party, United Russia, but of one of the parties that is a supporter of power in parliament. . Khabarovsk has revealed a real conflict between parties, which mobilize people in the streets, explicitly against Putin, and Putin’s alternative universe is also being stripped.

And if we should He challenged us to describe the rather massive attempts to escape political reality in both the United States and Russia, so it must be said: Welcome to postmodern political reality.