Is This America’s ‘Putin Moment’?

What Putin’s Russia teaches us about America, and what Trump can do about it.

By guest author Hunger the Dye Merchant.

In a recent podcast between Auron MacIntyre and Dave the Distributist, our good friend Dave made repeated comparisons between President Trump and the second most hated man in Washington, President of Russia, Vladimir Putin.

On its face, the two men in terms of background, personal charisma, and rhetorical style could not be more different. But a closer examination of the two men (and the challenges they faced after rising to high office) offers much food for political thought.

Post-Covid America, though not nearly to the same extent, can be charitably compared with Russia in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union: hyperinflation of basic consumer goods, a looming debt crisis, huge spikes in petty crimes and gang violence in cities, assassination attempts on political opponents, and the downright theft of trillions of dollars in public wealth by treasonous politicians and oligarchs.

One need only look at the similarities between the leaders of Russia and America at the time, Boris Yeltsin and Joe Biden, to see the incredible number of parallels.

Yeltsin was born in a small town in the Urals. Biden was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Both men were quintessentially Russian and American. Both men rose with the political winds and were catapulted into office by powers far greater than their own. Both men established legendary crime families by shamelessly stealing wealth from the state, private interests, and their own people.

Yeltsin was a famous drunkard who used his daughter and son-in-law, who was an energy baron and oil trader at Ural Energy, to launder billions. Biden, a senile old man obsessed with ice cream and sniffing young girls, used his son Hunter to launder billions of dollars in Ukraine through Burisma.

Interestingly, both men also stole a presidential election, Yeltsin in 1996 and Biden in 2020, by halting the vote count in the middle of the night through machine politics and chicanery. And the list goes on.

Due to massive public unpopularity, general lawlessness, and declining quality of life, both men’s careers were cut short. Yeltsin had to hand power to a new successor, Vladimir Putin, while Biden’s (involuntary) successor Harris had to lose an election to President Trump.

Yeltsin left President Putin, who came into office in 2000, a mess of a country. Both the war in Chechnya and the economic crisis created by untamed oligarchs were still raging, along with massive levels of corruption within state institutions and at the local governor level. Putin was able to turn this situation around due to the centralization of executive power that Yeltsin, ironically, initiated. Local governors became appointed instead of elected. The war in Chechnya was costly but won. And the “physical removal” of certain oligarchs, the banishment of others, and the co-opting of the rest was nothing short of a masterclass by President Putin. Russia was back on the world stage within just eight years.

Americans don’t have to look far to notice who in the political class have left their cities devastated by crime, dragged them into useless wars, and left their countries in ruin whether by fire or flood.

President Trump — by co-opting the TechRight and disaffected Republicans within Washington, finance, and the military — is now poised to be on a similar trajectory. No executive in the U.S. since possibly FDR ever made as many unprecedented executive actions as Joe Biden did in his last few days in office, and the Trump White House is even more likely to centralize this power even further.

President Trump now faces the enormous challenges of ending mass migration, securing the southern border, rebuilding the military, and tackling the oligarchs, whether they be in Washington, Davos, or the City of London. And this involves not only jailing his enemies but also pardoning and co-opting many within the Washington elite.

Yeltsin would never have relinquished power to Putin without the guarantee of a pardon for the whole crime family. The Russian oligarchs would never have been willingly co-opted without the promise that they got to keep their ill-gotten gains from the ’90s.

There’s been much injustice that Americans and President Trump himself have had to endure since 2016. Justice is blind but fair, and the treasonous will have their day in court just like the Russian oligarchs. Washington is still a wretched hive of scum and villainy, and likely always will be. But this is what separates the realists from the ideologues. We’re here to win. So welcome to Caesarism.

Are you tired of winning yet?