Garry Kasparov, who witnessed the Putinization of Russia, waves a warning flag (as he did in 2017) about Donald Trump, who in his second go-round in the White House is actively siding with Vladimir Putin, as Russia faces ongoing military losses and a wobbly economy.
Once more unto the breach arrives Donald Trump, back in office with more help from the Kremlin—and the inept Democrats—ready to throw his old pal Putin a lifeline. At his side is someone new: the richest private citizen in the world, Elon Musk. (Putin controls far more money than Musk or Trump—do not underestimate how that affects their perceptions of him as the big boss.) With Musk arrives an overused and misunderstood word in the American vernacular: oligarch.
Although it’s not a Russian word, post-Soviet Russia popularized its use and attempted to perfect the system it described. In the 1990s, those most capable of manipulating the newly privatized markets became the richest people in Russia. They quickly seized the levers of political power to expand their resources and fortunes, persecute their rivals, and blur the lines between public and private power until they were erased.
Putin, a nondescript technocrat, was a useful front for billionaires such as Boris Berezovsky: Putin appeared to be the hard veteran of the KGB, cleaning up corruption—while what he was really doing was bringing it inside, legitimizing it, and creating a mafia state. Oligarchs could bend the knee and profit, or resist and end up in jail or in exile, their assets ripped away.
While Trump’s unleashing of Musk and DOGE to rip apart the infrastructure of government may not appear to fit the authoritarian model, Kasparov has seen this before:
Cutting bureaucracy isn’t usually associated with despotism and power grabs. We tend to think of wannabe dictators packing the courts and increasing the size and power of the state. But that isn’t what you do when you want to make the government impotent against private power—your private power. The Putin model was to weaken any state institution that might defy him and to build state power back up only when he had total control.
The world’s richest man (at least “richest private citizen”) is unelected, unaccountable, and — though he is damaging the capacity of the federal government to do its jobs — he still has his hand out. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the NIH, EPA, CFPB, VA, FAA, and other programs and agencies may fail, but Musk is still near the front of the line to reap immense profits because of his connections to the Trump regime. Other billionaires aren’t far behind.
If we continue moving in this direction, this won’t turn out well for the rest of us.
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