WASHINGTON POST
Berlusconi started out as a wealthy demagogue on the brink of bankruptcy, whose celebrity was — like Trump’s — rooted in both real estate and popular entertainment culture. Berlusconi presented himself as Italy’s strongman, speaking like a barman, selling demonstrably false promises of wealth and grandeur for all. He made the electorate laugh while stoking fears of communists and liberals stripping privileges and increasing taxes. Presaging Trump, the Italian media mogul cast himself as the only viable savior of a struggling nation: the political outsider promising to sweep in and clean up from the vanquished left and restore the country to its lost international stature. ... Now we find Trump promising “to make America great again,” pledging to become the “greatest jobs president […] ever created.”
Like Berlusconi, Trump is running on his claim of being a rich, successful businessman, despite the fact that he was the owner of at least four bankrupt companies — just as Berlusconi promised Italians to make them as rich as he was, while in reality his companies were deeply in debt at the time he first ran, as extensively documented in Marco Travaglio’s book “Clean Hands.” Both men exploited voters’ rage at a discredited, gridlocked political establishment. Trump encourages voters’ fearful nativism and legitimizes racist and sexist anxieties called forth by claims to equality for women and minorities. He styles himself as the man willing to bluntly state “truths” held to be self-evident by fearful white conservatives, abandoning the politeness and political correctness of mainstream candidates who know they can’t win elections if they sound too much like Archie Bunker.
Like Berlusconi in Italy, Trump has built a political campaign employing unvarnished language and jaundiced humor, which has succeeded in the United States, a country that — embarrassingly — ranks second among wealthy industrialized nations, only behind Italy, in terms of being uninformed on key issues of the world.
Trump’s crude attacks on female candidates and journalists — such as characterizing Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly as having “blood coming out of her… wherever” and attacking presidential candidate and opponent Carly Fiorina’s appearance — are reminiscent of Berlusconi’s history of misogyny. He once dismissed opponents as “too ugly to be taken seriously” and insulted a fellow European leader during a conversation with a newspaper editor, referring to German Chancellor Angela Merkel as “an unf—able fat bitch.”
Like Trump, Berlusconi relied on the fact that Italy’s liberal mainstream would treat him as a joke, using his ugly gaffes as an effective, disruptive campaign strategy to distract both from his lack of well-thought-out policy ideas, as well as his dangerous ignorance on foreign policy. That seems to be Trump’s plan, too. They both turned the jokes on the political elite by stirring up the electorate’s disdain for their critics....Like Berlusconi, Trump has already succeeded in making himself the center of the conversation.
Trump has managed to tap into real anger and disillusionment with an American political class owned by billionaires like him. He’s taken populism to new depths, tacitly embracing a call to “get rid of” all American Muslims. Even worse, he communicates his backward views with a tone and tenor that screams of rejection and disregard of America’s civil rights achievements of the past century. The gridlocked political system is incapable of taking action to relieve the plight of middle class Americans, much less help the poor.
In Italy, it was their own poor reputations in voters’ eyes that prevented established politicians from fending off Berlusconi’s challenge. They were viewed as inept, corrupt, boring and uninterested in the concerns of ordinary Italians. Berlusconi appealed to their most base instincts and sanctified their prejudices, rendering them willing to overlook the obvious hypocrisy and fallacy of his promises. So effective was Berlusconi’s narrative that the electorate was willing to forgive — repeatedly — his utter failure to deliver on his economic promises.
DAILY BEAST
Berlusconi first came into power in 1994, when Italians were desperate and wary of politics as usual. The country was licking its wounds after violent internal terrorism during the years of lead followed by the Bribesville scandal and Clean Hands investigation that rocked the establishment, highlighting a culture of bipartisan corruption that sent prime minister Benito Craxi into exile in Tunisia, where he later died without ever serving his prison sentence in Italy.
“Berlusconi came to power at a peculiar point in Italian history,” Michael Day, author of Being Berlusconi: The Rise and Fall From Cosa Nostra to Bunga Bunga told The Daily Beast. “And after a grim decade and a half of industrial strife and terrorist violence stoked by the Cold-War, the public was ready to lap up Berlusconi's hollow promises of a bright new feature. He took his chance brilliantly.”
Berlusconi...also owned a popular soccer team, which, to an Italian, equates with having the keys to heaven. Whenever political opponents pressed him on policy matters, he responded with what amounted to bread and circuses, taking a page from ancient Roman emperors who used superficial entertainment as diversions in times of strife. “When a center-left rival challenged Berlusconi over his economic competence during his first election campaign, the TV and football mogul simply responded: ‘How many Intercontinental [soccer] cups have you won?’,” says Day, noting that he then called those very opponents communists for good measure.
Berlusconi used to quip that all women want to be with him, and all men want to be him. It was partially true. After all, the billionaire media tycoon started his career as a vacuum cleaner salesman and cruise ship crooner whose rags-to-riches success story is only missing the glass slipper.
When Berlusconi was running for office, that incredible divide between ‘have and have not’ actually helped him. Many Italians were convinced that he would do for their country what he did for himself. Of course that wasn’t to be, and his multiple court cases including 2,5000 trial dates during his 17-year reign as prime minister ranging from extortion and tax evasion to outright bribery and false accounting, instead proved that he still did for himself at the expense of the country.
[Though he lost power less than a year after his first election, he stormed back to power in 2001. Despite a short-lived turn in 2006 to the center-left’s Romano Prodi, Berlusconi once again returned in 2008. Forced to resign in 2011 amid a debt crisis, Berlusconi still led the Italian right to what amounts to a draw in the 2013 election.
It’s as if Italian voters just couldn’t help themselves, such was the spectacle of a showman that the Italian media dubbed ‘Il cavaliere,’ the ‘knight.’ Time and again, Berlusconi’s charms proved irresistible. It’s not out of the question that he might mount yet another comeback by the time that the 2018 elections roll around.
Most sensationally, Berlusconi was convicted in 2013 on charges relating to payment to an underage Moroccan prostitute, Karima El Mahroug (sensationally referred to in the Italian media as ‘Ruby Rubacouri’ — Ruby the heartstealer). Though the conviction was overturned by an appeals court in 2014, the wild stories of Berlusconi’s ‘bunga bunga‘ parties may have damaged his reputation more than anything else in what’s still a conservative Catholic country.
More recently, in July 2015, he was convicted of bribery while in office by a court in Naples, though that might yet be reversed on appeal. Berlusconi apparently paid €3 million to Sergio De Gregorio, a member of Italy’s senate, to join the center-right between 2006 and 2008, helping bring down the Prodi government.
Berlusconi was convicted in 2012, a year after leaving the premiership, for tax evasion, and an Italian court in 2013 upheld that verdict, clearing the way for the former prime minister to serve a one-year community service sentence and barring him, temporarily, from holding public office. Huffington Post ]
Writing in Quartz, Italian journalist Annalisa Minnella brilliantly summed up the bottom line. “Berlusconi ... won elections again, and again, and again, thriving off any and all attention,” she says. “People didn’t take him or what he said seriously. Then one day we woke up to find our government overrun by criminals, our economy destroyed, and our cultural mores perverted to the extent that the objectification of women was commonplace. There was no more laughing left to do.”
HUFFINGTON POST
The similarities between Trump and Berlusconi — their willingness to engage demagoguery, their wealth, their vulgarity, their ability to tap into the emotions (both positive and negative) of their supporters — are manifest.
But there are important differences.
For all of Trump’s bluster, he doesn’t control nearly the share of the American economy that Berlusconi did. For one, Berlusconi’s net worth is nearly $6.5 billion, according to Forbes, about $2 billion wealthier than Trump (again, according toForbes). But that $6.5 billion punches far stronger in Italy’s economy than Trump’s $4.5 billion wealth punches in the United States, which has the world’s largest economy and a far less insular network of business elites.
Berlusconi, through his media company, Mediaset, controlled six of Italy’s most popular private television channels when he was in power. Now, regardless of whether Trump’s self-branded empire of real estate and other interests impress you, he certainly doesn’t control the American media. Far from it, given his on-again, off-again feud with the right-leaning Fox News and his attacks on other media outlets.