The socialist who paved the way for Trump

Neither the Right nor the Left will like this, says Rory Carroll, but as I see it, the leader who Donald Trump most resembles is a socialist demagogue from Venezuela. The swagger, the showmanship, the blunders: with every passing day, President Trump seems more like the late president Chávez. His fixation with crowd sizes and victory margins, his war on the media, his fights with neigh - bours; all are moves out of the Hugo Chávez play book. Yes, the two have different profiles: Chávez was a poor country boy and keen socialist, Trump an alpha-capitalist reared in affluent New York. But both took on the Establishment, playing up their outsider role with “bawdy humour” and “vitriolic insults”. Both loved being TV stars: Trump fired contestants on The Apprentice, Chávez ousted oil execs on his own weekly TV show. And like Trump, Chávez was reviled by the educated classes. Yet their shrill denunciations of him alienated voters in the middle ground, who kept voting him back to office even though he ruined the economy. Trumps’ critics should take care not to repeat their mistakes.