>>17856087
>>17856259
>America's Gorbachev
I respectfully disagree for three reasons.
1. Trump is essentially devoid of the magnanimity of Gorbachev. On a personal level, the man is deeply vindictive, harbors grudges lasting years, and seemingly incapable of serious self-reflection. Where Gorbachev saw the writing on the wall, Trump would only double down.
2. Gorbachev was a Soviet bureaucrat through-and-through. One of the reasons he is one of the few Russian heads of state to survive having his government collapse from under him (as opposed to Nicholas II) was that he could navigate the Soviet bureaucracy like no other. Trump is the opposite of a bureaucrat. The man detests political process and this is arguably what makes him a "man of the people", he shares their contempt for a system that seems slow and unresponsive to the public's needs.
3. If the Union were to dissolve, it would not peacefully (relatively speaking) dismantle like the USSR did, it would tear itself apart as Yugoslavia did, where centuries of building bad blood and a desire to settle new and old scores become a lighting rod for racial holy war and genocide. The precedent for this was already set in the first Civil War where the United States government demonstrated it would rather plunge the entire continent into slaughter than lose a single star on its flag (whether or not the Confederacy's reasons for secession were justified is another matter).
In this sense, the man is closer to Slobodan Milošević, an anti-bureaucratic rabble-rousing populist with a base of hardcore violence-prone supporters who came into power at precisely the wrong moment. And as Milošević found out, they'll grow radical to the point where even he can't control them anymore.
