Martin Sixsmith

Despots Martin Sixsmith

ong Live the King. Since his re-election as US president, Donald Trump has made good on things he only dreamed of accomplishing in his first term: he has smashed constitutional constraints, trampled on free speech, suborned the judiciary, demonised the media, crushed protests on the streets, secured the backing of America’s oligarchs and inflated his personal wealth. According to Martin Sixsmith, BBC’s Moscow Correspondent when Vladimir Putin came to power, it all looks eerily familiar from what Russia went through in the 2000s. Despots is Sixsmith's exploration of two aspiring dictators who came to power in nominally electoral democracies, then dismantled the pillars of democracy from within, one of them following confidently in the footsteps of the other. As we see in our news every day, US foreign policy is no longer based on values but on greed, and at home the Trump administration has intervened in the almost every area of people’s daily lives, bringing the National Guard and ICE agents into America's cities, telling educators what schoolchildren should be taught and threatening universities when they beg to differ. As in Putin’s Russia, so in Trump’s America: the US is fast-forwarding through what Russia endured in the first five years under Putin, and the parallels this time are much clearer, more overt, and increasingly terrifying.