The Putinization of America: Can Trump and Musk Outdo Vladimir Putin?

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The latest pronouncements from Donald Trump and Elon Musk have left the Kremlin feeling a mix of pride and unease. On one hand, Russian officials are convinced that Vladimir Putin has become the ultimate role model for these American titans. After all, wasn’t it Putin who popularized the gangster swagger—typical tough-guy talk—and pioneered bullying as the lingua franca of global politics? Yet, on the other hand, there’s a creeping anxiety in Moscow: What if Trump and Musk are poised to out-Putin Putin on his own turf?

Take, for instance, Putin’s peculiar congratulatory speech after Trump’s presidential victory. In November, the Russian leader declared the death of the old world order—the one built on the principles of liberal democracy—and heralded the dawn of a new authoritarian era. “We are witnessing the formation of a completely new world order, nothing like we had in the past, such as the Westphalian or Yalta systems,” he proclaimed, with the confidence of a man watching his worldview go mainstream.

Over the past weeks, as Trump and Musk have offered up their foreign-policy musings, Russian oligarchs and bureaucrats have been nodding along in agreement. Those statements, say the Russians, prove Putin’s point: The old international legal framework is dead.

The rules-based order? A relic. Trump’s casual claims to Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal—and his cozying up to far-right movements in Germany and Britain—signal that the game has fundamentally changed. As Musk put it recently in a social media post directed at Justin Trudeau, “Girl, you’re not the governor of Canada anymore, so doesn’t matter what you say.” According to many of my contacts in Moscow, the statement was so emblematic of the emerging global order that it might as well be considered its new slogan.

Kremlin insiders have a term for this phenomenon: the “Putinization” of global politics. Just three years ago, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it would have been unthinkable for US public figures to flirt so openly with ideas like annexing a sovereign nation. Such talk seemed firmly relegated to the dustbin of the 19th century. But since February 2022, this has become the new norm of the 21st century.

When Putin invaded Ukraine, he didn’t lose. He wasn’t overthrown, stripped of his billions, or held accountable for his aggression. Instead, he emerged looking stronger—at least in the eyes of Russia’s elites. And that, according to prominent businessmen in Moscow, makes him an irresistible blueprint for success. The brash violator of all conventions becomes the alpha role model. Bullying, once taboo as a diplomatic strategy, is now a burgeoning trend.

Back to Masculinity

Putin didn’t immediately become the embodiment of the alpha male. Twenty-five years ago, when he was chosen as Boris Yeltsin’s successor, he was dull and unknown. At that time, he needed to come up with an image that would quickly bring him popularity. Obviously, he had to become the opposite of the old, sickly, and feeble Yeltsin, who could barely walk or talk by the the time he left office. That’s why Putin’s image was sculpted as that of a “real man”—an athlete, a fighter, strong, decisive, and even rough.

“We will pursue the terrorists everywhere. If in the airport, then in the airport. If we catch them in the toilet, we’ll waste them in the outhouse,” Putin famously said in 1999, just before he announced his presidential candidacy. He was trying to show that he was a person of an entirely new type—he wasn’t shy about violence, he flaunted it.

The late Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky is said to have helped invent this image for Putin. Berezovsky—a billionaire, adventurer, and probably the most flamboyant person in Russia in the 1990s—was confident that the faceless Putin would become a pliable toy in his hands. But as it turned out, Putin was informed by a troubled adolescence and had actually been a member of a gang of juvenile delinquents; the bandit philosophy stayed with him forever. After becoming president, he quickly got rid of the billionaire who had aided his rise to power.

At the same time, Putin had long tried to portray himself as a respectable Western politician. Next to George W. Bush, he played a man who found God (that is, the Russian George Bush). Next to Tony Blair, he played the Westernized jurist (that is, the Russian Tony Blair). Next to Silvio Berlusconi, he played a cynical hedonist (and this role, obviously, suited him best).

Next to Barack Obama (or next to Trudeau), he had no role to play—they were people of different generations, different worldviews. Obama’s popularity drove him insane, as did all the new values that began to spread in the early 2010s. It was around at that time that Putin consciously began creating for himself an updated, hypermacho image of an alpha male, posing shirtless on a horse. His statements began to sound less and less like the rhetoric of an ordinary politician—he was increasingly switching to the language of a street thug. In his view, showing weakness was not an option because, as he once said, “the weak get beaten.”

Old-fashioned masculinity became his answer to the new social trends that have since become known as “woke.” This manifested not only in rhetoric but also in legislation: In 2017, he approved the decriminalization of some forms of domestic violence in Russia, and since 2013, several homophobic laws have been passed restricting the rights LGBTQ+ people; in 2023, a law targeting transgender people was passed, banning gender-affirming surgery, among other things. This agenda is effective because it is supported by one part of the population and helps to keep another part in fear.

In this brave new world, a Putin-style approach to power is no longer a liability; it’s an asset. If Putin can get away with it, who’s to say others won’t? The fear in Moscow isn’t just that Trump and Musk are taking cues from the Kremlin—it’s that they might refine the formula, making Putin’s once-singular brand of authoritarian audacity a global standard.

Sources close to the Kremlin, on the one hand, believe that the new American leaders have pragmatically borrowed this style from Putin, believing it to be effective. And in this, they see a danger for the Russian leader himself. He is used to considering himself the sole “global maniac,” as one of my sources put it; he has always been a politician who raises the stakes and is always ready to escalate. According to Kremlin insiders, Putin now faces competition—and he is not used to that.

“If we assume that Trump and Musk have learned something from Putin, they could very well turn out to be students who surpass their teacher,” says one source.

Russian Déjà Vu

Observing the early moves of the Trump-Musk tandem through the lens of Russian political history, it’s hard to shake a sense of déjà vu. Something strikingly similar unfolded in Moscow almost exactly 25 years ago.

Putin had just been elected president of Russia, with the omnipotent oligarch Boris Berezovsky standing behind him. It was Berezovsky who had gone to great lengths to make Putin president. He believed that the new Russian leader would remain indebted to him, preserving the loyalty and obedience Berezovsky had come to expect. However, Berezovsky’s behavior quickly crossed the line.

Less than three months after Putin’s inauguration, Berezovsky resigned his mandate as a member of the Russian parliament, and by the end of 2000 was living in London in self-imposed exile. He was convinced this was only temporary, confident that Putin wouldn’t survive without him, that no one would dare strip him of his power and business empire—but he was wrong.

Now, in Moscow, there’s plenty of speculation that Trump could subject Musk to a similar fate in the coming months. Two alpha males, many argue, cannot coexist in the same den.

This is a particularly popular perspective, largely driven by the fact that, as many Russian businessmen admit, they fear Musk even more than they do Trump. The Tesla, SpaceX, and social media mogul at the helm of global affairs seems even more unpredictable than Trump does in the White House. For this reason, the prospect of an imminent fallout between Musk and the new American president is, in many ways, a reflection of the hopes of a perplexed Russian elite.