Despots

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 and crushed protests on the streets. He has secured the backing of America’s oligarchs by the offer of mutual enrichment and inflated his personal wealth by flouting ethical standards. US foreign policy is no longer based on values but on greed, while at home the White House has intervened in almost every area of people’s lives, sending the National Guard into America’s cities, telling educators what schoolchildren should be taught and threatening universities when they beg to differ.

According to Martin Sixsmith, the BBC’s long-serving former Moscow and Washington Correspondent, it is all eerily familiar from what Russia went through in the early-2000s.

Despots is Sixsmith's account of how two aspiring dictators came to power in nominally electoral democracies then dismantled the pillars of democracy from within, one following confidently in the footsteps of the other. 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.