Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

President Trump's Boris Yeltsin Moment

Washington is starting to look a lot like Moscow in the 1990s.

February 15, 2017 at 5:33 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Trump's chances at overpowering the bureaucracy aren't as good as Yeltsin's. And Yeltsin lost.
Photographer: Shepard Sherbell/Corbis via Getty Images

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

President Donald Trump is irritated about the media furor surrounding the departure of his national security adviser. "The real scandal here is that classified information is illegally given out by 'intelligence' like candy. Very un-American!" he tweeted on Wednesday. Of course it's un-American -- it's Russian, 1990s-style.

Immediately after Trump's victory, Andrei Korobkov, a Russian-born political science professor at Middle Tennessee State University, published a lengthy article (an English translation can be found here) discussing the resemblance between Trump and Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first president. Korobkov described both men as establishment figures who turned against the ruling elite while managing to sell this turnaround to voters. Both protested against the specific forms of political correctness that dominated their countries' public discourse. In both cases, the establishment fought back angrily, Korobkov wrote: