Is Donald Trump America's Milosevic?

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note - Slobodan Milosevic

Donald Trump has been called "America's Silvio Berlusconi," and the similarities between him and the former Italian prime minister are indeed striking--the hair jobs, the conspicuous womanizing, the media manipulation, the TV-pitchmanstyle demagoguery. But Berlusconi's style didn't really include playing on religious and ethic fears. That's why I think the more apt--and worrisome--comparison is to Slobodan Milosevic.

Like Trump, the former Yugoslav president came to power by fanning ethno-nationalist sentiments whose strength surprised even him. In 1987, Milosevic, then a loyal Communist Party apparatchik, went to Kosovo to mediate a protest by minority Serbs against the province's ethnic-Albanian-dominated government. The party at that time took a hard line against nationalist speech. But when the protesters complained of rough handling by the Kosovo police, Milosevic told them, "No one will ever dare beat you again!" A TV clip of that remark went, as we say now, viral. Overnight, Milosevic became a hero to Serbs throughout Yugoslavia for having defied what we would today call "political correctness." He used that celebrity to take over the presidency of the Serbian Republic, to foment protests by restive Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia, and to provide those Serbs arms and ammunition.

During the years of carnage that followed--the ethnic cleansing, the rape camps, the 100,000 people killed--journalists and foreign leaders who met with Milosevic came away with impressions of the man remarkably similar to what many today say about Trump. He was brash and confident in public, but polite and conciliatory in private. He was obsessed with controlling and manipulating the press. He seemed not even to believe the nationalist rhetoric he spouted, but to be using it to gain and hold power. He trusted nobody but his family.

There are other parallels. We remember the breakup of Yugoslavia as driven by ethnic/religious divisions, but there was also a huge economic component. During most of the Cold War, Yugoslavia was a relatively prosperous country, but in the 1980s living standards plummeted thanks to austerity measures brought on by high foreign debts. Tensions grew between the industrialized, higher-income northern (Catholic) republics like Croatia and Slovenia, and the poorer farming- and mining-based republics like (Orthodox Christian) Serbia and Montenegro.

As a journalist covering Yugoslavia in 1995, I spent a fair amount of time with Serbs in both...