“This is the way you guys protect yourselves. When I encroach you, when I debate you on something, then it’s irrelevant whether or not you know the constitution? Of course it’s relevant to me! As it should be to you! And for the people who listen to you! How are you going to say that it’s irrelevant? What are the people who listening to you going to think? You’re saying knowing the constitution is irrelevant! I say this to you, for you to reflect, if you want. I’m sure you know the truth. I want to believe you know the truth.”

And so it goes, on and on, this back and forth between them. The clip on YouTube lasts nine-and-a-half minutes. Chávez never answers the question.

Tamoa Calzadilla, a Venezuelan investigative journalist who left the country in 2015, has also been getting a bad case of déjà vu these days. After one of Trump’s press conferences in January, Calzadilla wrote a piece for Univision on the many similarities she saw between Trump’s open hostility toward the press and her experiences as a reporter during Chávez’s regime. “The threats to litigate against the press, when he revoked _The Washington Post’_s credentials during his campaign, when he yelled at Jim Acosta that he was ‘fake news’—those were the moments that most troubled me,” she said over the phone from Miami, where she now lives. “Even the unfiltered use of Twitter at all hours of the day. That was a very Chávez way of governing.”

And about Twitter: When Chávez joined the social media platform in 2010, he quickly became the most followed person in Venezuela. Much like Trump today, Chávez would announce policy changes on Twitter, retweet praise from his fans, and enthusiastically embrace the exclamation point. His last post, before he died of cancer in 2013, reads: “Still holding on to Christ and confident in my doctors and nurses. To victory always!! We will live and we will win!!!” Sound familiar?

I decided to call up Francisco Toro, the founder of the news and opinion blog Caracas Chronicles, for his thoughts on what’s been going on in the U.S. Toro has been living in Montréal since 2009—a pinned tweet from January 11 on his Twitter page reads: “If I hadn’t already moved to Canada, I’d move to Canada.” During our conversation, Toro was hesitant to draw too many parallels between Chávez’s rule and Trump’s string of bizarre press conferences. “It’s hard because I’m an analyst; I’m meant to think about these things. But for the last few days I haven’t been thinking about the news, I’ve been feeling the news,” he said. “The truth is, I don’t know. It’s okay to just be afraid.”