DONALD Trump may well be comparisoned out. Juan Perón, Huey Long, Mussolini, Hitler, Silvio Berlusconi—name a vicious European nationalist, Latin American strongman or power-grabbing tycoon and, by now, Mr Trump has been compared to him. An article in the Washington Post likened him to Napoleon, the curse of Oedipus and Frankenstein’s monster in the same breath. This struggle to comprehend and categorise the Trump phenomenon has already taken in Vladimir Putin. The Financial Times, for example, remarked on their joint preference for foreign policies based on the ruthless promotion of narrowly defined national interest; their political reliance on—or invention of—external threats (and internal ones, for that matter); and their common penchant for earthy language. Still, there is more to say about this last resemblance, and the similar ways in which power is wielded, or would be, by Mr Trump and Mr Putin (himself once the subject of classification attempts by history-trawling observers, as in this piece from 2006). To begin with, both have constructed and now inhabit post-fact worlds, in which truth is malleable and disposable. In this subjective arena you can continue to assert that, say, thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrated the attacks of September 11th, 2001, or that Russian troops did not invade Ukraine, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The trick is just to keep saying it, until the naysayers give up. This sort of insistence leaves an impression, even among sceptics of these arguments, that there must be something to them.

As well as being a straightforward propaganda tool, lying in this way is also, for both men, an exercise in authority. Mr Trump’s bogus but repeated tale of an American general dipping bullets in pig’s blood before executing Muslim captives; Mr Putin’s absurd pretense over the independence of Russian courts: making others swallow or succumb to these lies, however preposterous (in fact, especially if they are preposterous), is itself a form of power. The same goes for the two men’s ripe and regular insults. Mr Trump belittles his adversaries, journalists and harmless radio hosts. Mr Putin does the same for critics, such as Boris Nemtsov, even after they are murdered. They do it to show that they can—with impunity.

It helps, of course, that both men have dominated their domestic media, albeit in different ways and degrees. The Kremlin in effect controls virtually all Russian television; Mr Trump relies on the suggestibility of ratings-hungry American networks for his outsized exposure. But both have to keep their audiences entertained and loyal, which they largely do through outrage—in Mr Putin’s case, the fury of Russia’s confected wars; in Mr Trump’s, the shock and awe of his own wild rhetoric. They both rely, too, on the counter-intuitive media segmentation of the postmodern age. In theory, supporters of both have access to all manner of countervailing reports and opinion; in practice, many Putinistas and Trump supporters move in discrete informational universes, defined by state-controlled television and right-wing radio respectively.

Then there is the question of their alleged wealth—alleged by Mr Trump himself, in his case, and by whistleblowers in Mr Putin’s. This plays to a popular cynicism, even despair, regarding politicians that is much more justified in Russia than in America but is evidently prevalent in both. Wherever you go in Russia, you meet Russians who are perfectly aware of the Kremlin’s thieving and rapacity but nevertheless want Mr Putin to remain in power. Why? Because, Russians from Vladivostok to Smolensk will tell you, a new regime would just start stealing all over again, making the corruption even worse. A diluted version of the same instinct seems to lie behind Mr Trump’s boasts about his billions, and his not entirely accurate claim to be funding his own campaign. The message is that he is already rich, and so immune to the tawdry temptations of Washington.

They have something in common ideologically as well, not only in the sense that Mr Putin must be ecstatic at Mr Trump’s wobbles over America’s role in NATO. Both incoherently occupy a broad, populist political terrain: they offer protectionism to some low-wage workers and the promise of rising pensions, combined with an enthusiasm for money-making (so long as, in Mr Putin’s case, the money-makers remain obedient). Both thus seek to leave little political space for their opponents. Finally, in their extravagant tastelessness and shared macho posturings—Mr Putin’s on horseback, Mr Trump’s at the podium—both also, alas, leave very little room for satire.