Pussy Riot Singer on How Trump Is Like Putin, His Treatment of Women
Since he declared his candidacy for president, Donald Trump has blacklisted media outlets who fell out of his favor, threatened to jail his political opponent, promised to purge the government of employees appointed by President Obama and refashioned the right-wing website Brietbart as his own personal Pravda.
Over the last 18 months, Trump has essentially promised his administration would look a lot like those of the autocratic rulers he's expressed admiration for: Syria's Bashar al-Assad ("In terms of leadership, he's getting an A"
, Iraq's Saddam Hussein ("You know what he did well? He killed terrorists" , North Korea's Kim Jong Un ("You gotta give him credit" and, of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin, Trump has said, "has been a leader far more than our president has been." (Putin has returned Trump's affection, calling him "a really brilliant and talented person, without any doubt.”)
Nadya Tolokonnikova knows what life is like in a country like that. She, along with several fellow members of the punk feminist collective Pussy Riot, was jailed for staging a protest against Putin at the Russian Orthodox Church in 2012. So she speaks with a specific kind of authority when she warns Americans not to let what's happened in Russia happen here.
"I know a lot of people believe that [Trump] is just a clown, he will not win, so they will not [vote]. But I believe that it's fucking important," Tolokonnikova tells Rolling Stone.
"It is bad for [the] political and social climate in America, and in the world in general, that the candidate for president of the United States openly supports tyrants around the world like Putin or Assad," she says. "As someone who lived in a country where we had this type of guy as president for 16 years, I would say that it's not fun to live in this society. You don't have free speech, you don't have respect for yourself as women – we don't have it."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/pussy-riot-singer-on-how-donald-trump-is-like-putin-w446924?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=102716_17