On similarities - Isaac Chotiner interviewing Michael Idov in The New Yorker:

‘On Wednesday evening, ABC indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel, the host of its late-night show, after Kimmel discussed in his opening monologue the Trump Administration and the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was murdered last week. Some viewers accused Kimmel of erroneously suggesting that Kirk’s alleged shooter was maga, which Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called “some of the sickest conduct possible.” Hours before the suspension was announced, Carr raised the idea of punishing local television stations that continued to air Kimmel’s show. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said. Kimmel’s suspension was the latest in a string of attacks by the Administration on media outlets, and especially on broadcast television networks.’

(…)

‘To talk about Kimmel’s suspension, and more broadly about authoritarian leaders and their response to comedy, I called Michael Idov, a novelist and filmmaker who ran GQ Russia between 2012 and 2014, and wrote and directed the 2019 film “The Humorist,” about a fictional comedian in the late Soviet era. (Idov’s most recent novel is “The Collaborators.”) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the similarities and differences between Trump’s and Putin’s approaches to cracking down on comedy and culture, the speed of Trump’s attack on institutions in his second term, and Russian comedy under Putin’s rule.’

(…)

‘How would you define the role that the culture ministry plays now? Well, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was the absolute game changer in all of this. Many of the best and the brightest have left the country. The stuff that’s getting produced in Russia now is either historical and patriotic content, or a sort of great collectivist celebration of the glory of Russian society. There’s a new TV series that is basically a Western-style bio-pic of Peter the Great, which was, of course, shown on the main state channel. It is the No. 1 TV network in the country. It is what the BBC is to the U.K. And one of the lead consultants on this TV series is a man often described as Putin’s personal priest. That is where we’re at right now.’

(…)

‘Up until very recently, ninety-nine per cent of censorship that I’ve witnessed in Russia and in Russian culture was self-censorship. In a way, it was middle managers trying to divine which way the wind blows and preëmptively complying with rules that were never really written down. Now, even when repressive laws and laws curbing freedom of speech—such as the anti-L.G.B.T. propaganda law, or another law that makes it easy for any offended party to sue anyone in a criminal court—were passed, the application was very capricious and unpredictable. What you saw was a lot of anticipatory compliance with laws that weren’t even on the books. One can argue that that’s what we’re seeing in the U.S. right now, too. But of course, again, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been a huge factor because now it’s not up to the middle management to figure out where the red lines are. Everything is a red line.
In Putin, we have an enigma who does not do a lot of public speaking, and doesn’t always make it clear to everyone what he wants. But, in Trump, we have a President who posts, we have a President who constantly issues edicts—and they’re incredibly micromanaging edicts. It’s a completely different situation because his flunkies don’t need to guess and the media managers don’t need to guess what the wind in Washington is like. He goes online personally and says, “Get this guy or that guy off the air.” Which, again, Putin has never done.’

Read the interview here.

Trump gets his hands dirty by micromanaging the red lines, the let’s say killing zones of Hollywood (If you say this you will be taken off the air) are closely monitored.

But the biggest threat is always self-censorship, people internalize both civilization and barbarism.