As the U.S. presidential primaries rage on and Donald Trump holds onto a healthy lead in the Republican showdown, Politico has drawn a parallel between the American magnate and Italy’s resilient but often embarrassing populist leader, Silvio Berlusconi. Politico writer Silvia Marchetti claims that on observing Trump’s rise, Italians experience a “queasy sense of déjà vu,” hearing “very familiar echoes in Trump’s populist-nationalist rhetoric, his opulent machismo and the cult of personality based on the image of the self-made man.” Similar comparisons have appeared recently in the Italian press, who find numerous similarities between the entrepreneurs, suggesting that an excellence in self-promotion and consumer persuasion do not always translate into effective policy or leadership. Il Fatto Quotidiano, an influential daily, said that like Berlusconi, Trump presents “a threat to democracy because he’s not a politician, but a brand—a parasite that destroys the political establishment through self-marketing and advertisement techniques.” Silvio Berlusconi enjoyed a hugely successful career first as a media mogul and later as a thrice-elected prime minister. Known as a Teflon politician, even when Berlusconi was eventually convicted for tax fraud in 2013 and sentenced separately for having sex with an under-age prostitute, many of his supporters continued to