Shades of Henry VIII Or is Trump following Iran's playbook?

It reads like an inventory of Donald Trump's first two months back in the White House.

- Robert Tait

It reads like an inventory of Donald Trump's first two months back in the White House. A newly elected demagogic president, renowned for his rabble-rousing rallies and provocative stunts, makes a whirlwind start on taking office.

He upends the country's international relations in a series of undiplomatic demarches. State institutions are gutted or closed in an outburst of radicalism aimed at transforming government. Law enforcement authorities stage performative public roundups of those deemed, accurately or not, to be violent criminals.

Critics complain of statutes being routinely broken. Universities and media are targeted in a clampdown on free expression.

A widely revered cultural institution undergoes a government takeover and is given a conservative makeover.

Wrong-footed opposition politicians try to recover ground by highlighting the rising cost of dietary staples and the failure to address the kitchen-table issues that voters elected the president to solve.

Fitting as all this might be as a summary of the helter-skelter opening phase of Trump's second term, it also describes events that followed the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran 20 years ago.

Ahmadinejad emerged as an arch-nemesis of the west after rising to power from obscurity in 2005. His offensive diatribes against Israel - which he suggested should be erased from the map - and repeated denials of the Holocaust were the stuff of cartoon villainy, sharpened further by his hawkish championing of Iran's nuclear programme.

He was also an electoral populist in the Trump mould, as adept at drawing vast crowds with his message of championing the left-behinds and dispossessed as he was at riling his opponents.