Is Donald Trump the American version of Silvio Berlusconi? As the New York Times, Washington Post and Guardian have recently noted, the former prime minister of Italy is one of the closest precedents we have to a President Trump. Berlusconi is a powerful and well-connected businessman who governed in a tangle of conflicts of interest rather than truly give up his media empire; he lived an unapologetically luxurious life in office, with a coterie of glamorous ladies and gold-plated bathrooms, all while mobilizing populist crowds of supporters.

I covered Berlusconi for 20 years, and it’s true: Both men are orange-faced tycoons in glamorous power ties, always glued to their images on the small screen. Both have appeared regularly with a retinue of beautiful, scantily dressed young ladies, and they enjoy sporting events—golf and boxing for Trump, soccer for Berlusconi, who for 30 years has owned the A.C. Milan club, who are something like the Yankees of Italian sports.

On a less superficial level, Trump and Berlusconi have different dispositions that suggest they will also have different governing styles. But it is their populist anti-political movements, and the supporters constituting those movements, that offer the strongest connection—and the clearest lessons for America under Trump.

Just like Berlusconi, Trump runs a risk of failure by disdaining the political system he is inheriting—but so do his opponents if they alienate the voters and supporters who brought Trump to power. Italy has seen the consequences of such alienation in just the past few days, with center-left Prime Minister Matteo Renzi now forced to resign following a populist landslide in a constitutional referendum.

Trump is proud to project a nasty persona, shouting, “You’re fired!,” buying ads in favor of capital punishment and, even before he ran for office, favoring macho postures and publicly humiliating partners or acquaintances. Trump likes coming across as arrogant and rarely smiles on camera, instead having mastered a pseudo-serious pout. But Berlusconi, as a businessman, was always smiling; he is the affable Milanese craving admiration, a maestro salesman trying to cut a good deal with a newly acquired friend. In Milanese dialect he is a bauscia, the guy everybody is fond of at the local bar, whose stories of money and women, no matter how inflated, make everyone laugh.

Flying on his private plane hours before his first electoral triumph in 1994, Berlusconi explained to me why he had opted to campaign, and then govern, as the jovial businessman. “In politics, if you keep betraying people, the pundits will extol you as a Machiavellian, calculating genius. The market, however, appreciates a guy ready to make money, but not if he leaves scorched earth behind, screwing everybody else,” he said. “Starting a company is not a zero-sum game like politics, where winner takes all. In real estate, finance, media, sport, I made money, yes, but a lot of people around me made money too.” Berlusconi became more combative over time (“This time we will not take prisoners,” Cesare Previti, his longtime lawyer, menaced upon the prime minister’s second national victory, in 2001) but to this day, he can still praise opponents like Renzi at least in private.

As prime minister, Berlusconi demonstrated this eagerness to please by trying hard to appease his rivals, even electing former communists and Marxists on his tickets. In an attempt to be accepted by the Italian establishment as an insider, he asked Renato Ruggiero, the respected leader of the World Trade Organization, to serve as his secretary of state, nominated, Mario Monti, the prestigious dean of the Bocconi business school and later a prime minister, as European commissioner, while elevating to the same position Emma Bonino, a libertarian feminist leader of the gadfly Radical Party.

This sounds like Trump choosing Bill Gates, Larry Summers and Elizabeth Warren to serve in his administration. This is where Berlusconi and Trump diverge: Berlusconi wants to be loved by all, but if Trump’s Cabinet picks so far are any indication—Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos, Ben Carson, to name a few—the president-elect seems to care little about being “liked” by Democrats. Trump likes winning in a polarized America. He thrives on alienation, while Berlusconi craves attention.

Where Berlusconi and Trump most closely align is their populist message and its appeal to the people they govern. And here, Berlusconi’s experience should be a lesson to Trump and to his Democratic opponents alike.

Like Trump, Berlusconi originally ran on the boast that he was not a politician. Even today, after six national political campaigns, he swears, “I am a businessman forced to be a politician in order to save Italy.” We should expect Trump, similarly, to try until his last day in office to pass as a political outsider, elected by blue-collar voters blaming Wall Street (even as he appoints Goldman Sachs alumni in his administration). Berlusconi, unlike Trump, started out as a free-market Thatcherian, eager to reform the old-fashioned Italian capitalism and spur market growth and innovation. Soon, however, he found out how difficult it is to upend entrenched political and social habits if you do not patiently cultivate allies, media and public opinion, and ceaselessly negotiate and barter in Parliament. Berlusconi’s reformist zeal petered out early, and he soon confessed to La Repubblica, Italy’s leading newspaper, “I guess I am not Mrs. Thatcher. I cannot fire poor miners!”

When Dwight Eisenhower won the 1954 presidential election, Harry Truman tartly observed, “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.” The same frustration plagues the businessman-turned-politician. Used to a vertical organization in which power, information and charisma sit on top and subordinates are supposed to be in line with the program and apply it without objection, the businessman reborn as politician is befuddled by leaks, infighting, egos, ideological agendas. A businessman likes to accumulate power, does not delegate, sees long meetings and negotiations as a waste of time.

Of course, the American political tradition, the Constitution and executive orders give U.S. presidents more power than any European parliamentary premier. But in large part, the quicksand that swallowed Berlusconi the Reformer awaits Trump: You cannot despise politics and its antics and pretend to run a democracy successfully. Trump may glide over conflicts of interest, leaving the company to his kids (just like Berlusconi “sold” one of his newspapers to his younger brother Paolo, to avoid an antitrust bill). Yet disparaging political finesse and holding a rugged contempt for any educated criticisms will eventually spell doom for Trump, as Berlusconi found. In 2011, when Italy seemed on the brink of bankruptcy, ready to share financial doom with Greece, Italian elites—the establishment Berlusconi despised—ganged up on him. All mainstream newspapers and columnists, the association of entrepreneurs and the best economists bluntly asked for Berlusconi’s resignation and cheered the new cabinet led by the respected scholar Mario Monti.

At the same time, Berlusconi’s liberal opponents failed to win over his onetime supporters, a development that has led to Renzi’s imminent departure—and that should be a lesson to Democrats now. When Berlusconi was elected, the liberal media and the traditional left—the trade unions, the intellectuals and a huge share of academia—decided he was not fit to run the country, considering him a political mongrel not educated by the traditional cursus honorum, the ancient Roman syllabus promoting politicians from the grassroots to the palaces. Berlusconi was accused of being a fascist, a mafioso, a corrupt gangster, and he was tried and eventually sentenced for fiscal fraud, losing his Senate seat. The Italian left had the same snobbish attitude toward Berlusconi’s voters, the equivalent of what Hillary Clinton regrettably called the “deplorables.” Instead of focusing on political issues, Berlusconi’s opponents mercilessly teased his voters, disparaging them as an ignorant, uneducated, greedy, authoritarian bunch.

The strategy backfired, big-league, as The Donald would say. Anticommunists, small-business men and shop owners fearful of taxes, Northern voters upset with the Southern fat cat bureaucracy, Southern voters clinging to Tammany Hall-style cliques begging for public spending and plum jobs—all voted for Berlusconi. By lumping them in a single box as simpletons too uneducated to recognize the vulgarity in Berlusconi, the left disavowed a large number of voters, leaving them for two decades in the center-right grip.

When Renzi took office in 2014, he actually went out of his way to avoid any aristocratic mannerisms, making an effort to emphasize his middle-class boy scout roots. It seemed not to work in the most recent elections. The South crushed him, and inner cities and blue-collar neighborhoods were also overwhelmingly against him. After long supporting Berlusconi, those voters deemed Renzi a pro-European globalist, and instead supported Northern League leader Matteo Salvini and the populist Five Star Movement’s Beppe Grillo. Now, Grillo, the maverick comedian, seems poised to be Italy’s new Trump, likewise insulting opponents (he dubbed Renzi a “wounded sow” and a “serial killer”), bombarding the public with false news and accusing reporters of being paid spies. “Trump said fuck you to the American establishment,” Grillo recently said. “We will soon say fuck you too to the Italian political establishment.”

On November 8, the most powerful country in the world imitated the cradle of the Renaissance. A businessman, great at winning elections and hapless at running the country, and an opposition bitterly stuck in the Ivory Tower, cost Italy dearly. I hope America will be spared what Italy went through: recession, a dented international reputation, the birth of a huge populist anti-establishment party, led by Grillo. But I worry that liberals and the Democratic Party are reproducing the self-defeating attitude of Italy’s left. Rabid alt-right racists, law-abiding moderate Southern citizens, educated centrist suburban women, military families, conservative evangelicals, rural residents and community college white working-class students are just a few of the tribes roaming in Trump’s America. Even though we might expect the arrogant CEO attitude to be Trump’s undoing, the leftist-aristocratic prejudice against his base may grant him enough momentum to carry on. This is exactly what happened to Berlusconi, allowing him to continue to be reelected twice.

So what should Americans who fear or oppose Trump do about him? A frontal approach against Trump will fail, like the militant attacks on Berlusconi. Trump basks in contradictions; he will never accept anything but “his” own facts, “his” own reality. He claims to have won in a “landslide” despite unverified claims of “serious voter fraud”—not unlike how Berlusconi still thinks he lost power in 2011 due to a “secret Franco-German conspiracy.” You will never win a rational argument against Trump or Berlusconi, because they believe the myths their propaganda circulates. Instead, a much humbler, Sun Tzu-style strategy is needed: avoiding direct attacks and patiently waiting until the new administration runs into its own trouble. And importantly, delegitimizing Trump will not work if it implies delegitimizing millions of American voters.

Covering Berlusconi, I was often reminded of the original title F. Scott Fitzgerald chose for The Great Gatsby: “Trimalchio in West Egg.” Trimalchio is the main character in Petronius’ Latin novel Satyricon, splendidly rendered as a movie by the late Italian director Federico Fellini. Trimalchio was a Roman Kardashian—a crass freed slave, vulgar in his tastes, gorging on his new money, narcissistic, egocentric. Petronius aptly describes the nouveau rich class in Nero’s time, leading the reader to a serious moral conclusion that Fitzgerald borrowed for America centuries later: A society built on a decadent ruling class—inebriated by power and luxury, devoid of any decent value and oblivious to public service, always placing the rich and famous ahead of the working communities, praising the military but not serving in the army—is doomed to decline. That kind of political arrogance can come in the form of a rich, lascivious Berlusconi or Trump, or in the form of a liberal elite. I hope the same loss of moral direction that Italy has seen does not befall America. I hope not to see Trimalchio in the White House.