To the casual political observer, at times it must seem as though Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat is playing straight out of US President Donald Trump’s playbook, and at other times it seems to be Trump playing out of Muscat’s playbook.

Either scenario is, of course, highly improbable but what is, in fact, perfectly plausible is that it is a simple case of birds of a feather flocking together, perhaps unwittingly flocking together against us purveyors of ‘fake news’, against the people who want those who govern them investigated, against their own citizens when it fits their discourse and objectives, and even against the publication of investigations in which they centre.

At times, it is almost uncanny, but the formula employed by both is a simple one.

First, you discredit the media, the only truly independent watchdogs, by calling them fake news. Secondly, you apply whataboutisms to every argument thrown at you – what about what the Nationalist Party or the Democratic Party did, or didn’t do, when in office. Thirdly, you let today’s pick-and-choose post-truth politics do its work. And finally, you unleash a veritable army of internet trolls to spread those messages with their monopolisation of the truth and the blanket denial of what is known until it is forgotten.

Trump, before he was elected, had once famously said that he could stand in the middle of New York’s Fifth Avenue, shoot someone, and get away with it. We have the distinct impression that there are a number people in the Maltese government who could safely make the same claim, if they had the same audacity to do so. Audacity they certainly have, but at least they seem to have just a little more finesse for such matters than Donald trump.

But then again, didn’t the Maltese government pull off the political equivalent of Trump’s boast when, after all the scandals and hanky-panky that were exposed from 2013 to 2017, it called an early election and actually increased its electoral majority?

It had created and nurtured a situation in which surveys show that the public trusts the government more than it trusts the independent press. It fostered a situation in which people in the upper echelons of government could get away with all that was revealed in the Panama Papers with complete impunity, much to the chagrin and amazement of the government’s European peers.

It fostered a situation in which almost every instance of corruption and misconduct was simply ignored or addressed with platitudes by the government until the storm blew over.

It nurtured a climate of complete impunity, a climate in which a police commissioner goes unpunished for sitting around and eating rabbit while a crime scene that was about to be assigned to a magistrate for the inquiry of all inquiries – the Egrant inquiry – was allowed to be compromised and possibly cleared of evidence.

It created a climate of fear of repercussion in which successive police commissioners, including the present one, and the attorney general had chosen to ignore reports from the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit implicating senior members and employees of government of serious graft.

It created a cesspool of an electorate which merely rubberstamped Get Out of Jail Free cards for those facing the manifold corruption allegations, and simply branded the media asking questions about such behaviour as a posse of liars. It created a climate in which the country’s institutions were allowed to rot practically to their cores unchallenged.

Then there are the inquires that both leaders are weathering in a somewhat similar fashion.

In the US, it is the Robert Mueller report into Russian interference in the election of Trump, and in Malta it is the Egrant report – both of which were potentially political career-ending.

Trump and Muscat both immediately claimed victory on the basis of the investigations’ 50 pages of conclusions, in Muscat’s case, and the four-page summary, in Trump’s case, even though no one has seen the real proof of the pudding, because, like the 400-page Egrant report in Malta, the 400-page Mueller report hasn’t been published.

And it seems Trump has as much compulsion to have the whole Mueller report released as Muscat has for the release of the full Egrant inquiry – one wonders why, when both profess their innocence so boldly and in such certain terms.

But with both men’s political careers on the line and hanging in the balance because of the results of these unpublished investigations, it is little wonder they have not seen the light of day while they apparently await the redactor’s black marker.

How both situations pan out at the end of the day is just about anybody’s guess, but there is one thing we can count on – the strategies and counter-strategies employed by both are certain to have an uncanny resemblance to each other.