"The One Way History Shows Trump’s Personality Cult Will End
An expert on autocracy assesses how far America has slipped away from democracy, and what it will take to get it back."

"In the summer of 2020, Ruth Ben-Ghiat was putting the final touches on
her history of modern autocracy. She had to do it, though, without the
benefit of knowing whether one of her most important subjects would
remain in power come November.

But she wasn’t exactly in the dark either.

She had seen enough of Donald Trump’s behavior over the preceding five
years to know how neatly he lined up with other strongmen she had
studied and how his autocratic tendencies would influence his behavior
whether he won or lost.

“I just predicted that he wouldn’t leave in a quiet manner,” Ben-Ghiat,
a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University told
me recently. “He’s an authoritarian, and they can’t leave office. They don’t have good endings and they don’t leave properly.”

Nearly two years later — after a riot, an impeachment, and a
monomaniacal campaign to punish the Republicans who tried to hold him accountable — Ben-Ghiat has ample proof of her thesis. And she professes
even more concern that Trump’s sway over the GOP has permanently
transformed the party’s political culture. “He’s changed the party to an authoritarian party culture,” she told me. “So not only do you go after external enemies, but you go after internal enemies. You’re not allowed
to have any dissent.”

With the midterms and some key governors races approaching, Ben-Ghiat is looking around the corner again. She sees dangerous signs of autocracy
seeping into state houses and governors’ mansions where leaders such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are executing policies and enacting laws that
mimic Trump but with a smoother, less bombastic style.

She insists her urgent warnings should not be construed as fatalism.
Throughout our interview she leavened her direst predictions with a
pragmatic if not sunny optimism. Political violence is more likely than
an actual civil war; a Republican takeover in November would be
catastrophic but she remains heartened by the ability of American voters
to “interrupt an autocratic personality who’s in the middle of his project;” and ballot box victories alone don’t stop autocrats but the
law can. “It takes prosecution and conviction to deflate their
personality cults,” Ben-Ghiat said. “That’s what it takes.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity."
[snip]

"Ben-Ghiat: One of the big talking points and strategy of right-wing authoritarianism, is to label democratic systems as tyrannical.
Mussolini was the first to say that democracies are tyrannical,
democracies are the problem. And there’s a whole century’s worth of the strategy of calling sitting Democrats, who you want to overthrow,
dictators. Biden as a social dictator, [is] a phony talking point. It
has so many articulations from “They’re forcing us to wear masks.” And you have people like DeSantis who are doing this very subversive thing
of saying, “Florida’s the free state. You can have refuge from the dictatorship of Biden here.” And what this is designed to do is
discredit the sitting democratic administration in order to create, a
myth of freedom. January 6 was actually marketed as the violence [being]
in the service of freedom, and you were overthrowing a dictator.

Kruse: Where is Trump in his own timeline? Is he in your estimation
getting weaker, getting stronger, in a holding pattern?

Ben-Ghiat: The genius of the “big lie” was not only that it sparked a movement that ended up with January 6 to physically allow him to stay in office. But psychologically the “big lie” was very important because it prevented his propagandized followers from having to reckon with the
fact that he lost. And it maintains him as their hero, as their winner,
as the invincible Trump, but also as the wronged Trump, the victim.
Victimhood is extremely important for all autocrats. They always have to
be the biggest victim.

So the “big lie” maintained Trump’s personality cult versus seeing him
as just another president who was voted out of office. Americans
traditionally always accepted that when your time is up, no matter how
popular you were, you were gone. Trump disrupted that because he’s
different from any other president, Republican or Democrat. He’s an authoritarian, and they can’t leave office. They don’t have good endings and they don’t leave properly. And I predicted — I had to turn in [my]
book in the summer of 2020 — and I just predicted that he wouldn’t leave
in a quiet manner. The “big lie” allowed him to psychologically never leave. So he’s in this kind of limbo. As an authoritarian, his other job
has been to make sure to keep hold of the party so no rivals emerge, so
that he could [not] be eclipsed by a younger version of himself. And
that would be DeSantis."
[snip]

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/04/16/history-shows-trump-personality-cult-end-00024941

Yeah, we see a lot of that pitiful victim stuff here. The
situation has gotten so bad that the poor ol' trumpis are forced to
watch hours of their only source for the one *true* news to keep up with
all the ways they're being screwed. LOL

TB




"

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