SCARY: Trump Knows What He's Doing | Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Look, I hate to say it, but Donald Trump is not as dumb as he looks. He's using the same playbook that authoritarians have used for centuries to attack and dismantle democracies. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat saw it coming. In 2020, she predicted that Donald Trump would never leave office peacefully. And she was right.

Now, with the safeguards of our democracy collapsing, she's warning and preparing for his next authoritarian moves. By the end of this video, Ruth will not only expose Donald Trump's playbook, but also share one of her most important maxims of resistance.

It's a lesson we can all use to find hope and to fight back. But before we get to that, please make sure you like this video, you subscribe to this channel, and hit the bell to make sure you stay up to date every time we post new content. Let's get started. Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, welcome to Defending Democracy. Thank you. I'm delighted to be speaking with you. So in your book, Strongmen, you actually predicted that

Donald Trump would not willingly or easily or peacefully, pick your term, leave office after he lost in 2020. And boy, if that wasn't the prediction of a lifetime. So tell me why you were so right when so few people, you know, frankly, called this in advance?

I think my study of autocrats for years,

which is distilled in that book, made me very aware of what they most fear, which is losing the protections of the office of head of state

so they can be prosecuted or or just have the shame of having to leave office before they want to, which is why they enact the playbook we're living through now with and have since 2020. I also, I turned in the book in the end of the summer of 2020, and I saw how the Trump administration was reacting to the social movement of Black Lives Matter and starting to try and activate the military. And so I concluded that there was pretty much no way that he was going to leave office without trying something. And in subsequent interviews during the fall through December,

I continue to feel that way. At one point I said to I think it was Business Insider, it's going to be a rocky road we should prepare.

And so, you know, it's funny. I view the presidential immunity decision as entirely terrible. Right. The decision, the idea that a president can't be prosecuted for anything, I think has made Donald Trump more reckless. But is there a silver lining in your study that maybe he's not afraid of criminal prosecution

this time and therefore is more likely to leave or is that, am I just being wishful thinking?

No, I think that the longer they are in office and the more corrupt they become, there's never been a strong man who gets into office and feels comfortable and says, I'm gonna be less corrupt now. Because what people need to understand

is the whole purpose of governance for autocrats is not at all what we think of in democracies. They're not interested in public welfare. They're not interested in doing good for the country. They're interested in making money off of public office and arranging the system, including elections and government institutions, the judiciary, so they feel safe. So they become untouchable

by the law, whatever that means for whatever crimes. And part of this is you also put into positions of high power people who share your views or have their own sketchy past with the law. And so a kind of conversion of the political class and the official class happens where you get people who are at their very worst. And those are the people that the

strongman needs to have around him. And so one of the things that I have been struck with is how many people ask me, you know, are there not going to be elections? And I always say, and I want you to fact check whether this is true or not, I always say, no, no, there'll be elections because dictators love elections. They don't like free and fair elections, right? They don't like elections where they might lose.

But the pageantry of elections, they seem to quite like. And at least that's been my experience growing up in the United States, watching, for example, the Soviet Union and its elections and Vladimir Putin and his election. Is that true though? Or do some dictators not like elections at all?

No, it's an interesting subject. Every dictator has some form of election. Often they're called referenda or plebiscites. And those are occasions, they're highly staged, they're highly engineered in most cases. Mussolini had one in 1934 after he'd done a big shakeup that was very unpopular and the economy wasn't doing very well. So he had a big plebiscite so he

could claim that 99% of the population was for him. And think about, we had them in the occupied areas of Ukraine. And so Putin was able to say, look, everyone wants to have these annexed. So that's how dictators use special elections, but they also, as you well know, hollow out the actual elections. And so you keep elections going today in the 21st century, but you game the system also through dominating the media. So the opposition's message, as in Hungary, isn't even heard by many people anymore. So you game the system so that the elections tend to come out the way you want them to.

And if they don't, you say they were rigged and now the new playbook in Brazil, it didn't go well for Bolsonaro in the end and then Trump, you have a kind of private army of thugs that attempts to have justice for this rigged election that you lost.

Yeah, so you actually anticipated my next question, which is, I have always assumed that Donald Trump would have, you know, he'd have official state power, you know, the military, the ICE, the FBI, right, the official apparatus of the state, right, and I don't mean that even pejoratively,

but the entities that comprise the government. But then there would be this sort of quasi-militia type movement that would be on the outside and would be able to, through intimidation and not official sanction, be able to enforce his expectations. And I think I've sort of in my head modeled that off of, you know, sort of pre-World War II Europe. But I'm curious if that is still, if you think that that is,

that is something we are going to see emerge more of, or whether that is not necessary in the most modern

states because the state power is so strong. I think even where state power is strong, most autocrats develop some kind of informal or paramilitary force, and it has different forms and names in different places, that does their bidding, does their personal bidding. And it depends on the structure of the state. In fascist Italy, which is a very interesting example,

Mussolini had the king, and the king was the one who actually put him in power, which is why Italians voted to get rid of the monarchy after the long nightmare of fascism was over. But the king was the commander-in-chief, which is very sad because at any time at the beginning the king could have ordered the only 30,000 squadrous thugs to disband, but he never did. So Mussolini wasn't sure about the military, so he put all the squadrous and black shirts into a

militia. It was called the fascist militia. And who did it answer to? Him. So there are various ways that dictators do this, or when they're even coming to power, like Duterte did in Maduro, you ally with kind of gangs, and there becomes this big gray zone of official, non-official helpers, little green men, like in Russia, biker gangs. And again, it's different in every place. And so what we had, of course, January 6, as I said before, Trump could not get the military to play his game.

And so he had his private army of thugs and launched them on. And it's very interesting that we see ICE being hugely boosted so that it's going to have an operating budget which is equal to the entire budget for military forces

in foreign countries such as Brazil. And so ICE is not a private militia of civilians. However, it's being steered to be doing the bidding of Trump and it's attracting as a corpse more extreme people. And that's why they're allowed to have kind of civilian-looking garb. They show their tattoos. They customize their gloves. They're masked. Big difference to regular cops or military.

So that's how it's kind of playing out so far. And then of course today we had Hegsteth speaking to the military and that's a whole lot to push forward, the idea that the military, the regular military, should be used against

the real enemy which is at home. Yeah, so I, in preparing for this interview, I was reflecting on something that I'm hoping you can help me sort out. So I think for a lot of people, they think of Trump and they try to graft him onto the historical person that they are most attuned to. So you know, given, you know, my background, I immediately think of, you know, the Germany in the 30s, and I think of Vladimir Putin today. Other people, I'll hear them talk about Viktor Orban, who candidly I know less about, or, you know, South American dictators. You are actually a scholar in Mussolini, one of the nation's leading scholars in the rise of fascism as a movement, which originated in in

In in Italy, obviously, I've heard people talk about Franco and what went on in Spain. I've heard people Compare Trump to the the Red Scare in the United States, which was a little different that wasn't really a Dictatorial movement, but it was sort of adjacent. And so help us here. Are we all just searching for the right

historical analogy? Or are you like, no, no, no, no, no. You know, each of these people are kind of like their own thing. Or is there a commonality? I'll be right back with more of my conversation with Professor Ben-Gad a moment but you know democracy is at a tipping point and if we do not act now we will wake up in an authoritarian regime. That's why the Democracy Docket team is growing to meet this moment but it can't do it without you. It needs your help to hold Donald Trump and the

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There are certain commonalities in their kind of playbook, and that's what I laid out in Strongman, the corruption, the violence, the machismo, the propaganda. But, and they do watch each other, and they are influenced by each other. But, of course, each time and place is unique, and each one puts together his style of rule in his same way, even though their personalities are quite similar. This was one of the most disturbing things when I wrote the book that, as I suspected, Trump's personality is quite similar and his governing style,

because I wrote it during Trump 1.0, is similar in its impulsivity and in something called personalist rule, where governance, as I said before, is about enriching yourself, amassing power, but it's really about having, recasting government and all the systems of governments so that they respond to your personal needs, obsessions, fears, such as prosecution. And governance becomes an expression of your personal concerns and desires and quirks. And so there's many instances in authoritarian history of impulsive decisions

or opinions that are held that are very unorthodox or quirky, such as Erdogan's economic policies, that nobody shares and economists think is a bad idea, but they have surrounded themselves with yes men and sycophants and loyalists so that over time and certainly in long regimes Nobody nobody tell gives them objective feedback and so policy becomes the whims of today and Even Hitler people think Hitler was so stable. He was not And he and

Mussolini would change their mind day by day on what they wanted to do. And everybody had to rush to get with the new party line, which was the will of the

Führer. Right? So this is a historical question I just have to ask you because you are an expert in this. It doesn't so much relate to Trump. But, you know, I think most of us learned in history that, you know, there was this alliance between obviously between Hitler and Mussolini. But, you know, in going back and reading more, the two of them actually for a very long time did not like each other. You know, I mean, the mission of Mussolini, who predates Hitler in power by a fair, a fair chunk of time, he was, he seemed at best skeptical

of the race, the anti-Jewish sort of core of what became Nazism. And of course, Stalin and Hitler hated each other, obviously. So there seemed to be a lack of affinity, honestly, with it. I don't know where Franco fits into all of this.

Maybe he'll tell me he was more copacetic with the others. But there seemed to be actually a sort of strong dislike among all of these strongmen. And the reason why I ask you the question historically is that I think of today, like when I think of Donald Trump, I think he seems to love strongmen. Like he, you know, he seems to admire strongmen.

So tell us a little bit about that period of time and why the strongmen then maybe didn't get along, or if I'm wrong and they did get along more than I've recently come to understand? They did get along, but the thing about this type of

personality is they are transactional, a hundred percent, in everything, private life, public life, governance, and they're amoral. And so today's friend is tomorrow's enemy, and they they learn from each other and if they think that the other has something to offer, they will ally. But then as happened with Hitler and Stalin, the next day maybe they would just, you know, like, I'm just gonna use profanity, they would go back on that and actually perhaps invade the person who was their

faithful ally, you know, before. So the reverse was true between Hitler and Mussolini, right? That's a very interesting story and Mussolini is actually more appropriate about for today's autocrats as a model because he came in very fast. He founded fascism from nothing. He founded it in 1919 and by 1922 he was already prime minister. And then he over three years of being prime minister of a democracy, he chipped away at the system. He started persecuting people, sending his thugs to beat up people.

And then he declared dictatorship at 25 to escape an investigation that was going to force him out of power because he had had a rival killed and he was also very corrupt and all of this was gonna come out.

So Hitler worshipped, I have this in my book and it's very interesting, Hitler worshipped Mussolini because Hitler did not have an easy path to power. He, you know, as we all know, he had his putsch that was modeled on Mussolini's March on Rome, but it failed. And then he was sent to prison. And when he got out, he had speaking bands in German states and nobody wanted to buy Mein Kampf,

which was a huge mess, giant, you know, mess, wordy, verbose. Nobody, he couldn't find a publisher and so finally the Nazi Party had to had to publish it. In the meantime, Mussolini's become a world icon for anti-communists. He even had a syndicated column that reached 1,000 American newspapers, courtesy of his admirer, William Randolph Hearst. So Hitler worshipped Mussolini, and he even had a bust of him on his desk,

and other Nazis would make fun of him, saying that he suffered from, quote, Mussolini intoxication. And then in the end, though, Hitler was influenced by Mussolini because he decided he didn't want to take the slow path to consolidating power. He used the Reichstag fire and he did everything very, very fast. And so, but he learned both, he learned about personality cults from Mussolini, but he also learned that he wanted to do things instantaneously. Yeah, now I think you've said now twice

that one of the hallmarks of these folks is that they surround themselves with incompetence or sycophants. And that is actually one of the things that Hannah Arendt actually observed in her study of of the Nazi regime. Why is it that these regimes attract incompetence among their leadership? And you know again, I don't want to I don't want to directly compare Donald Trump to Mussolini or Hitler. I don't think that's accurate or appropriate.

But it does also seem like in a second administration, he too is surrounding himself by less competent people. Like, as he's going along, you would think the Republican Party would warm to him and therefore more doors would open for more competent people to come in.

And instead, it's like the opposite is happening.

Yeah, it's a structural thing that is about their personality and the way they want to govern. And it transcends political lines. It's about it's about dictatorship or autocracy because they are very insecure people behind their bravura. And they don't really want to hear any opinions that contradict with theirs. Mussolini's slogan was, Mussolini is always right. And Trump is going around now saying, yes, yes.

Wow.

And yes, and even-

I've heard that more recently.

Yes, you have. And because this was fascist Italy, there were, it was even emblazoned in giant letters on buildings, in on public streets and squares. It was a major propaganda theme.

Mussolini is always right. Mussolini has sempre ragione. And they don't really wanna be challenged. And in fact, it's a paradoxical thing. The more power they get, the more they fear criticism and losing that power.

And also the more corrupt they become, the more violent they become. They become more fearful of the population or people from within the regime who might try and depose them. So all of these things lead them,

and it happens truly with almost everybody, to surround themselves more and more with people they consider safe. And once they find people, either they've broken these people who they used to be, look at Trump with Marco Rubio.

Marco Rubio was a big critic. And then whatever process went on, Trump feels that he has broken him sufficiently to give him, how many jobs does Marco Rubio have? Like three major jobs? At least. Because he's now the trusted man. He's the trusted man. It's like Whitcoff, right?

Like Whitcoff is like... Yeah. And so over time, you get a governance structure, and it's replicated within institutions, because professionalism and expertise are not actually what is valued. Loyalty, sometimes fanaticism, meaning you will see those ideological goals to the end, no matter what it takes. So those are not the qualities of democratic administration, or jurisprudence, where you weigh the or jurisprudence where you let the facts

determine or history we let the facts determine your case they don't they

operate in a totally different zone with different intentions so I think that a lot of Americans think that these strongmen come to power, that these, you know, autocrats, they come to power through violent means. I think that people don't under—they haven't read and understood what the Reichstag fire was and the role it plays. That Hitler actually was put in place as the result of elections. It was part of a democratic transition. And the same true with Erdogan, the same true with Mussolini. So talk about that a little bit.

Why is it that democracies can so quickly flip from a system of free and fair elections where you have, you know, peaceful transfer of power to be sort of used to put people in place that then undermine those things and sort of all of the safeguards seem to crumble really quickly, right? I mean, like in the case, I think you said, what you said in Italy, it was three years from, you know, and in Germany, once you get to him being made chancellor, it's a relatively

quick transformation. Yeah.

And so, and then there's all the people who come to power via coup, and then of course it's instantaneous. But the same dynamics of the types of people they have around them, the way they act, including in alliances with foreign autocrats, they all hold, regardless of how they come to power. So the elections question is really interesting because, you know, democracy is predicated on a kind of faith in the system. And so often autocrats and bad actors, so wannabe autocrats, realize that they can use the system, and there's a famous Goebbels quote to this effect, they can use the

system to undermine it. They can use the good faith of democratic institutions and the way Democrats approach governance to undermine it from within. And increasingly that is what's happened, that autocrats get elected sometimes on false promises, sometimes not. I mean Trump, the things Trump is doing now, he advertised most of them very, very clearly. We can't say we should be surprised. People were holding signs for mass deportation. He was

talking about liberating the heartland with military force, all of that. But the sad thing is that once autocrats get power, they hollow out institutions. And what this means for elections is that everything becomes a kind of simulation, and it's drained of meaning. And so you have, as I said before, you have elections but they don't mean what they did before. And so then people say, well what's the use of

elections? And if you're in a degrading, deteriorating democracy, it's very dangerous because people, I hear it all the time, and I always push back. What's the use of voting? You can't out-vote autocracy. And this is nihilistic. I'm very strong on this. It's never too late to use, this is one of my maxims of resistance, you use the tools and spaces you have now while you have them because you don't know if you'll have them one day and spaces you have now, while you have them, because you don't know if you'll have them one day,

but you have them now. And so to give up on elections, because there's extreme forms of gerrymandering or things going on, or suppression or threats of violence, is just, it's a sad capitulation in its own way.

Yeah, and I, let me tell you what I struggle with. I agree with that 100%. I mean, I preach that all the time, that Donald Trump wants us to be hopeless. He wants us to think he's all powerful. He wants us to give up and not feel like

there's any point in fighting back. He wants us to not vote. He wants us to think our vote won't matter, and therefore we won't vote. Like I totally I am 100 percent with you. But then I also hear people say that I also struggle with.

They will say, well, you know, we are getting close to crossing the Rubicon or if if Donald, you know, if we get to a constitutional crisis, x, y, z. And I heard this interview that really that really impacted me. And I wish I could remember the name of the gentleman, but he runs a an independent media opposition media entity against Erdogan.

And he was saying that, like, for the longest period of time, people were saying, well, it's not good, but we're still a democracy. Like like there was kind of like a, like, boiling the frog quality. Like, people didn't want to acknowledge that they had crossed into something. And I feel like we also have that going on, where, like, people are like, well, you know, the National Guard is in a city, but it's only temporary.

And now, of course, they're in like a bunch of cities, right? Like now, like they're spreading like wildfire. And as you say, he stole the military to be prepared to like, you know, combat the enemy within. And so how do you balance those two things?

That's, it's difficult because every situation when people are living in it, is their situation. So, for example, people in Turkey, indeed, will say even until Imamoglu, the opposition leader, was actually jailed in March. He's one of my heroes. And he was jailed in March and stripped of being the mayor of Istanbul for the sole purpose of making it impossible for him to run for president because Erdogan

knows that he is going to defeat him. And he tried everything else and then he got more and more panicked, Erdogan. And the reason I'm talking about this is this is the limit of electoral autocracy. This is the limit of the sham idea that you as an autocrat are going to keep elections going and everything's just fine. And Erdogan has said to CNN before, we have elections. I'm not a dictator.

Well, he was stuck because if he let Emamoglu run against him in a fair and free or even what happened in 2019, he provoked a rerun saying there were regularities and Imamoglu got even more votes. So the guy is unstoppable, Imamoglu. And so what is his autocrat solution? Lock him up. That they all do, they all arrive sooner or later at where their scams can't go on any longer and they have to reveal themselves for what they are.

And yet, all this, until this happened in March, Turkish, it can always get worse. Right. Right, it can be, they could give an example of China. It could be a one party state. We still have, in Turkey, they would say,

we still have multiple parties. So I think it's a tough and interesting question to consider but we have to, this is why I say we use the tools and spaces that we have in our country at this time now. And we recognize how precious they are and that they could be changed or banned or gone and thus we are where we are, and we have to fight to retain that, rather than, I talk

about naming it as something, if that makes sense.

Does that work?

It does. Yeah. So, you know, I recently read, it's a little bit tougher a read than I thought it would be a book about the dual state written by a Jewish attorney in Nazi Germany. And the thesis is that you essentially have these two legal systems going on simultaneously, one that appears to be roughly rule of law oriented

and one that is highly personalistic to the to the whims of the dictator. And I gather something like that has been going on in Turkey as well. Number one, is that a characteristic that we find in other authoritarian regimes? And it does feel like we are starting to see that develop in the United States, where for certain kinds of crimes, everything is very normal. You know, right now, all around America, you know, people are being,

you know, are on trial in what would undeniably be normal, you know, due process-like procedures. You could fault the U.S US judicial system, but they would be indistinguishable from what you would have seen 40 years ago or 40 years ago, maybe even better than 40 years ago. And then you have these other legal proceedings that are going on that are highly irregular, whether they're companies settling bogus claims or whether they're the indictment of James Comey, where it's just like nothing about these legal procedures appear anything like what you would have anticipated

a normal actors and including the state to be doing. And I'm curious if that has historical or comparative political salience to you and how this tension is able to hold itself over time.

So I would frame it a little differently. The Nazi Germany, I know that book. There's a reason that Hannah Arendt classified Nazism and Stalinism as totalitarian, because they truly were. And at a certain point, Hans Frank, the Minister of Justice, who later was richly rewarded for his corruption, and he was also Hitler's personal lawyer. Well, he also went to Poland. Yes, he was

rewarded by being able to plunder Poland as the minister of the occupied Poland, the plenipotentiary. But he led a successful campaign to have Hitler's personal will recognized as the law. Now that's totalitarianism. Whatever Hitler feels becomes the law and needs no further justification.

That's right, and eventually judges were told they were to anticipate what Hitler's personal will would be. That was their highest call.

And the historian Ian Kershaw, an excellent historian, I learned, I used his work in my book, it's called Working Toward the Führer. And this goes back to what are a very interesting conversation about the types of people they surround themselves with, people who themselves have been hollowed out. They're like pliant tools of the leader.

And all of these people are supposed to, because they have no morals of their own or ideals, that's, they've had to give those up. They anticipate and do what they think the leader would want them to do because they know that's how you get ahead. That's how you get the all-important blessing of the leader, where he might call you out at a cabinet meeting, which in our days is sometimes televised, right? And if they're not sure about you, they do what Trump was

doing to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and they say, oh, is he okay? Well, let's hear it from you. Well, he's safe for now. I've seen that all over the world. But going back to the question of the law, in reality, in Nazi Germany, the only dual state of law was that if you were Aryan, classified officially as Aryan, you could have a semblance of justice. If your landlord was ripping you off, you could get justice for that. If you were not an Aryan, if you were targeted, and it wasn't just Jews, it was leftists, Jehovah's Witnesses, all kinds of people, there was

no justice for you. None. So that's in a totalitarian state. The other, the place that that, the dual system is more operative is when you have today, 21st century situations where the leader has not gone yet to the one-party state or maybe never will, and there are still opposition parties. There's still a semblance of opposition, including in the judiciary.

And so some people, it's always an increasing, decreasing number, can get a semblance of justice. I would put it like

that. Okay. And my question about where we stand is a hard one to formulate and I'm sure it's an impossible one to answer. But I'm sure it's one you get asked a lot. Like, so, if at one end you have, you know, a perfectly functioning democracy, and at the other end you have a completely closed totalitarian state, we're not at either, right? And we never have been, by the way. We've never been at the first.

So this is always gradations, and I always say this about free and fair elections. Like, we've never had perfectly free and fair elections, but they're getting less free and fair. How do you grade, like, what are the guideposts that we should be using in our head

to judge where we were, where we are,

where we should worry about going next? I think, you know, I'm not a legal expert or anything like that, but one of the areas in which the resistance to the autocracy has been most successful in America is the legal area, that numerous judges have turned back the claims and all the different cases that are autocratic or vengeance justice, all the things that have gone on. And there's many different types of things, from the immigration. It's across the board.

Because I want to stress that the people in charge now in America, Stephen Miller, et cetera, they have a very holistic vision of how to proceed. And this is an autocratic vision. Autocrats do things holistically. From their propaganda, where you have talking points that are standardized, and they're

disseminated through all institutions in society a little bit differently for kids, but they think holistically. And that's one of the most challenging things and disturbing things for me is that they have a holistic plan. Yes, it comes from Project 2025 a little. That's a different subject. So, what we see going on is that the judiciary, for example, has not been completely purged

yet. And so you're able to get these results. So also, for example, numerous lawyers have been locked up in Turkey. And the Imamoglu's lawyer was locked up. And then Imamoglu's lawyer's lawyer. I wanted to tell you that story. And this has happened other places. First the lawyer, then the lawyer of the lawyer. Yes, yes. The cycles, the widening circle. So, we are not there yet. Now, I also want to say that, what are we, month nine? Are we end of month nine?

Yeah, just roughly, just nine.

Okay. There is no equivalent about the speed at which this is happening among leaders, 20th century leader, 21st century leaders who came to office via election. Oh, wow, really? What is going on here? Yes, it resembles more after-

So what was the time frame in Turkey?

Well, Erdogan's been there either as-

Right, but when did you start to see the signs of?

Like after 2014, and they started, but it's really after the coup attempt against him in 2016. Oh wow, this is really fast in the United States. And the same with Russia, even Russia under Putin, certain things were done, but you, you, it took a long, Putin's been there as long as Mussolini, he's been there 25 years. Orbán's been there as long as Hitler, right? These people have been there a long time.

And so today we look at them and we say, oh, okay, the US is looking like Orban's with the elections, but Orban's been there since 2010, and Trump has been there 10 months.

So I want people-

What about our country makes it easier easier or for it to move faster? Is it not something structural?

well, he was there before and Many things that are going on were rehearsed and thought about but they were just unable he didn't have the right partners It wasn't he and then then they also used their time out of power brilliantly to the point that he was able, this is very rare, he was able to keep his personality cult extremely active and robust,

even though he had lost the election, but then of course he says he didn't. And for four years out of power, he was able to keep being the leader number one. That's very unusual. And they had Project 2025 as a shadow government, a heritage foundation. So they did, there'll be

books written on this. They used their time beautifully and that's how they

were able to move so fast. Why? I think if there's one question I get, as much as I get any other question, it is people who are angry, frustrated, and quizzical. So I'm going to give you the quizzical version. You can add the anger or the frustration if you'd like. But as a historian, I think if you had asked people two years ago, you know, or a year ago,

you know, when Donald Trump was reemerging on the scene, that what the checks and balances would be if he got reelected, I think, number one, people would have overestimated how much of a check and balance his political appointees would be, right? Because they saw that in the first term and they think that, okay, fine. Then they would have said, well, you have these multinational corporations that operate across borders and have standards that they have to abide by across borders, and they have to worry about public sentiment. And they're not going to bend to any one ruler because, you know, they have to maintain

sort of a holistic approach. And that the large media organizations will flourish because there'll be a lot to cover in Donald Trump. And they too are very robust organizations. They have a lot of money and a lot of diversified businesses to which to drive money. And then the third is I think they would have said, look, the law firms. I mean, law firms are partnerships and they

pride themselves on fighting hard. You know, they get paid a lot of money to be seen as the toughest lawyers, the toughest, you know, the toughest, most aggressive, you know, standing up for their clients. And yet we have seen the complete opposite of that. And so talk to us a little bit about that.

Yeah, I'm taking notes. There's a lot there. About the last thing you said about the capitulations, unfortunately, in history, the more people have assets, resources, the more they feel they have to lose.

And in fact, an interesting thing, to do the corruption chapter of Strongman, I studied the history of corruption, because the book goes over 100 years for each subject. And what you see is often, and these are people who come via elections to power, you staff your government with a lot of very, very wealthy people. And the way you get to them is not so much, sure, everybody wants to make even more money, but they already have money. So the way you get to them is by giving them

something that they're going to fear they'll lose. And that often is their reputations, thus compromat. And so through Roy Cohn, it's not just the Kremlin playbook. Trump learned from Roy Cohn and Roger Stone that you give people a reason to worry they're going to lose something or have secrets exposed or just lose their

position and their status. And that seems to work in not just in America. It's a syndrome I observed. It seems to work very well to keep people in line and get the people who you most think would be independent because they can be. Instead, they are the people who either obey in advance or they obey immediately.

One of my obsessions with what Trump is doing and the people around him, and I'm actually I'm writing about this, I'm gonna record some additional videos on this, is this distinction between capitulation and collaboration. Because it feels to me like some of what we are calling capitulation to me looks more like collaboration.

Like, you know, it may have started as a form of capitulation, but now these folks have become sort of business partners with Donald Trump. You know, they're full in. Like, they're not just, and so they're not really the victims. Like, capitulation kind of suggests a weakness,

but a victim status, and these folks, I think, have transformed beyond that. So is that common to see, and do you

agree that some of this is that? I'm glad you brought the lawyer's precision to this, because, in fact, one of the main things I work with in my book is called authoritarian bargains. And these are partnerships, you're right, they're collaborations that there is an initial capitulation, but, and here's another thing just quickly, people sometimes think, if I do this one thing, I'm good. Yeah. No, it's same in organized crime. There's a lot of overlap. If you do the one thing, the aggressor knows you're

weak, and then you're gonna he's going to do it again. So you end up with these collaborations, which there's some political science literature on this, authoritarian bargains, and they are absolutely central to keeping a state going. And they're collaborations with faith. It can be faith leaders, certainly business leaders, finance, obviously party politicians. But the bargain is, I will make you rich or keep you safe.

In return, you are loyal to me, you don't oppose me, or depending on how stringent the circumstances are, the requests are, you have to sing my praises in public and then you get to Tim Cook and others. But it's a bargain. The bargain means it's a partnership, it's a collaboration, and they are very effective. Think about Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church

and the classic fascists had them. And when, and it's interesting, if you look at China, that was a great authoritarian bargain. I don't give you many rights, but you are gonna be prosperous. Well, when the economic downturn started, the bargain, if something happens

to make the bargain tenuous, then the leader can get more insecure. And so what's very scandalous and shameful to me now is the silence of business and finance elites when there are nonsensical and dangerous and harmful things going on that affect the economy and our public health and prosperity defined in a very

broad way and most of them have been silent. Oh I think to say most of them

understates it. I mean I think the the silence of the business community will go down as one of this generation's greatest shames. I mean, you know, we can talk about the shame of the big law firms. We can talk about the shame of the media institutions. And believe me, there has been no one tougher on big law firms than I am, and I could take up another hour of your time just going through the law firms one by one.

But pound for pound, you know, watching, as you say, the tech leaders, you know, these are these these folks, these folks have so much power, these folks could could influence and protect democracy, the finance community, the banking, where was last time we heard from a bank, a major bank in the United States?

That's what I mean. It's tragic. It's tragic. And it's interesting if you look at the history of some of these banks, too, there was recently JP Morgan Chase and Epstein's collaboration. And you know what I thought of is that soon after Mussolini declared dictatorship, the economy wasn't going very well for him. And who bailed him out, giving him international legitimation? The House of Morgan, as the

bank was then known, gave him a hundred million dollar loan when he most needed it both internally and on the on the stage. And that started the big

partnership. All right, I got to ask you a couple of final questions, but you've been very generous with your time. One of them is this. I have done a lot of reading throughout my life and more recently going back and reading some of the Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn and others. I've read Navalny's book, Lek Valens' books, and you mentioned the mayor of Istanbul who's jailed and who is one of your heroes. What can we learn from the dissident movement?

I don't just mean the non-collaborator movement or even like what ordinary citizens can do. But what can we learn from people who truly we now think of as the heroes of who were willing to go to great lengths and great personal risk? Is that a necessary component? Like is it necessary to have those figures? Or are they, or can masses of people,

I think of the mass protests in some countries, can that substitute for that?

Ideally, you're gonna have both. Okay.

It's very important for people. So talk about the difference, like what the roles of those two are.

It's very important for people to have heroes and frankly authoritarians have been better at having kind of, well that's what cults of personality are about, but it's very important for people to have figures who they can look up to, who are doing the right thing on on their behalf, at a time when the government has become either negligent or actually an actively hostile force. Right? It's very scary for people to realize the government, not only the

leaders don't care if they live or die, sometimes they do things that accelerate the opposite of well-being. And in that situation, the dissident who is not one of the wealthy, powerful people usually, who comes from, they can come from any social class, but they often operating alone or on small scale against power, is very inspiring to people people and it encourages others to have their courage and to get their courage and go out perhaps to protest or to there's many ways we can we can resist or protest it doesn't you don't have to

be in the streets so that's one thing the other thing is that I've read many you know much in the literature of dissidents. And I have a chapter on resistance in my book that was important to me to have that. They are resilient. They play a long game. And some of the names you mentioned are people who had interminably long, they were in interminably long dictatorships and commun, for decades and decades. And you need a

certain mentality that is resilient and also doesn't give up hope. There's a friend of mine who's an artist who lives, he's Chinese dissident, he lives in exile, and he told me, because the Chinese government is always trying to get his exhibitions that are in foreign countries canceled. And he said, my personal, you know, my personal ethos is like the myth of Sisyphus, and I feel like I'm trying, and then it gets foiled. He said, but the act of trying is important regardless of the result, because it's an example to others.

And I think that often in America, we're not used to this. We like things to resolve quickly, and we're just not used to this kind of long game. We haven't had to be used to it, although we have many examples from the civil rights movement, which we're absolutely not talking about enough. That was a long game, and it was ultimately successful. So I think being resilient, using the tools that you have, whatever they are, never losing hope. People can get very cynical about hope,

like, oh, what does it mean? It's very important.

Yeah, so my last question to you is, you interact with a lot of people, but I want to focus your attention on one group, which are students. Okay, so these are people, you know, in college who really have grown up with Donald Trump.

Like, you know what I mean? Like, the reason why I'm focusing on them, like, it's, in some sense, you talk to me and I remember, you know, what, I remember the trials and tribulations of American democracy during the Bush years

and the hope of the Obama years and all of that. But you undoubtedly, in your teaching and in your lecture and come across bright, energetic people who want to have hope, people who are at the beginning of their lives, but who have really grown up as adults or as teenagers and adults in this

kind of broken system. And I think if I were one of them, it would be easy to be a democracy nihilist, for lack of a better term. Like, you know, where is the hope that you offer them? Like you know what I mean? Like what do you tell them where they have not seen a more

functioning system? All they have seen is this broken system. What do you tell them in terms of hope and in terms of playing a long game when that's the only game they've known?

Well, that's where the qualities that autocrats try and suppress, like curiosity, awareness, critical thinking, but curiosity is important because you have to have a desire to search for a reality or learn about realities that are not yours. And that's also where heroes come in and in that and their generations cases you know Instagram influencers, TikTok influencers. And we need to be much better about in those spaces because

that's where their opinions are formed. And one thing I want to say about this though is as we saw with Mamdani and he's not the only one, because we're in this influencer age, there's a lot of studies that show that for young people, traditional party affiliations right now are less important than personalities, people they can get behind because of their values, and people who seem that they're embodying their

values, values that they personally believe in, and they relate to them on that basis. And so this is why you're seeing people like whether it's AOC or Mamdani, they're getting votes from former Trump supporters sometimes. And there are many others in America. And Trump himself got votes from people who used to vote Democratic, and he's quite a personality. He knows exactly how to do the communication,

the simulate, in his case, simulated care. So we can learn from this, right? But I think I have found in teaching, I taught a class on coups last semester at NYU, and NYU's a little different because I had a lot of foreign students too.

And it was almost as though, as things were getting more precarious, and we were, this was during the election, and then so during the class Donald Trump won, they became more curious about what happens when democracies are annihilated suddenly, which was the coups class. And they wrote, their papers were the best I have ever

seen. I was almost in tears reading these papers, how good they were, how impassioned they were. So that gave me a lot of hope.

Well, that's a good way to end. Ruth, you are a true American treasure and a hero. And your scholarship is an essential read at this time, as is your book, Strong Men. And we are going to put a link to that in the description of this episode.

I encourage everyone to go out and buy it and read it and really not just read it, but really think about it.

And I think that's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I'll see you next time.