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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.

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As for Trump overall, I would still prefer referring to him as an illiberal populist or right-wing populist. He has a lot in common with the right-wing populists roaming around Europe today. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of Italian and history, New York University Pelosi says Trump is “trying to have the Constitution of the United States swallow Clorox” ( Washington Post) Of course the United States has committed horrible crimes “in our names” before Trump. For years, when the US was directly supporting the military dictatorship and the slaughter of civilians in Guatemala, few things tore at me as much as the indifference of US citizens to the role of their government in these crimes which were partly enabled by their tax dollars, their silence nearly as painful and infuriating as conscious, implicit support. People could name many other countries where the same or maybe even worse has been done “in our name.” Our presidents and governments always have their justifications, ludicrous and exaggerated as they often are. We’re fighting Communism, Islamic terrorism, we’re keeping our country safe. Such are the disagreeable responsibilities of being an imperial power. Would you rather be ruled by Russia, China, a caliphate? Out of sight, out of mind, that’s certainly a big part of why people go along too. Finally, Trump is anti-science and anti-intellectualism in his approach to governance. Why? Because he believes that his ideas, his notions, his hunches and his narratives are far superior to data and knowledge. In other words, he does not want facts and information to interfere with his wishes and desires, either personal and political. Trump does not care if you believe the world is flat if it embellishes him or profits him. Hutchinson said she overheard Meadows say in regard to chants by insurrectionists to “hang Mike Pence” and nooses set up outside the Capitol, “He [Trump] thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”In a statement issued on Sunday, Trump reiterated that former vice president Mike Pence totally could have “change[d]” the 2020 election results. Legally, this is not true at all, and we cannot stress enough that a person who was once and reportedly again wants to be leader of the free world thinks one can just “change” the outcome of a democratic exercise if he doesn’t like the outcome. Nonetheless, Trump was apparently vexed by comments from Senator Susan Collins re: the Electoral Count Act of 1887, an arcane law that “essentially sets up a timetable for when different parts of the counting process must take place and sets up a dispute resolution process for how Congress will resolve irregularities in accepting electoral slates from states,” as ABC News explains. The lawmaker from Maine said the act was “exploited” on January 6 and must be reformed so nothing like that will ever happen again, safeguarding democracy from you-know-who. But in Trump’s warped mind, this bipartisan effort to protect the country and future elections is somehow proof that “Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away.” He added that “unfortunately” Pence didn’t “exercise that power,” which, according to Trump, would have meant that the then V.P. “could have overturned the Election!” (We don’t understand this logic either.) Later the White House tweeted a clip from the proceedings that ended before the booing began, presumably to avoid Trump blowing a gasket and tweeting something about how RBG supporters can go to hell. Trump isn’t a dictator, of course. He just acts like and reminds us of a dictator. Trump is like a dictator. A sub-headline in the November 10th New York Times read: “President Trump’s iron grip on his party has inspired love for him among many Republican lawmakers and fear in others.” Usually we think of dictators—“Dear Leader”—inspiring love and fear with their iron grip, not democratically-elected leaders. Trump’s circle of advisors, his supporters in government, act like the advisors and supporters in a classic dictatorship, utterly subservient, but also conniving and corrupt sycophants, fattening off the dictator’s delusions and lies. His most fanatical followers remind us of the fanatical followers of a dictator, worshipful, credulous of every lie, fevered by his rhetorical poison, because every dictatorship presumes a pact with violence and hatred of an enemy that needs to be stigmatized, subjugated, defended against, crushed. Otherwise, there would be no need for a dictator, or a dictator-like president, there would merely be an opposition, with its competing vision and ideas about how to govern; after an election, the winner would win, the loser would accept his or her defeat, and peace and civic seriousness, an essentially agreed upon common public reality, would reign. Obviously that’s not even close to what is happening in the United States of American today. However, if you don’t have a card of the lead suit, you can instead play a trump card from your hand. But before you do this, you must reveal your face-down card to show the other players your trump suit.

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Kruse: A scholar who studies violent conflict, Thomas Homer-Dixon, recently wrote, “By 2025 American democracy could collapse causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.” Does that sound right to you or too extreme? If I was doing this as a bottom line in some debate, I’d say that Trump is not a fascist, but what he is quite consistently is an illiberal democrat. He is a democrat to the extent that he’s used democratic processes to be where he is, which he doesn’t radically challenge. He obviously plays fast and loose, like any wheeler dealer, with things like the Supreme Court, who he gets in, etc. He doesn’t care about the rules, but the core system he doesn’t want to change, because he’s somebody who’s profited by that system.

Despite taking the presidential oath, Trump exhibits no intention to uphold or defend our Constitution. He does not recognize that the three branches of government are co-equal. He has demonstrated his belief that the executive branch holds all power. Look at how he has politicized the Department of Justice; he has been able to get investigations of himself and his cronies stopped. Branches of government in a dictatorship exist solely for the benefit and pleasure of the leader. Trump treats our judicial branch as an extension of himself, and as a vehicle for obtaining power and hiding his corruption. Image of Trump and Vladamir Putin ( https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2018/07/politics/trump-putin-summit-cnnphotos/)

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Ad Policy Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention on July 21, 2016, in Cleveland, Ohio. (Dennis Van Tine / STAR MAX via AP Photo) Here we have a disgraced former president who attempted a coup d’état after losing the last election, and is also facing major legal jeopardy at the federal level and from multiple states. Quite possibly, the only way to avoid going to prison for the rest of his life is to become president again—and the only way to satisfy his craving for limitless money and power, and to inflict ruthless vengeance against his enemies, is to turn the presidency into a dictatorship. There is no precedent for such a coup in US history, nor in any other major industrialized country. All those who have sought to downplay the significance of January 6 stand thoroughly exposed. Hutchinson said that after a White House meeting with Meadows on January 2, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani asked if she was excited by what was on tap for January 6. He told her, “We’re going to the Capitol. The president is going to be there. He’s going to look powerful.” She also spoke of extensive intelligence from the Secret Service, the Capitol Police and the FBI of armed paramilitary organizations such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers planning to occupy federal buildings and target Congress on January 6.

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Ben-Ghiat: No. David Pepper, who wrote this book Laboratories of Autocracy, has always said that many states are no longer functioning democracies. I would say that nationally, we are a functioning democracy. That’s how we got rid of Trump. But the system has been eroded and many states are shifting, are evolving over time to a condition where votes are going to mean less. And then you get into a situation which is like what happened in Hungary where over time Viktor Orbán has developed a system where it’s almost impossible for the opposition to win. Trump views the presidency as a way of marketing his brand and of skimming profits . Making money, for him, is an end in itself. Trump has not abided by the emoluments clause of the Constitution. His golf properties and Washington hotel have made huge profits off the public payroll and from foreign dignitaries. Trump's claim that he has lost money by assuming the presidency is a lie and part of his scam. Even money from his Inaugural fund in 2016 has been skimmed off by family members. And, of course, Trump is undermining various norms and institutions of democracy. But this doesn’t make him a fascist, which means much more than these things. Indeed, I almost think calling Trump “fascist” gives him too much “credit” — he isn’t strategic enough, ideological enough, or ambitious enough. And as bad as things are today, we are still not in 1930s Germany. The big question will be what will happen in the coming months so that he can retain that power because he’s very toxic. There’s always this worry that maybe the investigations will bring more things out, so it’s not a done deal that he will get the nomination. But he’s been remarkably successful in ways that don’t surprise me at all. Because that’s how authoritarians are. They’re personality cults, even if they rule in a democracy like [Italy’s former prime minister Silvio] Berlusconi did. Berlusconi’s personality cult did not deflate until he was convicted, which he eventually was. That’s what it takes. It takes prosecution and conviction to deflate their personality cults. In fact, after the election Trump’s team brought 62 lawsuits and won one. The others he either dropped or he lost and many of those decisions were made by Republican judges. Perhaps his biggest disappointment had to be the Supreme Court’s decision to not hear election challenges from states Trump believed he had won.

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Kruse: Where is Trump in his own timeline? Is he in your estimation getting weaker, getting stronger, in a holding pattern? 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.” In Guatemala, after peace negotiations put an end to its three-decade long internal war, with a blanket amnesty for human rights crime, the victors—the army, the rich, the establishment political parties—called for forgiveness. It’s time to heal. Our long nightmare has ended. Forget the past and forgive. But the Catholic Church’s preeminent human rights leader, Bishop Juan Gerardi, knew that really there can’t be forgiveness without some accountability, without justice. Standing up for that principle cost him his life. He was bludgeoned to death in his parish house garage days after presiding over the release of a Catholic Church-sponsored human rights report that exposed military officers to possible war crimes trials. In Guatemala, despite some victories, despite its at times laughable democratic facade, the only haphazardly disguised iron grip of dictatorship survives. That said, just as ethnically based violence or ethnic cleansing shares some characteristics with genocide/the Holocaust, so too does Trump bear similarities to other strongmen, a category in which fascists like Hitler and Mussolini belong, as do Orbán, Erdogan, Putin, and their ilk. That Trump maintains his support by engaging in explicitly divisive appeals designed to pit groups against each other — particularly but not exclusively ethnic groups — also, of course, bears some similarity to what fascists did. Although my position has not changed on Trump — less fascist than kleptocrat, more egoist than radical-right ideologue — that does little to mitigate the danger.

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Any cards that are leftover should be placed to one side. Once each player has their cards, they can choose their trump card. Once you’ve decided on your suit, take one card from your hand (that matches your trump suit) and place it face-down in front of you. That hasn’t happened here — but it could. It came terrifyingly close to happening in Greece, where the explicitly neo-Nazi Golden Dawn became the third-largest political party in the mid-2010s. And if and when it does happen in America, we need to have the right terms and tools to confront it. Robert Paxton, Mellon professor emeritus of social sciences, Columbia University Explosive testimony given Tuesday to the House Select Committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021 presented an account of Trump’s efforts to personally direct the storming of the Capitol, murder his opponents, and establish himself as dictator. Kruse: You recently wrote, “Ron DeSantis is turning Florida into his own mini-autocracy.” Why is he an autocrat? Ben-Ghiat: It could happen in a quieter way. I think that it’s not out of the realm of possibility, because if the Republicans tried to impeach Biden and impeach Harris, there would be protests. Whether that becomes a civil war is very different because it’s predominantly only one side which is armed, first of all. So Walter is right. She wanted to point out how far our democracy has eroded. And it’s not out of the realm of possibility that we could end up with some kind of form of autocracy because that’s what’s being set up by all of the assaults on our electoral system. And Bannon’s been working very hard at this, too, from his own vantage point. It’s intimidation of voters, removing voters, look at all these threats to election officials — so you get them out of the system — this all corresponds to what we call “autocratic capture.” There’s a movement going on. This is what I mean by more — it’s more legalistic and quieter. And that doesn’t tend to bring out people into the streets. Because it’s an evolution and it’s happening slowly, slowly, slowly, and big protests are occasioned by an event.