Ruth Ben-Ghiat: There Is No Alternative

Hello. Welcome to

the Bulwark Podcast. I’m your host, Tim Miller. I am delighted to be here. It was Ruth, Ben Giat, professor of history in Italian studies at NYU and MSNBC opinion columnist, her latest book is Strong Men, from Mussolini to the present. She writes the sub stack, lucid, about authoritarianism, and threats to democracy.

Kind of a relevant subject matter expertise, Ruth?

Yes. I didn’t plan it this way, but, definitely, I wrote strongmen to warn Americans that it can happen here. It can happen anywhere. I felt I had the skill set from studying fascism for so many years. So here I am.

I know you’ve been on the Secret Podcast before, but I’m I’m not sure we know your origin story. How did this come to pass? Like, how was it that you found an interest in this? Were you just a umberto echo fan? Or what was it that led you to the study of fascism?

Yeah. It’s kind of strange because I I grew up in Southern California in a beautiful town, Pacific palisades on the ocean. So not a place where you think the threat of fascism is around, but it was a place where a lot of refugees from Nazism, like many years ago, had settled, like, my town and towns around it, like famous ones, like Thomas Mann, the writer, and Arnold Schoenberg, composer. So, the, the grandkids and kids of some of these people were around, and I, I, I knew some of them, and I just got curious about why people you know, what does it mean you had to flee and start over? And so I was gonna study Germany and then somebody said, I start grad school and history and someone said, well, why don’t you do Italy because it’s not studied as much as Nazism, and it lasted twice as long.

And of course, I went to Rome. I loved Rome. So it started there with me as a child also of immigrants. The the closest family member was like a twelve hour flight, thinking about people who had to flee from their homes and come sometimes halfway around the world, and In fact, Strong Men, a subtheme of my book is people going into exile. So this is something since I was a teenager I’ve been thinking about.

You know, we do a lot of this kind of the big picture thread assessment, some conversations around here, and I I’m always sort of pulled both ways.

Yeah.

On this question, How do you assess the degree of the threat? I don’t know if we’re going back to the Bush era of of yellow, orange, red, homeland security threats? Like, how do you to degree of the threat, the big inspection, we’ll kinda talk about some specifics.

It can be hard because, like, if you think of authoritarian states today like Victor Orban’s Hungary, He’s been there since two thousand ten.

Really?

And so there are times, like, obviously, Hitler with the enabling act or coups. A third of my book is about coups. And, in our country, January six, they tried to accelerate history through, a force. Right? That’s that’s one line.

But if that’s not happening, and you still have a functioning democracy and you have an authoritarian threat from within. It can be hard to measure the threat. And that’s why people, if if you see something like an image, I’ve been on TV recently talking about this image of Biden, on a pickup truck, your life size as though he were a hostage, as though he’d been through a coup and something had happened to him. People can say, well, that is just a joke. Oh, you shouldn’t take it seriously.

What I do is I look at the aggregate. There’s all these things happening. What are the big picture things? There’s a concerted attempt to delegitimize democracy in our country coming from Trumpism, the GOP. So those kinds of things are how I approach this.

What kind of comps do you look at? I mean, obviously, you’ve done the work in Italy. And so, you know, there’s some mussolini elements. There’s some Burlusconi element him. There’s some Orban.

You know, I know sometimes I like to kind of think through specifically the comps because claims of, oh, like, democracy might end. Right? Like, so that sometimes feels abstract to people. Right? It’s like, is it really gonna end?

Like, you know, is are we really gonna no more elections. I’m just pretty unlikely. Is it possible? Sure. But that, you know, what could it look like that are, you know, some examples of things that we’ve seen.

I’m gonna tell you, an anecdote, but it’s, you know, a story that I think about all the time from my research, and it’s very important to go back and both interview people who live through these things. And I did that for my book, but just know the history.

Yeah.

So Mussolini’s actually more relevant than Hitler for our situation, for many situations today, because he was prime minister in a democracy for three years. And during that time, he chipped away at Democratic rights, and then he was accused of murdering the his chief political opponent, the head of the socialist party was much beloved. And he declared dictatorship to get out of an investigation, that was probably gonna send to jail. So as this happened, so he declares dictatorship, it’s January nineteen twenty five, And immediately, the state starts sending out, you know, the squad risk go, the Bulwark shirts go, but also the state, the military starts, you know, rounding people up. And there’s a communist, all these communists go to a safe house because they’re fleeing.

Right? And one of them said, that people were lining up at LaScala Opera House, and dictatorship had just been declared roundups were going on. They were lining up to see the opera like nothing had happened because they didn’t see how it would affect them. And there are lots of stories like this.

Yeah. And I’m wondering when you interview people, like, living through that can kind of be disorienting. Right? Because you do feel like, you know, you see a threat. It seems not great, but it’s hard to calibrate, you know, and you’re and and you, you know, rationalize.

Right? This isn’t Yeah. And it’s, like, kind of the cliche line that this isn’t gonna happen here. This won’t happen here, but there’s a reason that’s cliche. Right?

Like, that’s a real feeling that people have. Like, that this can’t happen here.

Well, it’s not just that it can happen here, that it’s also that it’s not gonna happen to me.

Right.

A big picture of thing I see happening, which I’ve personally find very unfortunate is that a lot of the same conservative elites, the sectors of to some extent media, but especially business and finance, that people who have always backed authoritarians right now in America, they’re kind of arranging themselves in a self protective manner in case Trump comes in. So that involves self censorship. So, not only they took away a lot of the asset managers, etcetera. They took away ESG because they were being under attack. Now it’s deI because the race war is being fought on at the workplace as well as schools.

So there’s a kind of a bang in advance, which happens, and that’s part of an accommodation that’s done so that you’re set up in case the autocrat comes in. And that’s very unfortunate because what you could do, this is the window to turn it back We have a window here to turn it back, but it means that these elites, they’re called pillars of support in autocratic studies. These are the people who have real influence in society. And if they speak out, if they oppose, and it’s actually in their interest to support democracy. Because the studies, you know, we don’t hear enough about how in Turkey, Erdogan is plundering the economy.

How Russia is actually a kleptocracy. Terrible things happen to businesses, private businesses in autocracies, but we don’t hear about that. Instead, people think they have to obey in advance And so that is happening here, and it’s I’m quite disturbed about that.

Yeah. I wanna bring up two examples of that. That have just popped up in the last day. The the first one’s a little bit of a silly example, but I think it’s a silly example that’s worth talking about. I don’t know.

Have you opened up AcCS this morning No.

Not this morning.

We have a two siren article, by the head of Axius Jim Van Dehi. Behind the curtain, how Trump’s mind works. The article, former president Trump thinks and talks and acts like no other politician in our lifetime, there is a Rosetta Stone that demystifies how his mind Bulwark, his closest friends tell us. His Spotify playlist goes on to talk about what we can learn from his Spotify playlist that he likes. Things traditionally likes famous people.

You know, he likes to control the volume. The stongs are I mean, this is just preposterous, but the treatment of him, right, like, that is part of Right? I don’t there’s some more serious examples of the accommodationists, but right, like, that journalists, you know, now, like mainstream journalists are thinking, well, you might win again. Every day, we can’t talk about the threat of Trump’s fascism. Like, some days, we gotta keep a little light so the team still talks to us.

You know, we’ll just do a little soft a soft focus profile on his Spotify playlist today to make sure that, you know, his black shirts are happy. You know, the next time we call looking for a scoop, That’s part of this. Right? It’s not just the Republican party, but, like, they’re all the elements of the establishment start to accommodate themselves to the possibility of of him coming into power.

They do. And I guess I would say, one of the things that I have been able to do just personally because of my training, and it’s a bit of a blessing and a curse, is that I started writing about Trump and company in twenty fifteen, and I was writing them for CNN and the Atlantic. And I did a couple of pieces, in particular, one for CNN called Trump is following the authoritarian playbook that was published, right before he was inaugurated. And if you look at that today from delegitimizing civil rights, two threats on judges. I think everybody would find it, unfortunately, to be a hundred percent accurate.

And I don’t have a crystal ball It’s that I’ve studied these people for years and Trump unfortunately, you know, matches in his psyche the outcomes are different. Of course, we’re not gonna have a North Korea or, you know, Nazi style one party state, but the personality traits are the same. And that’s why, and strong men, that’s documented from every point, every sector of, you know, corruption.

You didn’t need to look at a Spotify play us to determine that he had some authoritarian tendencies.

No. However, what’s what’s interesting is that when you look at we could call it the private lives of authoritarians, which I did, and it was one of the worst things to write about, especially as a female scholar, like Gaddafi and Libya, when he would go on trips abroad, he was a very showy person, and he had these female bodyguards. And that was kind of bait for the media, and they would focus on the glamour of these female bodyguards who were often very beautiful. Well, That was their day job. They were actually sexual slaves, and he had an entire system.

It’s as though Jeffrey Epstein was the head of state and used the secret police to scout women, recruit women. And so these bodyguards actually had to they were kept in a compound, and they had a night job. So the private lives of dictators, when you study them, actually reveal things that are interesting now. That’s very different than a Spotify playlist, but it’s all about context. It’s all about context.

So you can publish that article, to be light, but I think that we always have to mention that Trump tried to overthrow the government. Like that gets left out, and that is to the interests of the right that’s trying to rewrite this, you know, every which way.

Yeah. And there are many things that are left out. I I’ve one of my complaints always about the coverage of Trump is that, again, obviously, there there are limits to these comparisons. Like, he didn’t have women in sexual slavery, but did commit many, many sexual assaults. And I feel like a lot of times he gets back in, and those stories are considered old news.

Like you won already. We talked about this already. So we’re not going to revisit it. We’re not gonna already tell the stories. We’re not gonna contextualize.

Policy discussions about women’s rights or anything by reminding people about some reservos and, you know, all of the other women who made credible threats against him.

I I talk about that in the book because what so that’s like you could say that Cadaffi, Mussolini also had a similar system. He didn’t keep them captive. He just He just abused them, invited them in and abused them. But they’relusconi and Trump, for example, there are these authoritarian personalities And in general, they have a mania of control of bodies. Now that’s extends to locking people up where their machismo is part of their brand, which is true with Verlusconi and also Duarte but Verlusconi, he owned all the private teaming networks in Italy.

So he used I call them pipelines of bodies. Basically, these men go they go into aside business gigs. Businesses that allow them access to female bodies. So there, Lusconi had TV networks and women would wanna come on and, you know, become stars, but he also is interested in beauty pageants. Trump had miss universe.

He had Trump models, and there’s various stories about, you know, the different types of models, whether some of them escorts. So he also went into businesses that allowed him And this is all documented to go into changing rooms of miss universe and give him leverage, give him a pipeline of bodies. And this is relevant because it’s part of a larger mania of controlling as many people as possible and needing the adulation and the power over these people. So that’s how I link it in the book. So what happened before and he actually did not get rid of Trump models until I think it was well into two thousand seventeen.

So when he came in, as president, he still had it, and that I think is relevant.

It is relevant. I I wanna get into the accommodations a little bit more, but now that we’re down this path, Bill Crystal is, like, like, put me on to the echo. The you are Fascism essay. And it is, like, when you read it, I encourage we’ll put it in the show notes. I encourage everyone to actually read.

It’s not that dense of a document, and he, you know, gives the characteristic traits of fascism, and and some of them are not particularly relevant, but so many that that are. And you look at it, you know, number one is culture of tradition. You know, number two is rejection of modernism. This is all, you know, right there with a make American great again, irrationalism, is the third point. We could go on and on, but the the twelfth point to this is how the fascist mindset transition itself to sexual matters.

So I think he talks about machismo, disdain for women and you know, giving a lot of credence to power dynamics with regards to women and and set ties directly to the strong man. You are much more school than this than me, but you do see this across other Fascist aspiring leaders. This trend.

You do. And basically, if we get into the authoritarian gender politics, they’re as I’ve analyzed it, it’s a triad. Hyper masculinity, where the leader and Duterte did this, also Billsonaro did this, is boasting about their to women, their sexual prowess. Sometimes, certainly Duarte and Bosonaro, and, Baylusconi, especially boasted constantly about this. And that’s one pillar, but it’s linked to two others.

Another is misogyny, which becomes institutionalized in bands on a bore in, you know, that, something that flew under the radar during Trump’s presidency, he partly decriminalized domestic violence. Meaning, before it was a much broader category, Trump made it so that economic impoverishment psychological harassment, everything short of physical violence was now decriminalized. The big concept is that we think of authoritarianism as controlling people, and it is as with the misogyny control of women’s bodies, what they can do. But it’s also so some people have more controls. Other people, perhaps the the male elite, have freedoms they never dreamed of to plunder.

In women’s bodies, this one area. So you’ve got misogyny, you’ve got hypermasculinity, and the third is, of course, homophobia. And what I found in my research is the truth through line of authoritarian regimes and states is homophobia. Because there are even, like, Cadafi early on, he was a left wing revolutionary. He actually

I’m sorry. The Gaddafi homophobic homophobia thing is a little weird, since he’s so camp. I mean, there’s like, there’s sometimes a thin line as we saw in that Ron DeSantis ad, a thin line between homo eroticism and homophobia But anyway, so Well,

he he, in his case, he actually had male captives as well.

That’s not surprising.

He went after men too. But that is the true through line of authoritarians, all of them persecute in some form lgbtq people. So this triad of hyper masculinity, homophobia, and misogyny, they work together in authoritarian conditions. And think of Victor Orban, who banned gender studies in two thousand eighteen. And then twenty twenty, you could not be legally defined anymore as an intersex or trans person.

And so that’s the playbook that, of course, the GOP has been using with its own long history in our country of persecuting gays. So the hypermasculinity can be seen in a larger framework, and that’s how it affects the lives of everyday people when it becomes enshrined into law.

On the misogyny line of this, I mean, you have it’s not just abortion, but you have the birth control and the the contraception push that’s happening. We had Charlie care yesterday talking about how birth control screws up female brains and part that’s part of the project twenty twenty five plan. That’s all part of the same kind of control ethos You’ve mentioned Berlusconi a couple times. I just wonder if you have any other thoughts on the comparisons there and the threat like, looking at it through that frame because I do think it’s more graspable. Right?

I’m always cautious to be like, it’s Hitler. Right? Because, you know, sometimes people then turn off. Their brain because not it’s not gonna be Hitler. We’re not gonna but, like, Burlusconi is is real.

It’s modern, and there are a lot of comparisons. I just wonder if there anything else that stands out to you in that com?

I went to Italy. This is back in the nineties as a student. I was finishing, you know, my degree in post doc, early, early post doc. And I happened to get there right when Berlusconi had his first government. He never gets taken seriously because being a clown was part of his distraction from his corruption.

He was like a total clown. It was like an outrage every day, which can be familiar to people in America.

Yes.

But what did he do? He broke the taboo on having neo fascists in government. In Europe, nobody had done this for a very good reason. So here at Longcoms Barlusconi, who was a billionaire, a sports team owner, you know, he was known for other things. He goes into politics, And he makes his own party, Fort sitalia, which is he gives it the name of a sports slogan, so very popular.

And he allies with the neo fascist party. Which nobody had done before. He brings them into government. And so the big point here is he normalized far right extremism. He made it acceptable to consider them as governing partners.

So he did in Italy what Trump is doing later on. Here we have though a giant party, which was already a very old party, which has remade itself fusing with extremists. And there’s very all kinds of interesting data points on how, you know, like, from two years ago, one in five, local state GOP officials had either affiliations or sympathies with, you know, Proud Boys oathkeepers. So there’s been this normalization of extremism. So it’s a different setup because we only have the two parties, and it was already a huge establishment party providing us with presidents.

There you had a party that had been in parliament, but would never be in the government because it was fascists, and Italy had fascist dictatorship. Very loaded, but Berlusconi made it acceptable. And so that’s how we get Georgia Meloney as a prime minister today. And Berlusconi started her career by making her a minister of his last government. She was minister of youth.

So it takes a long time And when I saw this happening, it, like, totally changed my work because I had been thinking of fascism as something dead. Right?

The history project.

Yes. Yeah. I’m a historian. It was and then I was like, whoa, so I started paying attention to the memory of fascism and today. So it totally changed my career.

Being around Berlusconi’s, you know, normalizations. And that’s how I was able to see so early what Trump was doing. And so two thousand fifteen, I wrote a piece about Bannon, like, that his white nationalism was gonna become a threat because he was in with Trump. And so even people who seem clownish or remote, or they are very, very important for understanding what’s happening to us today.

Yeah. The parallel here, like, just listening to you talk about it. To me, it’s something that had been inside the Republican Party Yes. Is not that that he brought in a new party into this is like the fascist party or or something like that. But there is a is a direct Sarah Longwell, which is the the staffing

Yes.

Or like the types of people. And so Trump can be a clownish front man, and he can have other businessmen. Like, you you hear this now. Like, he wants the treasury secretary to be John Polsan or some serious businessman. He can bring in a couple other serious seeming faces.

He did this with the military leaders in his first administration, hopefully, his only. But then underneath that, you have people that never would have had jobs.

That’s it.

You know, the Jeffrey Clark, the Cash Patel’s, the Steven Miller’s, like, the idea that in a Marco Rubio and these people would have all been just totally cast aside in a back corner somewhere or been working for some back bench congressman or been working for Paul Gosar. Right? Like, the idea that they would be in decision making positions of power would have been crazy. And now, Trump has empowered the most extreme, you know, the most, like, what has been

Low life.

Low life.

Yeah. Low life. Diplorable types. Right? And so that is kind of how this fusion has worked for him.

Right? It’s been within the Republican party, but he’s taken that faction that would have never been empowered.

That’s right.

And empowered them.

Yeah. This is out of the fascist playbook and all all these states because first of all, the the leader encourages people to be their worst self.

Yes.

So even people who used to be fairly law abiding, they have license and permission to do things they never dreamed they could do. Q in Will Saletan, you know, Graham, all the people. And then the leader, humiliates them in public once in a while to keep them in line. So that’s one dynamic. The other is, it’s very sad.

You need lawless people to have the culture of autocracy the bureaucratic and the legal culture of autocracy. So I added a corruption chapter to my book to study this stuff. And it’s very dismaying, and and you saw I have trumping it, you know. But everywhere, you have the most, lawless extremist, brutal people, whose careers flourish. In Italy, and in, Nazi Germany, this was called the Little Muscellinis and the Little Hitler.

And often these people are hated. Everyone still loves the duce. They still love the fuhrer, but they hated these people because Yeah.

Nobody like Stephen Miller.

Yeah. They were brutal. Actually, he’s like what Hannah a rent called the desk killer, the kind of bloodless bureaucrat in the suit who goes into the office every day and, you know, kind of drafts legislation that’s gonna lead to a bad end for many, many people. Because you need you need three levels, for autocracy, and the GOP has been working on all of them. You need the foot soldiers, you know, the people who attack the capital, the thugs, the militia members, all these people, and I’m gonna include constitutional sheriffs, even though they’re these are just thugs.

Who are lawless, and they need the lawless.

And the thugs now have their own, like, logos. They have their own, keeper, skill, and all that. You know?

And in our country, we have an extraordinary threat because we have tolerated all these people in ways that other countries in peace time don’t have all this. Mean, it makes no sense to have all these militias and and the gun. It goes back to guns, of course. So we are we are different than other places. And then you need the bureaucracy, and that’s what Project twenty twenty five is about.

And note they chose a very neutral name, but it’s creating a legal culture for the state to come. And that’s why they have, you know, they’re vetting people politically, just like an authoritarian regime, to make sure they have the right people. So there’s gonna be a big purge of the bureaucracy. So you get people who are already corrupt Many of them will be already lawless. They don’t respect the rule of law.

And then there’ll be the perfect people to do what Trump needs to do. And the final is that you have the inner circle of the leader and these are sick of fans, these are, you know, people who are should be nowhere near power, and yet they’re perfect. Or they have some connections, like, if you go back and analyze Trump’s cabinet, who was in it, very interesting. You’ve got like Wilbur Ross. We never talk about him, but he was secretary of commerce.

He forgot to mention during his confirmation process that he was in business with Putin’s son-in-law. So every one of those people was chosen for their ties to an autocrat or for their corruption.

Okay. It’s actually very clear. Right? Like, these different concentric circles and how Trump uses it to gain power and how he uses it also to project to folks that aren’t paying close attention to this sort of thing. I can unscarry you know, persona.

Right? One that’s like, oh, we can’t believe that he could do that, because he uses these other, you know, concentric circles, these other layers of power just to execute the the stuff that would make people afraid that would make people cringe. When we were talking earlier, you’re talking about how people accommodate themselves because in case he takes power, they want to be able to, you know, have a place for themselves. And that’s pernicious. But we’ve also seen the Republican party people that aren’t really ever gonna have a place in power, but just are unwilling to to fight, right, unwilling to take the heat that comes with challenging Trump.

And you mentioned, the Atlantic earlier which you’ve written for, which is much more lucid to borrow a phrase about the potential threat. And the editor Jeffrey Goldberg wrote this week about a study in Senate cowardice. Republicans like Rob Portman could have ended Trump’s political career, but they chose not to. You know, talk about that group, which I think is the group that makes me the maddest, but that gets off the hook the the most, which are the Republicans who know better who are not in any of those three concentric circles that you talked about that aren’t doing anything to undermine the power of the people inside those those circles or those levels.

Yeah. I see this as a a moral collapse. A collective moral collapse, and the collective frame is important because we know that what matters most for people’s actions is that There’s some kind of unity. They don’t feel that they’re alone. And one of the saddest missed points off the Trump Highway to hell, the the missed x it is that these people, maybe on January seventh, and some of them did, and then they retracted, you know, they went back on their words.

They could have banded together and said, this isn’t who we are, I mean, after a coup attempt that cost, you know, the lives of people. They would have had the public probably on their side, and they didn’t. And they’ve missed the exits at every moment. Now why have they missed the exits? Definitely, Trump has mobilized threats against them.

That’s been going on since his first impeachment where Republicans who voted to impeach him had to buy, you know, body armor and get security, and there’s the the interaction with the thugs, right, who have been the extremists. And he keeps them. Right? He keeps them foaming at the mouth through the right wing media ecosystem. But it’s also, yes, taking the easy path.

That’s why I think it’s very important to make outcome arguments to these people and to the public that ultimately, you know, a little pain at the beginning is gonna avoid a lot of pain further on for business, for prosperity. So I’m trying to speak to to business people, also pointing out that, you know, you see erdogan and he looks harmless. Well, he’s not harmless to business. And this goes back to our point where people think Not only is not gonna be bad.

Economy also is not crushing it in Hungary right now either.

No. It’s a it’s a disaster. It’s a disaster. And and Putin is only, you know, it’s a kleptop courtesy. These places do do not function.

They’re totally dysfunctional. And I tried to show that in in my book that, you know, how Trump kept hiring and firing people, and there was sixty eight percent turnover. They’re all like this. We just don’t hear about it while it’s going on because of censorship. And so that’s very sad.

So it’s larger than the GOP, but they all know better with very few actions. And so it’s cowardice, it’s moral collapse, and it’s a lack of strategy because if they all banded together and made a big statement behind Liz Cheney, that would, you know, move the needle.

Even forget behind Liz Cheney, because I always used to say this. I’m no fan of Ron DeSantis. I think that he has some autocratic tendencies as well. But they could have all disbanded behind around the Santa’s. Like, they don’t actually they didn’t actually need to go full board.

Right? Like, that would have been a possibility. Had they just convicted Donald Trump. In February of twenty twenty one. And united behind Ron DeSantis, he would have won the primary, and that’s where we would be.

And we would have other threats. There’d be certainly things that we could debate and be upset about, but the acute threat of Trump would be would be over. And it would have been better for the Republican party. It probably would have been worse for us. I you know what I mean?

But for the Republican party’s institution, if you’re just looking at the Republican party and say, what would have been the best to preserve its own power? Getting rid of them actually would have been the best thing to preserve its own power, but they didn’t have the courage to do it.

No. And and then you can get into a situation that the party of Verlusconi got into, and the acronym for this is Tina, there is no alternative. Because these guys can’t hear any talk of successor or alternative because of the personality cult. We haven’t talked about that yet, but the the personality cult thing. Which all of the Republicans, you know, are are bowing to.

You can’t talk about anybody else. I mean, Nikki Haley persisted, but you can’t talk about anyone else. So if he starts to crash and burn or if people no longer wanna be part of him associated with him, there’s nowhere for them to go. And so it’s Tina. There is no alternative.

And in fact, even though Mike Pence is going out on a relative limb, saying he’s not endorsing Trump, Who is he endorsing? He’s not gonna be endorsing Biden or RFP Junior. So the system is stuck. The system is actually in a stalemate as far as Republicans are concerned.

We have a prime example of that this week where we had a little bit of courage shown by somebody in maybe unexpected quarters, but still succumbing to the Tina conundrum. Let’s listen to Carl Grove here this week.

I worked in that building as a young man. To me, the Congress of the United States is one of the great examples of the strength of our of our democracy and a jewel of the constitution. And what those people did when they violently attacked the capital in order to stop a constitutionally mandated meeting of the Congress to accept the results of the electoral college is a stain on our history and everyone those sons of who did that, we ought to find them, try them and send them to jail. And and if And if and one of the critical mistakes made in this campaign is that Donald Trump has now said, I’m gonna pardon those people because they’re hostages. No, they’re not.

Their thugs. There were people. Some of them had automatic weapons at a hotel in Virginia hoping to be able to be called up. We had people saying where’s Nancy Pelosi? We had people who were, you know, taking desks and sitting at the desk of the speaker of the house and attempting to you know, find people in order to bring them to justice and saying to the to yelling at the police, kill them, kill them all.

And so Why Trump has done this is beyond me? If he had said, you know what? I trust my jury system, I trust law enforcement, anybody assaulted the I mean, he said it once or twice, but now he’s got he’s appearing at a video with people who assaulted police officers with an attempt to take the capitol by force.

He’s so close. Really good, powerful. Thank you. This is what we’re asking for. But then why Trump has done this beyond me.

Why is he sticking by them? It’s beyond me. Ruth, educate Carlrove. Answer that question, answer that rhetorical for him.

Well, yeah. The why he’s done it is to have an authoritarian take over. That’s my I feel my job is to, like, go there because it’s it’s backed up by research. You know, One of the saddest things, we talk about moral collapse. I’ve never been a Republican, I never will be, but it’s very painful for me as an American.

The burying of January six, as a violent act and its conversion into the kind of a patriotic thing has meant that These men and women who were serving the country who had to run for their lives. Imagine their families on that day, their children have had to forget to the public have had to silence themselves and, quote, forget that this trauma ever happened to them. So authoritarianism asks you not only to betray your neighbors and your teachers and whoever. It asks you to betray yourself. And I can’t think of a better example of these people who running for their lives.

Some of them, we have studies. Right? It was thirty seconds more, and they would have been in the hands of these thugs, and they’re not allowed to talk about it, or they don’t allow themselves to talk about it. And that’s why all the work I’m doing is, like, we can’t forget because in other countries, when we forget, we give into these revisionist narratives, we get myths of autocracy that prop them up.

And that’s why it’s so refreshing to hear even people like Carl Rove talk about it. She’s like, yes. Just say it. Just say it. Why isn’t everybody saying it?

It’s so nice. Okay. Final topic. We’ve had a little internal dialogue here at the Bulwark Jonathan last wrote earlier this week that Trump If he wins, will run again in twenty twenty eight. And the Republican Party and Supreme Court will go along with it.

On the next level podcast, we can go, listen. We had a very lengthy discussion about about maybe JBL is a little authoritative in that claim. I I certainly think it’s possible, and I think the fact that it’s possible is insane enough Right? And, you know, so we don’t need to get in the prediction business. We can just be in the probability business.

But what do you think? Your crystal ball from twenty fifteen was, ended up being pretty clear If Donald Trump gets in again, what do things look like from there, from your perspective?

Well, unless, there’s a natural cause for him. He will never leave because he cannot leave. Because the purpose of authoritarianism for the strongman is to be protect did allow themselves to protect themselves from jail. It’s really simple. In fact, regular politicians who have charges against them, investigations, they don’t wanna run for office.

But strong men, and you can add in Netanyahu, Putin, Barlewscone, and Trump all ran for office repeatedly while they had investigations or charges against them because they have to get into power and arrange government to protect themselves. So the whole deep state thing said they’re gonna, you know, even Project twenty five, these are the desk killers who are gonna kill off the DOJ. They’re gonna kill off this, that, and the other, all the agencies that can harm him. So once he gets in, he’s going to legalize crimes. He’s telling us that.

Right? He wants immunity. And so he has to stay there.

And he’s gonna legalize other people’s crimes too. He’ll he’ll pardon them. Yeah.

That’s right. And let Putin does whatever he wants, etcetera. It’s like global disaster. But he’ll never leave because he can’t leave. Otherwise, he’ll he’ll have to pay consequences and so will all of his, collaborators?

This is the lack of imagination that Donald Trump defenders have. This was my point yesterday. I don’t exactly know what’ll happen if he gets in again. But I do know this, which is that if he is in again, he will do more crimes and that the Democratic party and that the people who still believe in rule of law in this country will try to stop him and we’ll try to punish him and hold him accountable for those crimes, and he will not allow himself to be held accountable.

That’s right. And if you know how they operate, I just found an interview I did with salon on December twentieth twenty twenty, and I said that Trump’s coup is not over. I felt like something was gonna happen. And so I was, like, right before January sixth. And then I had to turn in my book to the publisher in the late summer of twenty twenty, but I said that I didn’t think he would leave quietly.

So none of this for me is a surprise and you can kind of predict sometimes what they will do based on what others do in such circumstances.

Ruth Bend Galllett’s RBG has, the sub stack newsletter lucid. I do hope you come back to the Bulwark podcast. It’s not not maybe the most uplifting space, but, we have to have these conversations. And I’m happy. No.

No. No. I’m happy that you are just as candid and as lucid as as we need in this moment. So thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Alright. We’ll be back here tomorrow with the weekend board pod. We’ll see y’all then. Peace

You say that you wanna go to Malay. That’s far away. I always supposed to get there with the way that we’re living today You talk loud, all doubt god, freedom comes from the call, but that’s not why this bitch wants not what I want at all. I on.

The Secret Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.