IHIP News - Fascism Expert Sounds Alarm as Trump Secretly Builds His Hiding Place While He Collapses

Episode Date: May 3, 2026

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Visit edc.ca to learn more. Right. Joining me today on IHIP News is my friend and absolute expert in exactly what is happening right now. Her name is Ruth Ben-Giott and she is the best-selling author of Strongman and she has an amazing, amazing substack called Lucid. Ruth, welcome to I hip news. Welcome back. Thank you. So pleased to be here with you. You're one of our audiences' favorites. I think you and I went to dinner a couple of weeks ago and I was telling you, I think there's a desire among the public right now. as we see this regime attack science, attack facts, attack knowledge. There's a desire from the electorate to learn. And so thank you so much for making yourself available. Right now, Trump's approval rating is hitting around 32%. What happens to an autocrat when they become this unpopular?

And what happens to all of those surrounding him when they are, you know, looks like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? Yeah. So you've hit on, so one of the things is they never take responsibility for their actions. And they have, by this time, many autocrats have bought into this propaganda that they are infallible, that they can do no wrong. And so they will never say they're sorry or admit failure or blame. So what's better? You throw other people under the bus.

So most autocrats are constantly reshuffling their guns. governments. It's really crazy. And one of the reasons I wrote Strongman was to like, to demystify this idea that autocrats are efficient. So like Mussolini made the trains run on time. Well, in reality, every four years, he totally reshuffled his cabinet. Right. So that happens. And we're seeing that. Because the people they put in are incompetent often to start with. And that's by design. It's by design. And why would somebody who wants to rule over, you know, in an autocratic dictatorial way, why would they want incompetent people?

What's the psychology behind that? Because they're threatened of people who are too competent, and they don't want people who have independent sources of power, independent networks. And so they did this from the very start where Tulsi Gabbard was put in there, in a director of national intelligence, with very few contacts in the intelligence. world so that she would be dependent on him or whoever is his trusted person. The same with Hegsef or the people have to be flawed so the leader has something over him or her.

And so you have these people to begin with who are not, who are set up to fail. And then when the autocrat inevitably creates crises, they don't know how to handle it. Look at Cash Patel. And so that's one thing. The other thing that autocrats do if they start sinking in the polls and they get really worried that something's going to happen to them electorally or otherwise is they go to war. They either deepen conflicts that they're already involved in instead of retreating, and Netanyahu has done this, or they start a war.

and then they get into worse trouble. And this is called Autocratic Backfire. And so February 1st I published an op-in the New York Times on Autocratic Backfire. And I had Mussolini, Putin, and Trump. And I said that I felt like I get these instincts that Trump was getting into the zone where he was going to do something to distract from all the messes he was creating at home. And I said, we should, you know, we should be prepared for some kind of military engagement. So there's patterns in the way that these people behave and think and the tragedies that they create for the nations they're supposed to be governing.

And I've noticed that Trump, you know, he kind of has loose lips. He can't ever quite keep anything close to the chest because he likes to grandstand. He likes to boast. And he would say stuff, and you can always get little breadcrumbs from what he says. He would say, well, you know, Beebe doesn't have an election because he's at war. How great is that? You don't have to have an election. He said the same about Zelensky.

They don't have to have an elections. And he like streamlines basically what his nefarious plans are. But this situation with the war, there's been rumors that, not rumors, I mean, pretty substantiated. The State Department said that we went to war at the request of Israel. And then you have Putin, who appears to have. something, you know, I don't know, Trump adores him or something, oh, compromise, who knows? Very deep tie.

Very deep tie. But Putin is helping Iran. And as I watched the whole thing, Ruth, I'm like, okay, you have this guy, Donald Trump, who doesn't really seem to care that much about America. And he's helping these other forces. And it just seems to me like his number one goal is self preservation. When you speak about the psychology behind autocrats and that being their North Star and all of their policy. It's pretty incredible. And it, and it starts actually with way before they get into office because regular politicians, if you have, if you're under investigation or you have like problems of whatever sort, you don't want to run for office because journalists will start poking around. But if you're an autocrat type and you want to be further an autocrat,

if you are under investigation, you feel compelled to run for office because the whole point is to get into power and then use the government, take over government to fix your problems. So here's a list, it's partial of the people who were under investigation when they ran for office, Netanyahu several times. Bear Lusconi three times, Trump three times, Putin was under investigation, and they got into office and look what happened. And immediately, like in Netanyahu, tried to do this judicial reform. And they always go for the judiciary because they need to get rid of their problems. It could be financial problems, could be legal problems. So it starts there with actually how they even get into office. An attack on the rule of law.

Yeah, yeah, because they are, they have legal problems or they're corrupt. And so they have to go against corruption. So that's that's the beginning of it. So recently over the weekend, there was the White House Correspondence Dinner. Of course, we have mental health crisis, gun crisis in the United States. And instead of coming out and speaking about this immediately, immediately he goes to the White House press room and says, I need, this is why I need that ballroom. And then you've got Lindsey Graham, who's jumped on board.

All of the MAGA influencers, it's almost like they had a coordinated thing where this is why this man needs this ballroom. And it seems that he is laser focused on the ballroom, the arch, and remodeling the White House. What's the psychology behind this? Do you think he's planning on camping out in there? Is this something that's unique to this type of ruler? It's so bizarre. It's bizarre, but it's predictable. So that's the next stage of the self-preservation.

So they get into power, and then they start doing things that cause problems at home. Look at Orban. He impoverished the nation while he became a billionaire and his cronies. And so discontent builds. Hardship, you know, falls upon the nation. And so the more they create problems, because remember, they never backtrack. Because the thing to understand is that autocrats are not. in office for the same reasons as other politicians.

They don't care about public welfare. They don't care if the population has hardship. They care about self-preservation. So inevitably, they get more paranoid, the longer they're in power, because more people hate them. The election might go badly. People do crazy things to try and get rid of them, as we've seen.

So they have safe spaces. And so these are people who are driven by fear. And you really can't, you know, overestimate the fact of fear. And it's why they puff themselves up with personality cults. I am omnipotent. I am infallible. And they're telling themselves this. So at a recent, it was a recent Trump speech.

And I don't remember the content, but I wrote on social media that he was self-soothing. It was like he was telling himself, as you say, he has no filter, that he was great. that everything was going to plan, even though that's not at all the case. And it could have been domestic, it could have been about the economy or Iran, who knows. But it was about him propping himself up. And then they create these inner sanctums, the cabinet officials who are sycophants. And so we've seen the ritual of when the officials meet. It's not to give him objective feedback that he desperately needs. And they all do this, Putin, and they all have their inner sanctums. Mussolini did it, Hitler. And

And so they're reinforcing his sense that he knows what he's doing, and they, you know, genuflect to him. They praise him. So instead of making him more secure, this makes him more insecure. And so they end up with these like Putin had his palaces. They have bunkers. Gaddafi had a huge compound underneath which he had sex slaves. You know, they have these spaces where they feel safe.

So the ballroom, I've been watching this for a develop for a long time. And the Washington Post just did like a they analyzed all his speeches for the last months. So we're at war like Americans are you know American lives are being lost, right? But the thing he's talked the most about is the ballroom because his ego is is he's projected like the ballroom is and the White House, which is his personally, right? He doesn't see it as the public's home that he's occupying temporarily. It's his. So his ego is fused with the White House. house and the ballroom. And so underneath the bunker is going to be a safe space so that when all of the mistakes he's making come back to haunt him, he has a place to be. Oh my God. It's really incredible. It's like his baby blanket. Yeah. And so Putin had Putin's palace. And one of the reasons that Putin went after Alexei Navalny is that he was an anti-corruption researcher, but he took it upon himself Navalny to research and document Putin's palace. and he made a film about it that showed the corruption,

showed the gold-plated toilets. Some of it is actually the same aesthetic, the gold, the marble, and Putin felt exposed. And so that made him all the more go after Navalny and eventually he hadn't killed. That's Putin and that's Russia. Right, right. This is the United States, but the psychology,

the need to have your safe space, which is somewhere you could go that must be secret for you and yet you're boasting about it is, is, the difference is that Trump boasts about everything. Yeah. Putin and others do it in secrecy, a little more secrecy. Yeah. Trump is telling us everything about it and he, because he has no filter very different than Putin, who is an intelligence officer. Right. Putin is like superversed in what not to say. Right. He measures each word. He still like this will damage Trump, his loose lips. Yes, because it alerts people to what he's doing and he sometimes he's soft launching things that are horrible.

Like maybe I should have a third term. Right. So it has a propagandistic function, but ultimately the corruption, the denial saying everything's going great, the Nobel Prize when we're at war. Because autocrats think that the people are stupid because they scorn people. You might even, if you're an autocrat, make an AI video of you crapping on people. Remember that? Right. Or post yourself as Jesus Christ.

Yeah, that shows what he really thinks of people. And so it doesn't cross his mind, apparently, to measure his words and be a little more circumspect, which is what other, I was going to say smarter, but he's very smart in his own way. So other autocrats have not boasted as much about their ballrooms and their things that are, you know, evidence of corruption. So you've been watching him closely as a professor and author, a student of all of this and now a teacher of all of this, an expert in this field. And you knew when he said, I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and my supporters would still support me. You knew immediately. So you've been watching him since. that time to now. And this Trump 2.0, the observations that you have, because for me, as the

layman, it really seems like he feels emboldened, that he feels like he's 10 foot tall and bulletproof, that he has, he's governing as though he will never face consequences. And our Supreme Court helped him, assisted him to fill that with the immunity. So what are your observations in this just over a year into the second term of the escalating behaviors of him. Yeah, he feels invincible and he has created a government full of people who mirror his values. So autocrats want you to be your worst self. And often they pick people who are flawed. So we talked before that they're inexperienced, that you would never pick those people.

Like a CEO wouldn't pick those people, but he needs to have those people there. And we talked about the loyalty part. But he needs people who are flawed so that he can further corrupt them. And Trump is very good at corrupting people and bringing them down to his level. Like Christy Noam shot her dog. And he thought, oh, that's perfect. She's perfect for this job. Yes.

Flawed people. So Kennedy, think of all the cabinet. Right. And he's also been collecting information. on people since he was a businessman, like from the 80s. That's what he does. And his mentors were Roy Cohn and Roger Stone, and they, it's their version of compromise. Okay.

So that is going on. So these are people who have been collaborators in his lawlessness. And so when Hegeseth went to Quantico and all those faces, those stony faces, weathered with experience of all of our U.S. commanders with so many years of professionalism they sat there and Hegeseth said that we are not going to abide by these old rules of engagement and then Stephen Miller went to law enforcement and said you know your hands are untied now so it's a liberation from any kind of humanitarian or ethical rules so I call this moral deregulation so there's

economic deregulation, which is going on. So all companies and corporations and big capital, they don't have to, you know, they can relax their protections of the workforce, they can plunder the environment. But moral deregulation, Trump is like the pied piper of this. Everyone must be their worst self so that you don't have to, this is what you meant when he said, I could shoot someone and my followers will love me for it that that the they could be biblical they could be ethical secular the injunctions against cheating people harming people killing innocent fishermen on boats whatever it is they you don't have to worry about those things anymore you can even reward and pardon people who stormed the capital um who were violent who attacked police officers there's

no bottom. So that's moral deregulation. And his partner at the beginning of this nightmare was Musk, who think similarly. So we gave him a place in government and said, go at it, just wreck everything. Because it's all about, that's back to fascism. It's like destruction. And Mussolini called it creative destruction. And you can be like that if you have no morals, you're amoral. So that's what we're face with. So I've been talking about moral collapse and the need for a renewal of morals. And like we need a political politics that foregrounds values. Yes. Like simple values that you learn used to learn in school. Right. You know like justice, equality, don't beat the other people up or there might be a consequence. Yeah. Golden rule.

What about what do you make of? I understand to an extent Trump recruited incompetent, immoral people to come work for him. I get that. That makes sense to me. What do you make of these tech oligarchs and other industry titans that before maybe, you know, that weren't really controversial, but when this guy gets in power and they have all the money, more money than he has, and you can, you know, business people, well, we can write out four years. It's his lame duck term. It's been so shocking to see Tim Cook of Apple, a gay man, you know, making a participation trophy in these award rituals. And you can tell Trump enjoys humiliating them because he said recently, I think it was a truth

social post. He said, I love having the CEO of Apple called it Kiss My Ass. He recently said this about Tim Cook, who now I think is going to be outgoing. Is this something that you see? and other autocracies where the wealthy also morally collapsed just as much as the aforementioned person he found that was already broken. Christy Noem and brought her and broke her even more. Is this a feature and not a bug? It is a feature and it's called the authoritarian bargain and all of them do it.

All the autocrats do it. It means bargains that you make with elites. It could be media elites, tech elites today, business elites, religious elites. And the bargain is it's like a pact, a deal, that I will give you lots of opportunities to make money and promote you and not stand in your way, not persecute you. In return, you have to be loyal to me. You could outwardly support me, but you must not criticize me. No matter what I say or do, no matter what happens. And these bargains, they happened under Musslini and under Mobutu.

They're just part of how it works. Yeah, Putin for sure. Think about the Russian Orthodox Church, which backs up Putin and backed him up even more when he went into Ukraine. That's their part of the bargain, right? And we have the evangelical church and Orthodox Jews, no matter what happens, they're there. So that's the religious. And so this is part of how autocracy works, these elites that prop up. So what you want to do, if you're trying to unseat through elections, you need something

called elite defection. You need elites to wake up, and they only do this sometimes in the old days if there was like being bombed by the allies. Or the economy starts to collapse. Yeah. And then they finally decide to come out of their cowardice and venal, you know, posture, and they will retract their support, right, for the state and for the leader. And sometimes they can put it to someone else in power, and then you have, what, like a palace coup, right?

But when there's a well-developed party system, because today autocrats don't kill off all the other parties and they keep elections. You want the elites to go over to the opposition. And that's very hard to do, but eventually it can happen. So J.D. Vance is by all means on paper. Somebody in traditional American politics, if we follow what the lineage is and how the torches are passed, would be the heir apparent and be the Republican nominee. I have noticed that Trump, in my opinion, is sending J.D. Vance out to set him up for failure. And here's some examples of my observations. He sent him to campaign with Victor Orban.

And of course, Victor Orban, you know, lost in a in a landslide. He sent him to Pakistan to negotiate this war that J.D. Vance at the table, and this was leaked from J.D. Vance's camp to the New York Times that everybody said, yes, yes, yes, except for Vance. Vance said no, because Vance is trying to position himself as, oh, no, I'm the anti-war can. I'm the anti-war candidate. Trump's like, off to Pakistan, you go. And then the, now this is my favorite, Ruth.

He's made him the fraud czar, the most fraudulent president in American history. And I just can't help but think he's like, got J.D. Vance in a headlock here saying, good luck, buddy. That he's sabotaging the alleged heir apparent of his, you know, whole. movement what is your take on that and watching the way he does Jady Vance it's part one of the question part two is the Catholic Church won't bend the knee and Jady Vance fancies himself a big Catholic and I just want to get your opinion on that but first talk about the succession and then Trump what I think is sabotaging that yes I agree and it that is in line with the autocratic playbook because

autocrats don't really have successors with the exception if it's a family dynasty, like in North Korea. Or they can have some kind, like in Brazil, Bolsonaro is sitting in jail for having done something similar to what Trump did. But now his sons, who are right-wing politicians, they're thinking they'll come back. In the Philippines, you know, you had the Marcos dictator and now Marcos Jr. Bon-Bong is there. So that can happen. But otherwise, they don't want,

They're terrified of successors. Do you hear Putin talking about a successor? Never. No. And in Turkey, Erdogan, he's president, and he used to be prime minister, and now he's gotten rid of the office of prime minister, because he doesn't want anybody close to him. It's him and the people, right?

And so they do these tricks. They're not really fooling anyone, because they can't stand to have anyone getting too much power. Now, luckily for Trump, Vance is a uniquely unlikeable. first then with like terrible instincts a hypocrite you know because he's evolved you know we all know that he used to say about trump and that now the thing about catholicism he doesn't seem to have very good instincts like taking on the pope really and and lecturing the pope right and saying also the his words he chooses his he's very smart in his in book way right and he chooses his words

carefully but issuing something that to many of us who study autocracy sounded like a veiled threat to the pope he said you should be careful the pope should be careful in choosing you know something like he should be careful in choosing his words what he says and that's like kind of how like mafia bosses talk yeah you better be careful he better watch what he's saying yeah it's not it's not a good PR strategy shall we say so um so there's all that but it is complicated because Because we all know that why is Vance there? He's a proxy for Peter Thiel and the wider tech community. Just remember, Peter Thiel bankrolled his Senate race and his businesses, Vance's private businesses.

So they have a long history. And these tech billionaires are on the offense right now. You saw that the head of Palantir, who Alex Carp, who keeps appearing in public in some kind of drug, seemingly drug state. Yeah. Why? I don't know. manifesto and Musk has been the Washington Post reported he has upped the amount of his posting on race issues

He's in some kind of manic seeming manic thing about posting about race to indoctrinate people about white supremacy so there's something going on with these people They're like panicked and maybe that's because they see that their guy is being set up to fail as you say Interesting Yeah, because I just published my latest essay on Lucid is about this techno-fascist and how they seem to, I said they're sharpening their swords. There's something, there's something going on. Like, why released your 22-point manifesto right now if you're telling you? It was nuts, said that they wanted the draft.

It was so incredibly, I agree with you. There is kind of some sort of shared psychosis going on with them right now. And Musk, what the Washington Post found is that in the last months, he's posted 850 times on race. like laser-focused saying things like great replacement theory that whites are a dying majority and and he's posted more than in these last months than in the preceding the in the preceding two years on the theme of race so there's some kind of let's say anxiety that's an underestimate of what's going on something is going on and i do think it's linked to i think you're right vance not doing very well shall we say in in certainly in public opinion and being under

about what that means for their whole enterprise. Yeah, because they made a huge investment into him. And Trump didn't want him, but he had to win or he was going to go to prison, Donald Trump, or face major, major consequences, had Kamala Harris won. And so they sent the tech money. That makes perfect sense because they do seem a lot crazier. Go ahead. And one thing.

And Vance has also, with the Catholicism issued, he's maneuvering himself into a space. like in between a rock and a hard place because of course he's one of the voices of white white christian supremacy that's the that's the ideological plank of this state and it's now seeped into foreign policy national security policy that's what it is white christian hegemony but and so he converts and he does this book but he's attacking the pope and a very loved beloved pope an activist pope as you read where peter till it was leaked totally told him that he thought this Pope was an offshoot of the Antichrist and to ignore him. That's right.

Which is insane that we have this billionaire Peter Thiel, whose side hustle is giving conferences about the Antichrist. I mean, this is just, if I saw it in a movie, I would be like, this can't be real and we're living it. That's why the Reverend Barber, he said it's a war on divinity itself. And I'm interpreting that not only in the religious sense, but just. just all that is good, all that is love, all that is justice in the world. And so the Pope becomes the target.

But this is not, so if Vance has to be, if the future of Maga is embedded with, in bed with white Christian nationalism, then Vance's stance is not helping. It's not helping. What's interesting, and this is just what I know from living in the Bible Belt, is white evangelicals, which or, you know, support Trump by I think it's 90%, they don't like Catholics and don't think they're real Christians. So that was a really bizarre calculation on Vance's part, in my opinion, like his political instincts aren't that great because I know from just growing up, it'd be like, well, you know, Catholics, they're not real Christians. We're the real Christians.

Like a Baptist friend or some friend would say that in school. Yes, and it's also the same. My mother's from Scotland and they're Presbyterian and there was a black sheep in the family and he converted to Catholicism and no one spoke to him. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. Okay, so this makes perfect sense. All of these tech guys that invested heavily are crashing out. Trump, in my opinion, with evidence looks like he is making sure any hopes that J.D. Vance has for being Mr. Maga reincarnated. That's not going to happen. And here's what everybody has to see. We've gone from the fight, fight, fight image, you know, a year, two years ago to this video here, Ruth. And I want you to watch this as we, okay, this is him last week in the Oval. And people are talking behind him. I mean, you can see his lip down. It looks like a stroke victim.

I mean, he's a senior citizen. And I don't mean to be ages, but this is not the commanding alpha male. And you'll see here in a second, he wakes up, kind of checks in on everything. And then he dozes right back. There he is, checking everybody out. And then he goes right back to sleep. So take me and the listener in on this. So strong man, toxic masculinity, fight, fight, fight.

Fast forward, fast forward, we're in a war, approval rating 32%. That is the current situation, the cancles, the makeup on the hands hiding the things. He recently had some sort of skin rash right here. Psychologically, is he aware? What happens to the cult historically? Take us what you think the imagery of this means. Well, two things stand out. One is that you saw there were people behind him and there was some of the court.

somebody gesticulating and talking. And they decided to completely ignore the sleeping. And they just carried on because that they're in denial. They're not in denial. They know exactly what's happening, but they can't acknowledge it. They can't wake him up. They can't acknowledge that he's not listening to them, that almost he's a figurehead just sleeping there because that would puncture the cult, because their job is to be subservient

to him. So if something happens, you just carry on, right? You just carry on. And it also reminds me of late communism in USSR where there were a series of leaders who were not very healthy. And there was all kinds of popular criminal. Everybody became a criminologist. Like today, his eyes are slightly less opened.

What does that mean? Because they were all, like, some of them were like half dead. And so that's, that's, there's that going on. But the role of the elite standing behind him is just to just barrel on and barrel forward and just ignore the fact what everyone sees. So it's like, it's like an extreme, it's an extreme example of how you have to lie for the leader. And the better you lie for the leader, the more your political career does well.

And that's why we have dozens of people in high office. This has never happened, who previously had on-air positions at Fox. It's not just Heggseth. Pam Bondi had an on-air position. Right. And she was Attorney General of Florida. Jean-Piro. There's dozens of them.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because they know how to tell untruths and look good while they do it. Camera-ready liars. Yeah, and that's why Hegg-Seth immediately put a makeup studio in the Pentagon. That was one of his first priorities because he was a fox. weekend host. So these people know how to ignore and just disassemble even if he's sleeping. The other thing that strikes me is that Trump woke up and he looked around and then he just

went back to sleep. Like, okay, nothing, he wasn't alarmed. This is interesting. If he fell asleep in an inappropriate time, your face would register some kind of alarm. Right. And you know the camera's on you right but he went back to sleep and I don't know fully what to make of that I think that he had he had no choice but to go back to sleep because he didn't do the opposite which most people would have done and they would have been embarrassed right but this is also like he's his own world he can even in a in a perverted way it's like a demonstration of his power he can sleep on camera and he's still there like he didn't have that

inner conscience to say, hey, I shouldn't be sleeping right now. I need to wake up because then he would be placed in a position of weakness. He's just going to sleep right on. Do those projections based on other autocracies you've studied when you start to see the strong man appear as frail and you start to see in real time their health failing, does that produce fissures in the cult bickering in the cabinet jockeying for does even though he looks you know asleep does that escalate the mania surrounding him it does but it can be uh in in classic one party dictatorships it can it's a dangerous time for the leader in mabutu who's in my book um he was a kleptocrat he was the biggest cleptocrat before kodafi and tell us what a kleptocrat is when somebody who officializes stealing from the state so he had

mansions he had his own Concord airplane with its own runway and the population was starving in the Congo okay and he he you know he was always like he did these things with the purging so there was a guy I talk about who he sent to jail then he made him a minister then he sent him to jail again it's like a constant chaos so he became after many many years of this very hated and he fell ill And this was the signal of people to act. So he left the country to get treatment. I forgot where he went.

Maybe Switzerland, the places dictators go. And that was it. He was forced into exile. So he showed his weakness. So when they show their weakness, that's why Putin is very guarded about his health, very guarded. And Putin disappears sometimes. And no one can know because that shows people. It's like a survivalist mentality, especially in Russia where people are falling out of windows.

Right. Or you go into the hospital and you never come out. So if that's survivalist, what is that that I just showed you? What is that just full display? I get to do whatever I want to do and nobody can stop me? Yeah. Flagrant entitlement? Yeah.

Yeah. And it works because the people behind. him and around him and on Fox News and are like active gaslighting yes they are choosing to ignore it and and saying that he is still the greatest leader in the world and ignoring completely well Trump told us and it was either 2015 or 2016 and he said don't believe your eyes and ears and so they're just deciding i'm not going to i'm not going to believe that trump is sleeping he's still the great leader and I'm going to message that or they turn just they turn you know any kind of adversity into a heroism and like he's a victim and so we have to

help him and that worked for a very long time they were the maxi pads on their ear at the R&C yeah yes that worked for a very long time but now he's sleeping and we're at war and the economy's tanking and American science and medicine are being are being sabotaged. They really are. And education. And people are waking up now. And there's fissures in the party. And I think that all of this is going to continue. So the sleeping is like a moment where remember that the elite bargain thing. It only works if the people around you keep saying, you know, the emperor has no clothes thing. That's when they refuse to repeat the lies anymore, then it can fall apart.

So this brings me to my final question, which is the media. And you remember two and a half years ago, Joe Biden was president and they were brutal on him, as they should be. I'm a believer that if you're going to run for the United States of America, you have to have thick skin, you have to be able to put up with comedians. Like I think Donald Trump is wholly, emotionally unfit for the job to be president. He's too thin-skinned and he likes being a victim too much. But when you think about the way the press, whether, you know, justifiably or not, went after Joe Biden, he chose to run for president. You're going to have a lot of shiny lights on you.

Any misstep, any nodding off. And then I see the disparity in the way this is covered. Fox News, if Joe Biden fell asleep like that in the middle of a war, I don't know that there's enough emergency rooms in New York that could resuscitate all of them. I mean, they would just completely go into overdrive. And so we saw in Hungary that Orban, you know, moved quickly to buy media companies. And we see Trump acolytes and supporters like Larry Ellison. He's bought CBS. Now he's bought TikTok.

Now he's buying CNN and on and on and on and on. And there was the 60-minute interview the other night right after the ordeal. ordeal at the White House Correspondents' Dinner so he could go pitch, you know, laser focus. We've got to get this ballroom built. There's reporting coming out now that that interview was 40 minutes long and they edited it down to 12 minutes. And you remember Trump famously sued CBS for deceptive editing in the Kamala Harris? Okay.

So this girl that I love, she's excellent online. It's called Decoding Fox News. Oh, yes. She's fabulous. And so she provides us all a wonderful service. And she watched the entire unedited version and talked about how deceptive the editing was. So if we don't have a mainstream media that doesn't, you know, like this guy is clearly unfit,

he's fallen asleep, somebody needs to give him another cookie, will him on down, you know, to his nap time or something, it's troubling to me, but then I just think about what Hungary did. So if you'll address that and then leave us with your so good, Ruth, about finding hope and how much you believe in the spirit of humanity, in the spirit of freedom. And so if you'll just leave us with your thoughts on all of that. Well, Hungary shows it's really interesting, the more you look into it because the way that Majar campaigned was designed to get around this trap that Orban had essentially completed a level of media capture, as it's called, when you have bought out, you know, had friends by or allies by. So in the preceding elections in 2018,

2022, the opposition candidates and their messages weren't even heard by people outside big cities. They, they, because all of the TV stations and radio stations refused to air them. They didn't give them any air time. So Majar did this thing, which I, at first I was like, why is he doing that? For two years, he went on this like, you remember what, what Mamdani did where he, he walked the length of Manhattan? Yeah. Madjad did this all over Hungary in rural areas. And he did a million step march.

And he went to like hundreds of small towns. and small cities. He went to almost all the parishes in Hungary. So this is why it took two years. And he presented himself in person to these people. And he held rallies, even small ones. And he just had this, he's in his 40s. So we had huge amounts of energy to do this. And guess what? It paid off because there's new data now about the voting. And every village or a town where he went in a rural area, you could map on who voted for him and it matched. So he showed up in person to get around the media block on him. Now, this is a very large country and you can't do that to that level. But that's a sense of hope. And the other thing, Hungary also and we also are meeting,

people don't like blatant corruption. They also don't like brutality. There had been things going on with education had been you know completely defunded there was did you know that the Department of Education equivalent in Hungary was moved to the in the Ministry of the Interior which is the police so the education now sat under the ages of the police and so there were like very repressive things that reminded some people of communism so they had they didn't want any more of this but it was it it's all the more notable and it shows that even in a climate of media capture you can prevail and in our country we have also this individualized media system like you yeah like creators and people who are

fighting the good fight who have huge followings yep substacks yep right i've got on over 200 000 and you know there's so many of us right and and and we could coordinate our messaging more if we We wanted to do that. But it's strength and diversity. And so that's something that no one can take away from us. And Trump is not likely to shut down all of our substacks. And so there are ways that we can get around this. We shouldn't feel fatalistic.

And it is dispiriting to see all the big media companies bought out and Barry Weiss and all of that. That's just, it's awful. But we are on the right side of history and no one can take away our ability to message for the things that we feel are important and to help people, to help to by speaking the truth about what's going on, instead of being like those men be, those white men standing behind Trump deciding to ignore that he's sleeping while we're at war. Yeah.

Yeah. The enabling of this is really one of the more fascinating components of it. I understand a singular crazy person. We all know crazy people. We all know narcissists. the enabling and the collaboration with all of this is still takes my breath away. Ruth, thank you so much for joining me today in studio in New York. I really appreciate it. And go follow Ruth on social media, Ruth Ben Guaute or go to Substac. And our substack is called

lucid. Thank you. How lucky are we viewer that we have an expert, a scholar in fascism, authoritarianism, educating us today. It's so therapeutic. Knowledge is therapeutic in the time of It truly is. It's always so great to speak with you. Thank you, Ruth.