The Bulwark Podcast - Ruth Ben-Ghiat: There Is No Alternative

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

Republicans can't get off the Trump highway to hell, but business and media elites are also cozying up to him in case he returns to power. Meanwhile, Trump's project to legalize crimes and delegitimize democracy continues. Ruth Ben-Ghiat joins Tim Miller today. show notes: Umberto Eco's essay on fascism Ruth's book, "Strongmen"

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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 Strong Men 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 Borg podcast before, but 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 Eco fan? Or what was it that led you to the study of fascism? Yeah, it's kind of strange because 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 that my town and towns around it, like famous ones, like Thomas Mann, the writer, and Arnold Schoenberg, composer. So the grandkids and kids of some of these people were around, and 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 going to study Germany and then somebody said I started grad school in 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 closest family member was like a 12-hour flight, thinking about people who had to flee from their homes and come sometimes halfway around the world.

And in fact, Strongman, a sub-theme 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 threat assessment conversations around here. And I'm always sort of pulled both ways 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 yellow, orange, red, homeland security threats, like how do you assess the degree of the threat, the biggest picture, And we'll kind of talk about some specifics. It can be hard, because like, if you think of authoritarian states today, like Viktor Orban's Hungary, he's been there since 2010. 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 6, they tried to accelerate history through a force, right? 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 you see something like an image, I've been on TV recently talking about this image of Biden on a pickup truck, 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 or 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 deleg 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 Berlusconi elements to them, 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 going to end? Like, you know, is it, are we really gonna have no more elections? That feels pretty unlikely. Is it possible? Sure. But what could it look like that are some examples of things that we've seen? I'm going to tell you an anecdote, 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. So Mussolini is 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 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 going to send him to jail. So as this happened, so he declares dictatorship, it's January 1925. And immediately the state starts sending out, you know, the squadras go, the black 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 La Scala 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 wonder when you interview people, 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, you know, rationalize, right? This isn't. Yeah. And it's like kind of the cliche line that this isn't going to happen here.

This won't happen here. But there's a reason that's cliche, right? Like it's a real feeling that people have, like that this can't happen here. Well, it's not just that it can't happen here, that it's also that it's not going to happen to me. A big picture, a thing I see happening, which I 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, the 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, et cetera, they took away ESG because they were being under attack. Now it's DEI because the race war is being fought 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 want to bring up two examples of that, that have just popped up in the last day. 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 Axios this morning? No, not this morning. We have a two siren article by the head of Axios, Jim Vande Hei, 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 works, 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 songs I mean this is just preposterous but the treatment of him right like that is part of this right there's some more serious examples of the accommodationist but right like that journalists you know now like mainstream journalists are thinking well he might win again every day we can't talk about the threat of Trump's fascism. Like some days we got to keep it 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, is that I started writing about Trump and company in 2015, 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 to threats on judges, I think everybody would find it unfortunately to be 100% 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 going to have a North Korea or, you know, Nazi style one party state. But the personality traits are the same. And that's why in Strongman, that's documented from every point, every sector of, you know, corruption. You didn't need to look at a Spotify

playlist 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 in 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. 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. And there are many things that are left out. I have one of my complaints always about the coverage of Trump is that, again, obviously, there are limited comparisons, like he didn't have women in sexual slavery, but he 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, right? Like he won already. We talked about this already. So we're not going to revisit it. We're not going to retell the stories. We're not going to contextualize policy discussions about women's rights or anything

by reminding people about some reservos and, you know, all the other women who made credible threats against him. I talk about that in the book, because what so that's like, you could say that Gaddafi, 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 Berlusconi and Trump, for example, there are these authoritarian personalities. And in general, they have a mania of control of bodies. Now that extends to locking people up, where their machismo is part of their brand, which is true with Berlusconi and also Duterte. But Berlusconi, he owned all the private TV networks in Italy. So he used,

I call them pipelines of bodies. Basically, these men go, they go into a side business gigs, businesses that allow them access to female bodies. So Berlusconi had TV networks and women would want to come on and become stars. but he also was interested in beauty pageants. Trump had Miss Universe. He had Trump models. There's various stories about the different types of models, some of them escorts. 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 2017. So when he came in as president, he still had it. And that I think is relevant. It is relevant. I want to get into the accommodations a little bit more. But now that we're down this path, Bill Kristol has put me on to the Echo, the You Are Fascism essay. And it is like, when you read it, we'll put it in the show notes, I encourage everyone to actually read it. It's not that dense of a document. And he,

you know, gives the characteristic traits of fascism. And some of them are not particularly relevant, but so many 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 Make America Great Again. Irrationalism is the third point. We could go on and on. But the 12th point to this is how the fascist mindset transitions itself to sexual matters, right? And he talks about machismo, disdain for women, and, you know, giving a lot of credence to power dynamics with regards to women. And so it ties directly to the strong man.

You are much more schooled in this than me, but you do see this across other fascistic aspiring leaders, this trend. You do. And basically, if we get into the authoritarian gender politics there, as I've analyzed it, it's a triad. Hyper-masculinity, where the leader and Duterte did this, also Bolsonaro did this, is boasting about their attraction to women, their sexual prowess sometimes. Certainly Duterte and Bolsonaro and Berlusconi especially boasted constantly about this. And that's one pillar, but 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 male elite, have freedoms they never dreamed of to plunder in women's bodies is one area. So you've got misogyny, you've got hyper-masculinity, 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 qaddafi early on he was a left-wing revolutionary he actually sorry the qaddafi homophobia thing is a little weird since he's so camp

i mean there's like uh there's sometimes a thin line as we we saw in that Ron DeSantis ad, a thin line between homoeroticism and homophobia. But anyway, sorry. Well, 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 hypermasculinity, homophobia, and misogyny, they work together in authoritarian conditions. And think of Viktor Orban, who banned gender studies in 2018. And then

2020, 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 contraception push that's happening. We had Charlie Kirk yesterday talking about how birth control screws up female brains. And that's part of the Project 2025 plan. That's all part of the same kind of control ethos. a couple times. I just wonder if you have any other thoughts on the comparisons there and the threats, 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 it's not going to be Hitler. We're not going to, but like Berlusconi is real. It's modern. And there are a lot of comparisons. I just wonder if there's anything else that stands out to you in that comp. I went to Italy, this is back in the 90s. As a student, I was finishing my degree in postdoc, early, early postdoc. 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 long comes Berlusconi, 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 Forza Italia, 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 and state GOP officials had either affiliations or sympathies with, you know, proud boys, oath keepers. 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 Giorgia Meloni 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? A history project. Yes. Yeah, I'm a historian. 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 normalizations.

And that's how I was able to see so early what Trump was doing. And so 2015, I wrote a piece about Bannon, like that his white nationalism was going to become a threat because he was in with Trump. And so even people who seem clownish or remote, they are very, very important for understanding what's happening to us today. Yeah, the parallel here, just listening to you talk about it, to me, as somebody that had been inside the Republican Party, is not that he brought in a new party into this is like the fascist party or something like that. But there is a direct parallel, which is the staffing.

Yes. Like the types of people. And so Trump can be a clownish front man, and he can have other businessmen. You hear this now, he wants the Treasury Secretary to be John Paulson 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 the Jeffrey Clark, the cash Patels, the Stephen Miller's like the idea that in a Marco Rubio administration, these people would have all been just totally cast aside in a back

corner somewhere or been working for some backbench 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, deplorable 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 in power that's right empowered them uh 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 worth selves. So even people who used to be

fairly law abiding, they have license and permission to do things they never dreamed they could do. QN, William Barr, 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 you saw I have Trump in 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 Mussolini's and the little Hitler's. And often these people are hated. Everyone still loves the Duce, they still love the

Fuhrer, but they hated these people because they were brutal. Actually, he's like what Hannah Arendt called the death 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 going to lead to a bad end for many, many people. Because 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 Capitol, the thugs, the militia members, all these people, and I'm going to include constitutional sheriffs, even though they're, these are just thugs who are lawless, and they need the lawless. The thugs now have their own, like, logos. They have their own. They have their own.

They have their own. They have their own. They have their own. They have their own. They have their own. They have their own. They have their own. They have their own.

They have their own. They have their own. They have their own. They have their own. They have their own. They have their own. They have their own. They have their own.

Yes. They have their own. Yes. And all of 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 peacetime don't have all this. And it makes no sense to have all these militias and the gun. It goes back to guns, of course. So we are different than other places.

And then you need the bureaucracy. And that's what Project 2025 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're vetting people politically, just like in an authoritarian regime, to make sure they have the right people. So there's going to 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 them to do. And the final is that you have the inner circle of the leader. And these are sycophants, 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, like an unscary, 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 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 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 going to have a place in power, but just are unwilling 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 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 circles or those levels. Yeah, I see this as 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 missed exit, is that these people, maybe on January 7th,

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 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. So 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 going to 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, he looks harmless. Well, he's not harmless to business. And this goes back to our point where people think not only is not going to be bad.

The economy also is not crushing it in Hungary right now either. No, it's a it's a disaster. It's a disaster. And Putin is only, you know, it's a kleptocracy. These places do not function. They're totally dysfunctional. And I tried to show that in my book that, you know, how Trump kept hiring and firing people and there was a 68% 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 exceptions. 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 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 just banded behind Ron DeSantis. Like they don't actually didn't actually need to go full bulwark, right? Like that would have been a possibility had they just convicted Donald Trump in February of 2021, 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 probably would have been worse for us. You know what I mean? But for the Republican Party's institution, if you're just looking at the Republican Party and say, yeah, it 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 then you can get into a situation that the party of Berlusconi 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 personality cult thing, which all of the Republicans, you know, 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 want to 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 going to be endorsing Biden or RFK Jr. 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 Karl Rove 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 democracy and a jewel of the Constitution. And what those people did when they violently attacked the Capitol 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 every one of 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 going to pardon those people because they're hostages no they're not they're thugs there were people some of them had automatic weapons at a hotel in Virginia hoping 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, yelling at the police, kill them, kill kill them all and so why trump has done this is beyond me if he had said you know what i trust our jury system i trust law enforcement anybody who assaulted the capitol 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 intent 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 is beyond me. Why is he sticking by them? It's beyond me. Ruth, educate Karl Rove. Answer that question. Answer that rhetorical for him.

Well, yeah, the why he's done it is to have an authoritarian takeover. 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 6th as a violent act and its conversion into 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 are running for their lives. Some of them, we have studies, right? It was 30 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 Karl Rove talk about it. It'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 2028 and the Republican Party and Supreme Court will go along with it on the Next Level podcast. People can go listen.

We had a very lengthy discussion about maybe JVL is a little authoritative in that claim. I certainly think it's possible. And I think the fact that it's possible is insane enough, right? And 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 2015 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 these strongmen is to be protected, allow themselves to protect themselves from jail. It's really simple. In fact,

regular politicians who have charges against them, investigations, they don't want to run for office. But strongmen, and you can add in Netanyahu, Putin, Berlusconi, 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, he said they're going to, you know, even project 25, these are the desk killers who are going to kill off the DOJ. They're going to 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. Yes. And he's going to legalize other people's crimes too. He's telling us that, right? He wants immunity. And so he has to stay there. Yes. And he's going to legalize other people's crimes too. He'll pardon them. Yeah. That's right. And let Putin does whatever he wants, etc. It's like global disaster, but he'll never leave because he can't leave. Otherwise, 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 will 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 will 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 20th, 2020. And I said that Trump's coup is not over. I felt like something was going to happen. And so that was like right before January 6. And then I had to turn in my book to the publisher in the late summer of 2020. 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 Benghialat, RBG, has the Substack newsletter, Lucid. I do hope you come back to the Bulwark podcast. It's not maybe the most uplifting space, but we have to have these conversations. And I'm happy. No, no, I'm happy that you are just as candid and as lucid as we

need in this moment. So thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. All right, we'll be back here tomorrow with the weekend Bulwark pod. We'll see y'all then. Peace. I was supposed to get there with the way that we're living today You talk lots about God, freedom comes from the car But that's not what this bitch wants, not what I want at all I want money, power, and glory I want money and all your power All your glory Hallelujah I wanna take you for all that you've got

I'm going to take them for all that they've got The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.