The Daily Beast Podcast - Why Trump's Ballroom Bunker Proves He's Terrified

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

See if your SSN is for sale right now. My sponsor Cloaked will tell you for free in 2 seconds here: https://cloaked.com/dailybeast ✅ #ad Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian and authoritarian expert speaks with Joanna Coles about whether America is already experiencing the early stages of autocracy, why Donald Trump's behavior follows patterns seen in strongmen throughout history, and what happens when leaders surround themselves with loyalists instead of truth-tellers. Drawing on decades of research, Ben-Ghiat explains why weakening leaders can become more dangerous, how propaganda, humiliation, corruption, and loyalty tests reinforce authoritarian power, and why wars and economic turmoil often accelerate a strongman's decline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The secret of strongmen is that they live in, fear. This is why they build their bunkers. And Trump's always talking about, you know, not only the ballroom, the bunker underneath, that's his safe space. No longer they're in power, the more paranoid they get. If you have surrounded yourself with people who will not tell you the truth if bad things occur, then you start to make bad decisions. They get outvoted or they lose power, create instability around them as in Russia. And so I think that Trump is on that trajectory now. I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast, and we have a riveting conversation

for you today with Dr. Ruth Ben Guette, who is a professor of history at NYU. She's also the author of the Substat newsletter called Lucid and the author of the book Strongmen, which looks at the particular phenomenon of outsized leaders, people like Putin and Xi Jinping and Mussolini and dare I say it, our own dear Donald Trump. Before we get into it, I'm just going to ask you, we've got 1,000 more subscriptions to get to before we get to 700,000 subscriptions. So please, because we are independent media,

we appreciate your support. Please press the subscription button if you haven't done already. And, well, I'm really excited to share this conversation with you because I often wake up in the morning as I explain to Dr. Ruth. And I'm like, are we in an autocracy? Everything still feels very normal to me. But I'm not living in Minnesota. I'm not downtown in L.A.

where ICE is crawling, looking for people to dispatch them to El Salvador. Anyway, let's get into it. We like to think our personal information is locked down, but our sponsor, cloaked, recently asked me to put my phone number into their site. And the results were a massive wake-up call right there on my screen. cloak uncovered that my actual social security number was fully exposed. It's proof of how broken the system is. Data brokers are quietly pocketing billions by selling our private details to spammers, stalkers and scammers. Most privacy tools only try to clean up your data after it's already leaked.

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security scan. It takes just two seconds to find out if your SSN is actively being bought and sold. Don't wait until it's too late. Visit cloaked.com slash daily beast today to get your free scan and take 30% off any plan. Dr. Ruth, I am really struck by how I get up in the morning. I get my cappuccino, I stride to work or I ride my city bike. Everything feels very similar to how it felt when Joe Biden was president. I was asking a friend the other day at the Yankees game. I was sort of struck looking around the stadium and I said, are we actually in an autocracy? And his point was, don't be ridiculous. You couldn't even ask that question out loud if we were actually in an autocracy. And then other people, you know, other friends are kind of feeling hysterical about it.

Is this actually what an autocracy feels like, the confusion about it? Autocracies happen in stages unless there's a coup. And there are still coups in the world. And in a coup, as a friend of mine who lived through a coup in Uruguay said, he left his house in the morning in a democracy and he came back to a dictatorship the same day. Wow. But he was lucky to come back at all. So they happen over time.

And a lot of the, like if we take Vladimir Putin, he's been there for 26 years. Orban was there for 16 years. And so we've had Trump around for 10 years on and off. But he has done a huge amount in just 18 months or so. But all the same, it doesn't feel for your daily life, depending on who you are. in America. If you're an immigrant, you're living in fear, you're not going out as much, you could find yourself deported to a third country. And so the scale of illegal things that are going on is enormous. And in fact, if you look comparatively at the first year of this administration

versus the first year of Putin or Orban or Erdogan in Turkey, the changes are much more rapid. And yet, daily life for many, many people can go on. And we don't have a one-party state. We don't have a crackdown on media that's total. Otherwise, we wouldn't be sitting here. I would certainly be in jail, like many more people who speak out. So autocrats use different methods also today. They sue you.

They rely on their thugs to give you death threats. And so the methods are also different. And if we're working with an old-fashioned view of autocracy, it's not going to look the same. Okay. And certainly Donald Trump has sued the press. And I totally take your point that if I were an immigrant living in Minnesota, I'm sure I would feel completely different about that. Nevertheless, the press seems more robust than ever. And interestingly, the Murdoch press that you would think would be supporting Trump a lot of the time is not Wallst or.

Street Journal came up with the birthday letters. ABC and NBC refused to show the president's speech last week, moaning that he'd actually won the 2020 election when we know factually he did not win the 2020 election. So is Trump effective as an autocrat? He's highly effective given that he's only been in office for 16 months because, again, it takes years for people to do the crackdowns that we now associate with autocracy. If you look at the very first years of Putin, we would be in 2001. The press was not completely muzzled, nor in Turkey. And so he's managed to do a lot. He's silenced a lot of people, or he's shaken down networks so that many people who were the biggest critics, such as Jim Acosta at CNN, they're no longer there. But Jim Acosta's on substanti?

I mean, Jim Acosta is even more Jim Acosta in a way. Yes. So that is something that is new, the creator industry. And that is a huge challenge for autocrats all over the world. Well, that's interesting because you're also on substack. I'm on substack. Lucid is your newsletter, which is excellent and I really recommend it to people. And I started it after January 6th in 2021.

And I built it up over five years. but this explosion of the creator economy, not just substacks, but TikTok and all the platforms, it poses a challenge because you can't shut down everybody. You can't shut down all the voices. And so in Turkey, Erdogan has had to resort to what he calls insult suits. And 160,000 Turkish people from fruit vendors to former beauty queens have been sued. And so it wastes your time, it wastes your money. You have to go to court.

There's a trial sometimes. And he's done 160,000 of them because that's how he's trying to deal with social media enabling people. And in Turkey, they sometimes shut down platforms because they're quite advanced as an autocracy. We're not like that yet. And maybe we'll never be. And so Trump has not been able in 18 months to operate a full media capture and probably never. and probably never will be able to. He's lost so much popularity.

He's in a tenuous situation, a difficult situation. So let me ask you something, because I was also thinking as I was looking forward to this conversation. You know, there's YouTube, there's Facebook, there's X, TikTok, all of whom, or all of which are owned by people who are sitting around the tech dinner with Donald Trump. So Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook slash meta, which also, you know, overseas,

which owns Instagram and WhatsApp. You've got Sergey Brim was sitting there with his MAGA girlfriend who owns, you know, YouTube via Google or via alphabet. You've got Elon Musk who now owns X and you've got Larry Ellison who Trump, in fact, basically sold TikTok to. if Trump were to say to them, okay guys, you've got to close these platforms down.

There's too much anti-Trump stuff on them. What do you think would happen in a situation like that? So he wouldn't say to close them down because X in particular has been re-engineered by Musk to be a very effective far-right platform of radicalization for people. So he didn't want them to be closed down. So he wants to use them for his own purposes. And so it's very easy to retool the algorithm. I've seen a change.

I used to get hundreds of thousands or half a million views on my things on X. And now, you know, with some exceptions, it can be like 10,000. So they redo the algorithm to kind of minimize certain voices. And so that way they don't, that's enough to make sure that the opposing message isn't heard by as many people. And then some people, many people got off-ex because it's hostile environment for many people. But they don't want to close it down. And Donald Trump is one of the most skillful propagandists in history. He truly is. And so he is of the attitude that the more engagement, the better. And he's not interested in being liked. He doesn't

like being unpopular because it might hurt his legitimacy, but he's not interested in closing down avenues that are good for his engagement and X is one. And it's far better. And that's what happens today. You don't shut things down. This is what Orban did. And Modi is doing this in India. you have oligarchs and friends and billionaires by the platforms, get rid of the worst critics, and keep a middling, a semblance of plurality, but in fact it's skewed to reflect the interests that the leader, the ally of the oligarchs,

wants the coverage to have. So you don't need to shut things down. Right, you just manipulate them. You just have the owners manipulate them. That's right. So in fact, you know, if it's something that's outright, somebody who's an outright critic, so Putin early on in the first years, he, but he had, you know, somebody buy out a big TV station. And then it became, it went from an opposition to a friend of the regime. And so that's what you do, rather than just close these giant platforms, which are centers of propaganda for you. doesn't make sense to close them. The Hulu original series Furious is coming to Disney Plus. Starring Emmy Rossum, Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer.

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He's in a war that he's losing. The economy's a mess. People are seeing the cost of the war at the gas pump. Does that make him more dangerous or less dangerous? So we're living through something extremely interesting in history because we're living through it in an accelerated fashion. Before I said that he has managed to do more lawless and repressive things in 18 months than most people we consider established autocrats today in their first 18 months. But he's also managed to immerse himself in this process I call autocratic backfire. Autocratic backfire.

Yes. What is that? So when, usually it happens over time. But Trump is so extreme that he's doing it all very quickly. Is he extreme even for a strongman? Yeah. Yes, he is in many ways. Okay.

Yes. And so they are megalomaniacs. Many of them are narcissists, some sociopaths. And they have a constant need to feed their ego because they are weak and fragile people. The secret of strongmen is that they live in fear. This is why they build their bunkers. And Trump's always talking about, you know, not only the ballroom where people can adulate him and you can get money,

but the bunker underneath, that's his safe space. And he's talking about the military hospital. And there are going to be places where snipers can shoot people. And he's always worried about being hunted. When the Supreme Leader of Iran was killed, he said, I got him before he could get me. And this, the hunt or be hunted is the mentality of the strong man. But to be fair, Donald Trump has had several attempts on his life. I mean, the most dramatic being Butler, Pennsylvania. But if I were Donald Trump, I feel like you can cut him a break on that

because he's genuinely been the target of assassination attempt. Yes, of course, of course. And they all are. Putin, many, many autocrats hide them. they can. Putin's had of six or seven at least. Putin's had six or seven attempts on his life. Yes. Yeah. And they don't want that to be spread. And of course, what I mean is not as concretely, they are interested in self-preservation more generally. Not just, of course, they're interested in keeping themselves safe, of course. They have to be like everybody else and especially in their positions. But the strongman mentality is they're always looking out for number one, which is them.

Right. And this is why they create what are called these like inner sanctums around themselves, which are full of sycophants, family members. In Lucid, my substack, I have several articles about sons-in-law. There's a whole category, a subset of sons-in-law who are part of this intersanktum, who can keep their secrets because they're family, their tasks with, often with corrupt deals. And so over time, if you only have sycophants around you

and everybody's subjected to loyalty tests constantly, you don't have what every manager knows is essential, which is objective feedback on your actions. Right. They're not interested in objective feedback. They want to be agilated. So we've all seen the cabinet meetings where everybody goes round like it's North Korea and says, oh, great Trump is.

And he requires that. It's also why in other countries there are purges, like Xi Jinping is constantly purging people. Right. You see those people sitting on the dais and suddenly someone comes along and literally takes them away, right? Terrifying. Right.

Because they get paranoid. And the longer they're in power, the more paranoid they get. That's one of the paradoxes. The more power they amass, the more afraid they are of somebody coming to. take it away or internal plotting palace coups, this kind of thing. So but if you have surrounded yourself with people who will not tell you the truth if bad things occur, then you start to make bad decisions. Now in our case, the tariffs, the shakedowns, so these had bad economic effects.

And so that would lead another kind of leader to course correct. okay, I made a mistake. Didn't work. We'll do something else. Strong men never course correct. They barrel down even more. Right. So they double down.

They double down. That's what they do. And the more they fear inside that they're looking like they're fallible rather than infallible, right? The more they feel they have to do what they want to do. And they start believing their own propaganda because there's always sycophon. religious people who tell them they're in office by the will of God. All of them have this, some form of this. And Trump has evangelicals, Orthodox Jews. You're in office by the will of God. Everything you do is guided, you know, by destiny. And they start to believe it. And so I wrote an op-ed

for the New York Times that was published February 1st about autocratic backfire. I had Mussolini, Putin, and Trump. And I talked about the first two who got into wars that in the first case went very badly and Putin's not going well and I said that Trump was getting into the zone as his popularity tanks as he gets more desperate and I warned people that he could start in he could have some kind of military adventure and and then we had Iran right and so war is something they do when they're in this zone because they feel like they want to prove themselves to history. They're going to do something world historical.

Putin's going to restore the Russian Empire. And then it goes badly, and they, often that's the end of them in various ways. They get outvoted or they lose power, create instability around them as in Russia. And so I think that Trump is on that trajectory now. Right. So we've got both Putin and Trump who started a war that they thought would be over quickly. They both came up against smaller countries for whom the war was existential and have proved to be much tougher opponents than they anticipated. Is that because they've just had bad advice around them or it's because they thought that they, I mean, almost by force of personality could make this.

work for them. Putin's not going to be voted out. So do you think the war is the thing that pushes Trump over the edge and he does get voted out? Or do you think that this is the moment that he cracks down and thinks, I'm not going to be voted out, I'm going to rig the system? I think that the war will not be the cause. It's the collective effect of everything he's been doing from the tariffs to the ice militarized activities, which we're not talking about how local commerce in the places that they are still today, it's been terrible for small business.

There's an economic effect of these things. And then him changing his mind every five minutes, falling asleep on television, not caring if he falls asleep, actually. just the incompetence is often what what wakes people up. Even people who had bought into the Trump mythology, many of them are starting to see that this isn't, this isn't what they were promised.

Look at farmers. Right. And the other thing, Trump is a little bit different than other autocrats is that he's more truthful about not caring about people. Right. I mean, a crazy, right, a crazy facts about him. He tells people he doesn't care about them. He campaigned on this. There are a couple of quotes where he went during the campaign. He was in Iowa for the caucus and it was like sub-zero temperatures and he was worried people wouldn't come out in caucus for him.

And so he said, if you're ill and you come out and vote for me and then you pass away, it'll be worth it. Was he saying that as a joke, though? No, there's a whole, I have a file of a digital file of all these things. And, and there are, you know, autocrats like, I mean, people like Idi Amin and Gaddafi, they always say things like some people have to die. It's just how it is. They don't care about human life. And Trump, Trump doesn't really care if you live or die. He, he's not, he doesn't have the quote correct right now when we have service members dying. He doesn't have any empathy for others. And in this, he's like all the strongmen have ever studied. He only cares about himself. They're damaged people. And when damaged

people come to power, especially a country as important internationally as the United States, it's a tragedy. It becomes a collective tragedy. But he doesn't have the right empathetic. responses, he breaks the mold because he doesn't care. Yeah, we saw on Saturday when three American Service people were killed that he was raising money for the My Pillow guy. Yes. And he's sort of like, it's sad, it's sad, which is his sort of stop response to anything that is genuinely sad and awful and a consequence of a war he started with no ability to get out of. Can we go back to the son-in-law for a moment because the Jared Kushner and the Steve Whitkoff of it all dispatching them across the world to sort of in theory resolve the irresolvable. Does he actually believe they can get

the job done? Does he have such little respect for previous administrations where international diplomacy is something that all presidents have used. I mean, why does he think that Jared Kushner and Steve Wichkhov can resolve the Russia-Ukraine war can resolve Iran and get Gaza rebuilt? Because what happens with strongmen to different degrees, but it's happening a lot in this case, is the privatization of policy. Not only that everything is a deal for you and your cronies, and that's where the loyalty tests come in, in donors. But you have trusted people who take over policy. They're not interested in career diplomats.

And when Pete Hegeseth said, we negotiate with bombs, he meant it. They're not interested in the craft of diplomacy, because diplomacy is when you sit down with your adversary and at least you make a show of respecting differences and coming to a solution. That's not what Trump and company are interested in. So often people who work with empirical truths like diplomats and they're regional experts, they are sidelined. And who comes in are people from the inner sanctum? And it's very interesting.

So I mentioned cronies, officials who are chosen because they're a little bit incompetent and they're fanatics. and then the leader can control them. And members of the family, but also friends from the old days. And Putin had people from St. Petersburg in his inner sanctum. Which is where he was deputy mayor. That's right. So these are people who go way back.

And Trump comes from real estate as well as reality TV. And so who's there? We cough. And so I see these patterns that I've been studying for many years. repeated. But it's devastating because what happens is that you have people tasked with very sensitive delicate negotiations that require a lot of knowledge about the culture and the players. And so they don't do well because they're not equipped. And so that's what happens here with sending in Kushner. And then Kushner is there, we know, from very good reporting, to make his own deal.

to make money. And so I actually, I wrote this piece about Sons-in-Law and about Kushner in particular, recently in Lucid. I think that the negotiations were a side job. The focus is making money and doing deals. The negotiations on behalf of the United States were the side job. Putin is reputedly the richest man in the world. Donald Trump, as, you know, as we know, made at least two and a half billion dollars and probably a lot more just in his first 16, 17 months in office. How important is the grift and the money here for strong one? It's everything. And in fact, people who do comparative autocracy studies say that the corruption in the first 18 months is off the charts. it surpasses actually anything.

Early Putin, after coups, the devastation to transparency, accountability, anything to do with conflicts of interest. They're not interested in conflicts of interest. These are quaint democratic notions. And so they are there as predators to kind of to seize whatever they can, including our tax dollars. So you have to look at it from the autocratic point. of view, including kleptocracies like Russia. So tax dollars and any public agencies and public funds, they see them as something they can prey upon and use and turn to their own devices and spirit off used to be Swiss bank accounts and now it's offshore financial areas. And so we've already

seen Trump starting to do things with tax dollars and moving them here to pet projects. And we saw him with his $1.8 billion slush fund that he wanted, right, to the weaponization of the DOJ. And in Russia where it's institutionalized for many years, and that's why we call Russia a kleptocracy, gaspram, because gas and fossil fuels are the lubricants of the kleptocracy in Russia, gaspom is the big conglomerate that's public, and it's been sacked for years and years. There are a couple of really good books on this, and I have stuff. I have statistics in strongmen. It was sacked by Putin and his cronies.

It was deprived of money, and then the money was sent off to offshore financial accounts. And so you literally prey upon the economy. The other thing that autocrats do is that they shake down private businesses. Now, Putin has done this very explicitly. One out of six Russian businesses had had some kind of hassle by 2019. What Trump's doing is more of a shakedown, a threat. He's not actually going after them yet. But he threatens them.

He has different ways of getting their loyalty, which is also why you see Tim Cook and all the big, big ones. But this is happening in an established kleptocracy. It happens to any kind of prosperous business. And do people care? I mean, Trump is, you know, you said he's got no empathy and he doesn't care about people. He also says that people don't care about his own grift. You know, he's openly said people don't care. I realize I could take this money.

Do you think that's true? It is not true. And there are some very interesting studies now about, because we hear all about the march of autocracy and how skill for these guys are. we're not hearing about the fact we're living through a global renaissance of protest, mostly nonviolent, all over the world. People are, you know, demonstrating and sometimes pushing out established elites, forcing people to resign. And one of the main issues we know from studies now is corruption, blatant corruption,

deal-making. The latest example, Albania, they call it the full-excus, Mingo Revolution. And we started and there's Kushner again. And so it ignited a popular protest. And it's the biggest protest since the fall of communism. And this is happening many places. Hungary. And this was over Ivanka and Jared's discovery of an island just off the coast of Albania that they want to turn into a spa resort. Yes. And so it has environmental things. It's about foreigners coming in and wrecking the natural heritage. It's about the complicity of Albanian authorities with these foreign grifters. And so people want a different kind of leadership. They don't want

corruption. So corruption is one factor. Economic hardship that comes from a corrupt society is another. And the third is interesting. It's when a government is not only really brutal and starts using violence, but also uncaring just doesn't really care what happens to its people. And we're seeing this in the United States too. So these three things, I think, are coming together in the United States. That's why we see an uptick in protest and Democrats are winning their elections. It really isn't tenable. And so I don't think they will try and fix the election system, the MAGA and Trump,

because they're desperate, but I see a trajectory for defeat. Okay, well, that will give a lot of hope to people who are listening and watching this. So if you think about the oligarchy in America, how expedient do you think they are in terms of fawning over Donald Trump? I mean, because Trump appears to have no loyalty. He obviously demands loyalty. and we've seen slavish performances of it. Do you think there is a moment where he could turn on people? They all know he could turn on them. If there's a big ask and they refuse to grant it.

But they've also gotten insurance. That's the way I like to buy. I like to put it that way. They've gotten insurance by fawning over him when it most mattered at the beginning. showing up with him, coming to his events, pledging fealty with all their power. And the fact that they actually wouldn't perhaps have needed to do that because they're billionaires.

Some of them are, you know, they're immensely wealthy and powerful. And yet they did it anyway. That sent a lesson to the smaller people because autocrats like to set, it's called setting an example. And it's done both with punishment, but also with flattery. And lesser people, in the sense of power, they see, well, gee, if he's going after X, he's going to go after me too. And so autocrats like to create situations where you're being in advance. And you're also keeping your head down, all these phrases for not resisting, even when things start getting worse and worse and worse, the economy's getting worse.

And I often say that would managers tolerate and CEOs, would they tolerate somebody who behaved like Trump or had the history of Trump in their own corporations, maybe a few, but most would not? Or the end of the things that are happening to the U.S. military, where women and people of color are no longer being promoted, where Hexas saying they have to take testosterone, this kind of, you know, raging machismo, that's not really good for business.

And it's not good for military operational effectiveness. It's just not good for anything. And yet they're doing it anyway because they're ideological fanatics. So business people are watching all this. And honestly, most of them are really hypocrites because they wouldn't tolerate it in their own backyards, but they're staying silent as the country pays a price. I'm pretty upset about that. So you think business leaders should have spoken out more? Yeah, and their junctures, this is one, where they need to speak out. They have a lot of pull. They're respected, and they have to have a civic

conscience. You know, they have a conscience of perhaps taking care of their own people, maybe in their communities, if they're located, you know, whatever city they're in, they give to the Little League, but what about the country? Is it, is it, we're just supposed to sit, stay silent as one after the other of our rule of law is destroyed? We go and kidnap foreign heads of state. He's still, I don't like Maduro. Oh, he's a horrible dictator. You know, the things that we're doing every day, sending innocent people to sit in a gulah. in El Salvador. It's, you know, there are many, many things that people can decide to ignore because, as you said,

the beginning of our conversation, we get up, we have our cappuccinos, we go to yoga, and it's not affecting us. But the rule of autocracy is that sooner or later, the net is widened. Now they're starting with communists, the old Antifa. They've got lists. and so it may start with immigrants and LGBTQ people, but more and more people over time are going to be affected and you will start to know somebody who has been affected.

So Victor Orban was replaced by someone who'd been in his own party, Peter Magar. How does Trump get replaced? Yeah, that's a very interesting question. Because another measure of Trump being autocratic in his temperament and inclinations is that you're not really supposed to talk about successors. Nobody talks about Putin's successor. Otherwise, you fall out of a window, right? And J.D. Vance, luckily for the country, is so unlikable and has actually very bad, you know, communication skills.

and timing, you know, you come out as Catholic and then you insult the Pope. He's always getting into... So you kill the Pope. Such messaging. He's getting into such messes. Right. So is it Marco Rubio, who's now doing his best to step into the shoe of the far-right leader who's going to clean up the world from communism?

But really, Trump can only see himself in power. And so he's not really going to support anybody else. And this is where the machismo that you talked about is really important because all of these, it's why I call my book Strongman. And I actually put in a chapter on machismo because it's so important. They are built up to think they're infallible, they're omnipotent. They can do whatever they want. Trump tells us all the time he can do whatever he wants.

And so they buy into the propaganda that said that only they can rule the nation. No one else is qualified. So there can't be a successor. Even if you're in a system that's not a dictatorship and has elections, you notice that there isn't talk about, much talk about a successor. And the other complication, which is very different from Hungary, is that we have a bipartisan system. So the people who are disaffected with the Republican Party don't have anywhere to go. Right? Petra Maggiar, they can start their own parties. Autocrats do that too, like Buckele and El Salvador, he started his own party,

he called it the new party, literally. And here they have nowhere to go. It's like fossilized our system. And so there's no dynamism. And that also makes it harder to have successors. come forth because they would have to come forth within the Republican Party and then they're stuck with Trump's loyalty demands and he's going to try and own them and probably humiliate them as he does still with Marco Rubio.

Well, let's talk about humiliation because you talk about that in Strong Men. Humiliation as a management tool effectively. Can you talk to that? Yeah. So anybody, so we, so we unfortunately for the countries that have are afflicted with these people, these are damaged people who get pleasure from humiliating people because it makes them feel important. It's actually not about the person being humiliated. It's about them. They have like a need to do this. And so that's why they do it, they do it in private, but they especially do it in public. The best is if you do it on camera and you take someone who thinks they've served you well and then you humiliate them. You take them down so that you stand above and everyone else has to fawn you.

And you humiliate one to serve as a lesson to the others to not get out of line. You can sort of see that around the cabinet table that everybody's sort of avoiding his eye because they don't want to be the subject of his random thoughts or possibly humiliation. when Vlogimir Zelensky visited the White House earlier this year and Trump humiliated him and then J.D. Vance weighed in on top of the humiliation. Was that a net positive for Trump? Does that humiliation that he inflicted, I understand how it might build him up in the moment, but in the longer term, did that serve him well? It depends if you're in part of Maga and you've been brainwashed to hate Ukraine and hate Zelensky, who's supposed to be a Nazi and all Ukrainians are Nazis. They used every trick, right? Then you thought this was great.

It was great theater. It was great spectacle, right? And he did it against the background of his redone White House that looks a lot like Putin's palace, actually, the white and the gold. And if you were not Maga, you found this rather disgusting. And Zelensky being a performer in his past was the best equipped to get through this and not lose his dignity. It's very hard in such situations, but he knows how because he was on stage for years. And in that, he's like Trump. It's the only way he's like Trump.

They are performers. And the fact that Vance was doing it too was that he was modeling the behaviors on this great world stage that Trump would approve of. Right. So what happens is, have you seen how many times some on important occasions, the Maga sycophants, the officials, they wear the red tie, they wear Trump's a version of Trump's uniform? Right, right. It's Brioni sued and his Thai. So it's also that behaviors that the leader approves of, which is being brutish. Think about Hegsseth.

It was always brutish. But now he celebrates being brutish. And that's how you keep your status in the party is to become a mini-Trump. And so during both in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, people talked about mini-Hitlers and mini-Musilinis. and these were like local officials, and they were hated by people because they were brutal and they were like laughable in their attempts to imitate the leader. And so we see that happening as well. So although there are many people who are not personally affected, especially if they're not

political, and they're like, there's nothing going on, it's fine. there are cultural changes for gender, for behavior in the leadership class too, that have far-reaching consequences. We're really early in this, and I can just keep repeating. A lot has been done in 18 months to wreck our institutions. It's very rare that somebody goes after science to wreck science. that's a whole other conversation. That's very rare that you come in and you instantly wreck something that gave such prestige and prosperity to the nation. And what's the short answer to that?

Because I'd love to have you back and we should talk about specific institutions he's gone after. And I hadn't thought of it in terms that you've just presented it. But why would he do that? What is in it for him possibly to wreck America's reputation as, you know, at the apex of science research? I think, and I wrote a series of essays in Lucid, right when he came in in 2025, I think he wants to wreck America as a democracy.

He wants to completely wreck it in every way. And it's a predator and wreck the institutions. And he said it in a 2024 campaign speech. he was going to make autocrats do great. So America has to go down so that Putin and she and North Korea and they can prosper. And I really think that there's an intention here to just bring us to our knees.

And do you think that's because they have something on Trump? Or like what could possibly be his motivation for not building up America? as the biggest, so that he's the biggest of all strong men? I think that first, as Bannon, I was, you know, always used to say, first you destroy and then you create, so the destruction of the administrative state. But I think that Trump long ago internalized ideas about geopolitics and statehood that are autocratic.

And there is something with Putin. We don't know what it is. But that's a specific thing. Trump's worldview, he doesn't like democracy. He likes strongman rule. And so it's as though if you look at all the damage that's been done to institutions and to everything that brought us greatness, they've gone after these things. And it's extremely sad.

Okay, I'm now fleeing from the office. Convinced we're living in an autocracy. I would love you to come back and talk to us about the dismantling of space. specific institutions, the Department of Justice, the scientific research, America's elite universities that have hitherto, you know, drawn talent from all over the world. I think it's so hard for people to imagine why anybody would want to tear their country down, even if it is in theory to rebuild it as a mirror of them. Final question, is it too late? No, I don't think it's too late because the rapidity with which he's done all these depressing

things we've been talking about is why there's a mobilization to, that's why Democrats are winning in places they don't normally win. That's why his polls are down. That's why the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal is publishing op-eds that are elected. against his election denial. Even Fox News, which is the propaganda, de facto channel of the state channel, is dissenting more. And so I think he's on a trajectory to failure because he has been too extreme and done too many things that affect too many people adversely.

And if you were going to give one word of advice to the Democrats as they barrel towards the midterms, what would it be? What's the most effective way to impact someone like Donald Trump, other than getting out the vote, but in terms of putting him on the back foot? It's hard to put him on the back foot because he's shameless. So rather than focusing on him, we have to focus on the election, actually. And it has to be, as happened in Hungary, and overwhelming turnout, so overwhelming that any of their machinations about it being rigged won't hold up. Right, so too big to rig.

Yes. Dr. Ruth, thank you so much for coming to talk to us. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. I can't recommend Ruth's newsletter Lucid on Substack more highly and also her book Strongmen, which I confess I haven't finished. I'm about halfway through, but I particularly found interesting

the way she breaks down how strong men leaders and in particular Donald Trump uses humiliation as a tool to silence the people around him or cow the people around him. Anyway, write and leave us a comment or call our telephone number

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