Ruth Ben-Ghiat

So that would be a problem.

And there is a pattern where I wrote a piece for the New York Times recently about autocratic backfire, as I call it, where these leaders, they do a lot of bad things.

They surround themselves with sycophants and sons-in-law and people who just praise them.

And they start to believe their own hype, that they're infallible, that everything they're doing is great.

And then they make these unforced errors and they become more unpopular.

But when there's reaction, like we're seeing in Minneapolis and many other places, the sports world is waking up, things are going on to resist, to push back.

Instead of backing off, they double down.

And that's when, obviously, they're more dangerous.

And so, unfortunately, personalities like Trump's and the people around him, the Miller, Russ Vought, they don't back down.

They become more aggressive.

And that doesn't mean that we won't prevail, because resistance remains.

But that's a kind of, so it's death by a thousand cuts, then you can have a big thing happen in response to popular opposition.

They can, and it depends.

There's a lot.

They keep their personality cults going, and obviously after they're dead, they have people who are doing that.

Like even in Chile, the guy, José Antonio Kast, who got elected as president, he's an open Pinochet apologist.

Pinochet left.

He was doing experiments with neoliberal economics, the Chicago Boys, and it was a disaster.

And the military, it was a military dictatorship, and thousands of military officers were prosecuted after he left.

So it was a total disaster.