Ruth Ben-Ghiat

And yet, there are people like the current president who say, oh, Pinochet would have voted for me because I'm for law and order.

And so we have to be very attentive to the way that

today, there's movements to alter, to rewrite the historical memory of these dictatorships.

It's happening in Argentina with Millet.

There's all kinds of things going on in fascist Italy because there's a neo-fascist prime minister.

That's going on.

And so the

The memory can be fabricated and manipulated, and that's a huge problem.

And this is also why regimes and aspiring regimes go after historians.

There are people in Russia who are sitting in gulags because they're historians who were looking into things that Putin didn't want to be looked into.

There are analogies, and if the leader has plunged the country into a military conflict, like Mussolini did, which bankrupted the country and backfired on him, then that is when the elites who have been propping him up and the party...

officials can it takes a dire it takes a dire situation like being bombed by the allies but in mussolini's case finally they all woke up after many many years and uh removed him his own grand council removed him um and uh but you're right that uh we can expect more erratic desperate behavior because the whole point of authoritarianism and certainly trump is in this mentality is to get to power

And often, including Trump, you run for office because you've got investigations and you've got legal problems and you want to get into office so you can shut everything down for good.

And Putin, Netanyahu, Berlusconi, Trump's part of this.

And then you want to enrich yourself and you want to amass so much power that you become untouchable.

And if you feel that you're losing these things, you're losing people who prop you up and you're losing popularity,

then you become more erratic.

And often, that's when they do what we're already seeing this.

I did not have... I predicted a lot of stuff that's gone on, but I did not have on my bingo card the kidnapping of Maduro.

I know, I do have Stefan Strangman in my book on Greenland, because that's an old fixation of Trump that they're going to get Greenland.