Trump Descends Into Chaos As His Health Weakens, Expert Warns of What He'll Do Next
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What does Ruth Ben‑Ghiat identify as the defining features of Trump’s authoritarian turn?
Welcome to this special episode of IHIP News. I am joined by the bestselling author of Strongman, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian. Ruth, welcome to IHIP News. Thank you. I want to cover some very important information regarding what's happening in the United States because all of this, and you say this a lot, is new for the United States to have this form of government. And I read your lucid sub stack and listener, you should read it as well, because when you're armed with information, when the government is abusing its citizens, it can be cathartic and therapeutic to know what is going on. And Ruth, you speak a lot about the government. The Trump regime is intentionally wrong. weakening the government.
Explain to my listeners, why would you get power and then want to weaken the government that you operate within?
Yeah, this is one of the most tragic aspects of what's going on now, and I was calling it out in Lucid like in February, in March. You have somebody who's a head of state who really long ago internalized Kremlin and other authoritarian views of the world that see democracy as the problem. And then the question is, why would you kneecap your own country? And authoritarians do that so they can more easily grab control. If you have an impoverished, diseased population, they're less likely to be protesting in the streets. And if you care about profiting off of governance and you really don't care about the people you are supposed to be governing. And remember President Trump did the AI video of him like dumping excrement on American people and protesters.
That kind of shows you the mentality. And they're all like this. They despise the people they govern. Sometimes the bad outcome economically is over time and it's a result of incompetence. Here, everything has happened so fast and taking away vaccines, doing things that will increase the likelihood of mass disease, things like that. They are part of really a mentality that wants to create the conditions to be able to rule more easily in an authoritarian fashion.
And is it that in a democracy historically we think the power is within the people, of the people, by the people, for the people? We've learned that mantra, you know, from school age on. And is it to take the power away from the people and consolidate it in this regime?
Yeah, and it works in different ways. One is, of course, and this has a long, long racialized history of voter suppression. So we have a long precedent of some of these authoritarian practices. And I consider the Jim Crow South a kind of regional authoritarianism. So we have that precedent. But we can't really only define authoritarianism as in a legal way, which is important. So the executive wants to get as much power. That's why Trump has marginalized Congress. That's why he keeps ruling by executive orders. He's made the judiciary, the Department of Justice into his personal revenge tool. All of that is by the book. But I think we also need to see authoritarianism as a process by which you deprive the many of their rights.
And you create hardship for them to allow the very few, the billionaires, the oligarchs, to have unlimited liberties to plunder the workforce, to plunder the environment. You roll back all the regulations, including moral regulations that kept people behaving ethically. You take all of that out of government. And that's going on, too. Again, it's very tragic, but it's all proceeded very quickly, which is one thing that differentiates what we're living through. If we feel like our heads are exploding every day, it's because the pace of change, it doesn't really resemble other states where the authoritarian came to power via elections.
So that tees up my next question. A lot of people say we're in the middle of a power grab. And is it a power grab if this candidate was democratically elected? A lot of the things he's doing, he telegraphed that he was going to do during the campaign. He was going to root out the enemy from within. And so will you please talk to that and also speak to the role that the oligarchs are playing in this specific power grab in the United States of America?
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What does Ruth Ben‑Ghiat identify as the defining features of Trump’s authoritarian turn?
0:05–5:59
2
Why would a leader intentionally weaken democratic institutions to consolidate power?
5:59–23:56
3
How does “electoral autocracy” work and is a democratically elected leader still mounting a power grab?
23:56–34:55
4
What historical examples explain whether autocrats can be voted out?
34:55–44:21
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from IHIP News
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