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Trump checks all the boxes for history’s authoritarians, noted Ben-Ghiat, who last year published the book For one thing, they never leave the stage gracefully.
“I just predicted that he [Trump] wouldn’t leave in a quiet manner” after he lost the election, said Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. “He’s an authoritarian, and they can’t leave office. They don’t have good endings and they don’t leave properly.”
Trump’s “Big Lie” lie that the election he definitely lost was rigged protected his brainwashed followers from “having to reckon with the fact that he lost,” said Ben-Ghiat. The tale “maintains him as their hero, as their winner, as the invincible Trump — but also as the wronged Trump, the victim. Victimhood is extremely important for all autocrats,” she noted. “They always have to be the biggest victim.”
Now Trump has changed the entire nature of the Republican Party into an “authoritarian far-right party” that’s as hard on its own members as on foes, said Ben-Ghiat. “Not only do you go after external enemies, but you go after internal enemies. You’re not allowed to have any dissent,”