Authoritarianism Expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat Unmasks Donald Trump's 'Diabolical' Move That Broke Republicans

[Eugene]

Source: HuffPost

Authoritarianism Expert Unmasks Donald Trump’s 'Diabolical' Move That Broke Republicans

Ruth Ben-Ghiat talked about "the genius of what he did, seen from a diabolical authoritarian perspective."

By Lee Moran
Feb 28, 2025, 04:12 AM EST
|Updated 2 hours ago

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on Thursday asked authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat to explain why some of President Donald Trump’s “most harsh critics” — such as now-Vice President JD Vance and former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson ― have become his biggest backers and enablers.

Ben-Ghiat talked about a “moral collapse” in the GOP and Trump’s domestication of the party until it’s “become his personal tool.”

Trump “tried to overthrow the government” following his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, noted the author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.”

And “the genius of what he did, seen from a diabolical authoritarian perspective, is that he targeted Republicans as well as Democrats,” she continued.

Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, went after his own then-Vice President Mike Pence, and what it showed, “from an authoritarian perspective, is that no one was off-limits,” said Ben-Ghiat.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ruth-ben-ghiat-donald-trump-genius-move_n_67c172ece4b01834869f3d4b

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1. Not sure I'd call that "genius" even in the evil sense. It's standard crime boss technique

Gotta make sure every one one your side is scared to death to cross you.

What Donnie did that was novel, or at least modern, was to recognize that he didn't need a large army of violent people to back him. He only needed to occasional target a few key people at a time, and these days anyone can make pretty scary death threats from anywhere because so much personal information is readily available online.

So they can likely figure out where the spouse works and where the kids go to school, then make an eerily personalized death threats. In most cases even a single person could gather the information and make a number of seemingly unrelated threats from multiple accounts.

Bottom line though, for all their talk of leadership, there's not a single leader among them aside from Donnie himself, and even he is only a leader about things Putin doesn't care about because he himself is clearly scared to death to cross Putin.

The entire party has been thoroughly corrupted.

[LymphocyteLover]

2. Yes, and also, basically Trump makes anyone who doesn't support him into an immediate enemy

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3. Exactly *mcturtle*, of all people got death threats

He did more to enable this regime than anyone else in Congress. He opposed a single nominee and all his loyal toady work was instantly forgotten and he got death threats.