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Fascism Expert Sounds Alarm as Trump Secretly Builds His Hiding Place While He Collapses
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- [00:00]
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- [01:06]
Interviewer
me today on IHIP news is my friend and absolute expert in exactly what is happening right now. Her name is Ruth Ben Ghiat and she is the best selling author of Strongmen. And she has an amazing, amazing substack called Lucid Ruth. Welcome to IHIP News. Welcome back.
- [01:24]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Thank you. So pleased to be here with you.
- [01:27]
Interviewer
You're one of our audience's favorites. I think you and I went to dinner a couple weeks ago and I was telling you, I. There's a desire among the public right now as we see this regime, attack science, attack facts, attack knowledge. There's a desire from the electorate to learn. And so thank you so much for making yourself available. Right now, Trump's approval rating is hitting around 32%. What happens to an autocrat when they become this unpopular? And what happens to all of those surrounding him when they are, you know, it looks like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?
- [02:04]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Yeah. So you've, you've hit on. So one of the things is they, they never take responsibility for their actions. And they have by this time, many autocrats have bought into this propaganda that they are infallible, that they can do no wrong, and so they will never say they're sorry or admit failure or blame. So what's better, you throw other people under the bus. So most autocrats are constantly reshuffling their governments. It's really crazy. And one of the reasons I wrote Strongman was to like to demystify this idea that autocrats are efficient. So like, Mussolini made the trains run on time. Well, in reality, every four years, he totally reshuffled his Cabinet. Right. So that happens. And we're seeing that because the people they put in are incompetent often to start with.
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Interviewer
And that's by design.
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Ruth Ben Ghiat
It's by design.
- [03:00]
Interviewer
And why would somebody who wants to rule over, you know, in an autocratic, dictatorial way, why would they want incompetent people? What's the psychology behind that?
- [03:11]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Because they're threatened of people who are too competent. And they don't want people who have independent sources of power, independent networks. And so they did this from the very start where Tulsi Gabbard was put in there in a director of National Intelligence with very few contacts in the intelligence world, so that she would be dependent on him or whoever is his trusted person. The same with Hegseth, or the people have to be flawed, so the leader has something over him or her. And so you have these people to begin with who are set up to fail. And then when the autocrat inevitably creates crises, they don't know how to handle it. Look at Kash Patel. And so that's one thing. The other thing that autocrats do, if they start sinking in the polls and they get really worried that something's going to happen to them, electorally or otherwise, is they go to war. They either deepen conflicts that they're already involved in instead of retreating and Netanyahu has done this, or they start a war and then they get into worse trouble. And this is called autocratic backfire. And so February 1st, I published an op ed in the New York Times on autocratic backfire. And I had Mussolini, Putin, and Trump. And I said that I felt like, I get these instincts that Trump was getting into the zone where he was going to do something to distract from all the messes he was creating at home. And I said, we should be prepared for some kind of military engagement. So there's patterns in the way that these people behave and think and the tragedies that they create for the nations they're supposed to be governing.
- [05:06]
Interviewer
And I've noticed that Trump, you know, he kind of has loose lips. He can't ever quite keep anything close to the chest because he likes to grandstand, he likes to boast, and he would say stuff. And you can always get little breadcrumbs from what he says. He would say, well, you know, know, BB doesn't have an election because he's at war. How great is that? You don't have to have an election. He said the same about Zelinsky. You know, they don't have to have an elections. And he he, he like, streamlines basically what his nefarious plans are. But this situation with the war, there's been rumors that. Not rumors. I mean, pretty substantiated. The State Department said that we went to war at the request of Israel. And then you have Putin, who appears to have something, you know, I don't know, Trump adores him or something. Compromise, who knows?
- [06:01]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Very deep tie.
- [06:02]
Interviewer
A very deep tie. But Putin is helping Iran. And as I watch the whole thing, Ruth, I'm like, okay, you have this guy, Donald Trump, who doesn't really seem to care that much about America, and he's helping these other forces. And it just seems me like his number one goal is self preservation. When you speak about the psychology behind autocrats and that being their North Star in all of their policy, it's pretty incredible.
- [06:32]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
And it, and it starts actually with way before they get into office, because regular politicians, if you have, if you're under investigation or you have like, problems of whatever sort, you don't want to run for office because journalists will start poking around. But if you're an autocrat type and you want to be further an autocrat, if you are under investigation, you feel compelled to run for office because the whole point is to get into power and then use the government, take over government to fix your problems. So here's a list, it's partial, of the people who were under investigation when they ran for office. Netanyahu several times, Berlusconi three times, Trump three times. Putin was under investigation and they got into office and look what happened. And immediately, like in Netanyahu tried to do this judicial reform, and they always go for the judiciary because they need to get rid of their problems. It could be financial problems, could be legal problems. So it starts there with actually how they even get into that attack on
- [07:41]
Interviewer
the rule of law.
- [07:42]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Yeah, yeah. Because they are, they have legal problems or they're corrupt, and so they have to go against corruption. So that's, that's the beginning of it.
- [07:53]
Interviewer
So recently, over the weekend, there was the White House correspondents dinner. Of course, we have mental health crisis, gun crisis in the United States. And instead of coming out and speaking about this immediately, immediately he goes to the White House press room and says, I need, this is why I need that ballroom. And then you've got Lindsey Graham, who's jumped on board, all of the MAGA influencers. It's almost like they had a coordinated thing where this is why this man needs this ballroom. And it seems that he is laser focused on the ballroom, the arch and remodeling the White House. What's the psychology behind this? Do you think he's planning on camping out in there? Is this something that's unique to this type of ruler? It's so bizarre.
- [08:43]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
It's bizarre, but it's predictable. So that's the next stage of the self preservation. So they get into power and then they start doing things that cause problems at home. Look at Orban. He impoverished the nation while he became a billionaire and his cronies. And so discontent builds, hardship falls upon the nation. And so the more they create problems, because, remember, they never backtrack. Because the thing to understand is that autocrats are not in office for the same reasons as other politicians. They don't care about public welfare, they don't care if the population has hardship, they care about self preservation. So inevitably, they get more paranoid the longer they're in power, because more people hate them. The election might go badly. People do crazy things to try and get rid of them, as we've seen. So they have safe spaces. And so these are people who are driven by fear. And you really can't overestimate the fact of fear. And it's why they puff themselves up with personality cults. I am omnipotent, I am infallible. And they're telling themselves this. So at a recent, it was a recent Trump speech and I don't remember the content, but I wrote on social media that he was self soothing. It was like he was telling himself, as you say, he has no filter, that he was great, that everything was going to plan, even though that's not at all the case. And it could have been domestic, it could have been about the economy or Iran, who knows? But it was about him propping himself up. And then they create these inner sanctums, the cabinet officials who are sycophants. And so we've seen the ritual of when the officials meet, it's not to give him objective feedback that he desperately needs. And they all do this. Putin, they all have their inner sanctums. Mussolini did it, Hitler. And so they're reinforcing his sense that he knows what he's doing. And they genuflect to him, they praise him. So instead of making him more secure, this makes him more insecure. And so they end up with these. Like, Putin had his palaces, they have bunkers. Gaddafi had a huge compound underneath which he had sex slaves. You know, they have these spaces where they feel safe. So the ballroom, I've been watching this develop for a long time. And the Washington Post Just did like a. They analyzed all his speeches for the last months. So we're at war like Americans are. You know, American lives are being lost. Right. But the thing he's talked the most about is the ballroom, because his ego is. He's projecting. Like the ballroom is in the White House, which is his personally. Right. He doesn't see it as the public's home that he's occupying temporarily. It's his. So his ego is fused with the White House and the ballroom. And so underneath the bunker is going to be a safe space so that when all of the mistakes he's making come back to haunt him, he has a place to be.
- [11:54]
Interviewer
Oh, my God.
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Ruth Ben Ghiat
It's really incredible.
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Interviewer
It's like a baby blanket.
- [11:57]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Yeah. And so Putin had Putin's palace. And one of the reasons that Putin went after Alexei Navalny is that he was an anti corruption researcher, but he took it upon himself, Navalny, to research and document Putin's palace. And he made a film about it that showed the corruption, showed the gold plated toilets. Some of it is actually the same aesthetic, the gold, the marble. And Putin felt exposed. And so that made him all the more go after Navalny and eventually had him killed. That's Putin and that's Russia.
- [12:31]
Interviewer
Right.
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Ruth Ben Ghiat
Right. This is the United States. But the psychology, the need to have your safe space, which is somewhere you could go, that must be secret for you and yet you're boasting about it. Is the difference is that Trump boasts about everything. Yeah. Putin and others do it in secrecy. A little more secrecy. Trump is telling us everything about it. And he, because he has no filter. Very different than Putin, who was an intelligence officer.
- [13:02]
Interviewer
Right.
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Ruth Ben Ghiat
And is like super versed in what not to say.
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Interviewer
Right.
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Ruth Ben Ghiat
He measures each word.
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Interviewer
He's still like, this will damage Trump. His loose lips.
- [13:11]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Yes. Because it alerts people to what he's doing. And he. Sometimes he's soft, launching things that are horrible. Like, maybe I should have a third term.
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Interviewer
Right.
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Ruth Ben Ghiat
So it has a propagandistic function, but ultimately the corruption, the denial, saying everything's going great. The Nobel Prize Peace Prize when we're at war, because autocrats think that the people are stupid because they scorn people. You might even, if you're an autocrat, make an AI video of you crapping on people. Right. Remember that.
- [13:46]
Interviewer
Right. Or post yourself as Jesus Christ.
- [13:48]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Yeah. That shows what he really thinks of people. And so it doesn't cross his mind, apparently, to measure his words and be a little more circumspect, which is what other I was going to say smarter, but he's very smart in his own way. So other autocrats have not boasted as much about their ballrooms and their things that are, you know, evidence of corruption.
- [14:16]
Interviewer
So you've been watching him closely as a professor, an author, a student of all of this, and now a teacher of all of this, an expert in this field. And you knew when he said, I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and my supporters would still support me, you knew immediately. So you've been watching him since that time to now. And this Trump 2.0, the observations that you have, because for me, as the layman, it really seems like he feels emboldened, that he feels like he's 10 foot tall and bulletproof, that he has. He's governing as though he will never face consequences. And he, our Supreme Court helped him, assisted him to fill that with the immunity. So what are your observations in this, just over a year into the second term, of the escalating behaviors of him?
- [15:11]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Yeah, he feels. He feels invincible, and he has created a government full of people who mirror his values. So autocrats want you to be your worst self. And often they pick people who are flawed. So we talked before that they're inexperienced, that you would never pick those people like a CEO wouldn't pick those people. But he needs to have those people there. And we talked about the loyalty part, but he needs people who are flawed so that he can further corrupt them. And Trump is very good at corrupting people and bringing them down.
- [15:48]
Interviewer
Like Christy Noem shot her dog.
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Ruth Ben Ghiat
And he thought, oh, that's the perfect person.
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Interviewer
She's perfect for this job.
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Ruth Ben Ghiat
Flawed people. So Kennedy, think of all the Cabinet, right? And he's also been collecting information on people since he was a businessman, like from the 80s. That's what he does. And his mentors were Roy Cohn and Roger Stone, and they. It's their version of Kompromat. Okay, so that is going on. So these are people who have been collaborators in his lawlessness. And so when Hegseth went to Quantico and all those faces, those stony faces weathered with experience of all our US Commanders with so many years of professionalism, they sat there and Hegseth said that we are not going to abide by these old rules of engagement. And then Stephen Miller went to law enforcement and said, you know, your hands are untied now. So it's a liberation from any kind of humanitarian or ethical rules. So I call this moral deregulation. So there's economic deregulation, which is going on. So all companies and corporations and big capital. They don't have to. You know, they can relax their protections of the workforce, they can plunder the environment. But moral deregulation, Trump is like the Pied Piper of this. Everyone must be their worst self so that you don't have to. This is what he meant when he said, I could shoot someone and my followers will love me for it. That they could be biblical, they could be ethical, secular, the injunctions against cheating people, harming people, killing innocent fishermen on boats, whatever it is. You don't have to worry about those things anymore. You can even reward and pardon people who stormed the Capitol, who were violent, who attacked police officers. There's no bottom. So that's moral deregulation. And his partner at the beginning of this nightmare was Musk, who thinks similarly. So we gave him a place in government and said, go at it. Just wreck everything. Because it's all about. That's back to fascism. It's like destruction. And Mussolini called it creative destruction. And you can be like that. If you have no morals, you're amoral. So that's what we're faced with. So I've been talking about moral collapse and the need for a renewal of morals. And, like, we need a democratic politics that foregrounds values. Yes, Like. Like simple values that you learn, used to learn in school.
- [18:35]
Interviewer
Right.
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Ruth Ben Ghiat
You know, like justice, equality. Don't beat other people up or there might be a consequence.
- [18:40]
Interviewer
Yeah.
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Ruth Ben Ghiat
Golden rule. What about.
- [18:42]
Interviewer
What do you make of. I understand to an extent, Trump recruited incompetent, immoral people to come work for him. I get that. That makes sense to me. What do you make of these tech oligarchs and other industry titans that before, maybe you know, that weren't really controversial, but when this guy gets in power and they have all the money, more money than he has, and you can, you know, business people. Well, we can write out four years. He's a. It's his lame duck term. It's been so shocking to see Tim Cook of Apple, a gay man, you know, making a participation trophy in these award rituals. And you can tell Trump enjoys humiliating them because he said recently, I think it was a truth social post, he said, I love having the CEO of Apple called it kiss my ass. He recently said this about Tim Cook, who now I think is going to be outgoing. Is this something that you see in other autocracies where the wealthy also more morally collapsed just as much as the aforementioned person he found that was already broken Kristi Noem, and brought her and broke her even more Is this a feature and not a bug?
- [19:59]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
It is a feature, and it's called the authoritarian bargain. And all of them do it, all the autocrats do it. It means bargains that you make with elites could be media elites, tech elites today, business elites, religious elites. And the bargain is, it's like a pact, a deal that I will give you lots of opportunities to make money and promote you and not stand in your way, not persecute you in return. You have to be loyal to me. You could outwardly support me, but you must not criticize me no matter what I say or do, no matter what happens. And these bargains, they happened under Mussolini and under Mobutu. They're just part of how it works. Yeah. Putin for sure. Think about the Russian Orthodox Church, which backs up Putin and backed him up even more when he went into, into Ukraine. That's their part of the bargain. Right. And we have the Evangelical Church and Orthodox Jews. No matter what happens, they're there. So that's the religious and, and so this is part of how autocracy works. These, these elites that prop up. So what you want to do, if you're trying to unseat through elections, you need something called elite defection. You need elites to wake up. And they only do this sometimes. In the old days, if there was like being bombed by the Allies or the economy starts to collapse. Yeah. And then they finally decide to come out of their cowardice and venal, you know, posture, and they will retract their support. Right. For the state and for the leader. And sometimes they can put it to someone else in power and then you have what, like a palace coup? Right. But when there's a well developed party system, because today autocrats don't kill off all the other parties and they keep elections. You want the elites to go over to the opposition, and that's very hard to do, but eventually it can happen.
- [22:11]
Interviewer
So JD Vance is by all means on paper, somebody in traditional American politics, if we follow what the lineage is and how the torches are passed, would be the heir, apparently, and be the Republican nominee. I have noticed that Trump, in my opinion, is sending J.D. vance out to set him up for failure. And here's some examples of my observations. He sent him to campaign with Viktor Orban, and of course, Viktor Orban, you know, lost in a, in a, in a landslide. He sent him to Pakistan to negotiate this war that J.D. vance at the table. And this was leaked from J.D. vance's camp to the New York Times that everybody said, yes, yes, yes, except for Vance. Vance said no, because Vance is trying to position himself as, oh no, I'm the anti war candidate. And Trump's like, off to Pakistan you go. And then the he. Now this is my favorite Ruthie. He's made him the fraud czar, the most fraudulent president in American history. And I just can't help but think he's like got J.D. vance in a headlock here saying, good luck, buddy, that he's sabotaging the alleged error apparent of his, you know, whole movement. What is your take on that? And watching the way he does J.D. vance, it's part one of the question. Part two is the Catholic Church won't bend the knee. And J.D. vance fancies himself a big Catholic. And I just want to get your opinion on that. But first talk about the succession and then Trump, what I think is sabotaging that.
- [23:52]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Yes, I, I agree. And it, that is in line with the autocratic playbook because autocrats don't really have successors with the exception if it's a family dynasty like in North Korea. Yeah. Or they can have some kind in like the, in Brazil, Bolsonaro is sitting in jail for having done something similar to what Trump did. But now his sons, who are right wing politicians are, they're thinking they'll come back. In the Philippines, you know, you had the Marcos dictator And now Marcos Jr. Bongbong is there. So that can happen. But otherwise they don't want, they're terrified of successors. Do you hear Putin talking about a successor?
- [24:36]
Interviewer
Never.
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Ruth Ben Ghiat
No. And in Turkey, Erdogan, he's president and he, he used to be prime minister and now he's gotten rid of the office of prime minister because he doesn't want anybody close to him. It's him and the people. Right. And so they do these tricks. They're not really fooling anyone because they can't stand to have any, anyone getting too much power. Now, luckily for Trump, Vance is a uniquely unlikable person with like terrible instincts, a hypocrite, you know, because he's evolved. You know, we all know that what he used to say about Trump and that now the thing about Catholicism, he doesn't seem to have very good instincts like taking on the Pope, really. And lecturing the Pope.
- [25:21]
Interviewer
Right.
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Ruth Ben Ghiat
And saying also his words. He chooses his word. He's very smart in book way and he chooses his words carefully. But issuing something that to many of us who study autocracy sounded like a veiled threat to the Pope. He said, you should be careful, the Pope should be careful in choosing, you know, something like he should be careful in choosing his words, what he says. And that's like kind of how like Mafia bosses talk.
- [25:48]
Interviewer
Yeah.
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Ruth Ben Ghiat
He better be careful. You better watch what he's saying. Yeah. It's not, it's not a good PR strategy, shall we say. So there's all that. But it is complicated because we all know that. Why is Vance there? He's a proxy for Peter Thiel. Yes. And the wider tech community. Just remember Peter Thiel bankrolled his Senate race and his businesses, Bance's private businesses. So they have a long history. And these tech billionaires are on the offense right now. You saw that the head of Palantir, who. Alex Karp, who keeps appearing in public in some kind of drugs, seemingly drug state. Yeah. Why? I don't know. But he issued a manifesto and Musk has been. The Washington Post reported he has upped the amount of his posting on race issues. He's in some kind of manic, seeming manic thing about posting about race to indoctrinate people about white supremacy. So there's something going on with these people. They're like panicked and maybe that's because they see that their guy is being set up to fail, as you say.
- [26:58]
Interviewer
Interesting.
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Ruth Ben Ghiat
Yeah. Because I just published. My latest essay on Lucid is about this techno fascist and how they seem to. I said they're sharpening their swords. There's something, there's something going on. Like why release your 22 point manifesto right now if you.
- [27:14]
Interviewer
That was nuts. Said that they wanted to. The draft. It was, it was so incredibly. I agree with you. There is kind of some sort of shared psychosis going on with them right now.
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Ruth Ben Ghiat
And Musk, what the Washington Post found is that in the last months he's posted 850, 50 times on race, like laser focused, saying things like great replacement theory that whites are a dying majority. And, and he's posted more than in these last months than in the preced. The. In the preceding two years on the theme of race. So there's some kind of, let's say anxiety. That's an underestimate of what's going on. Something's going on and I do think it's linked to. I think you're right, Vance. Not doing very well, shall we say in, in certainly in public opinion and being uncertain about what that means for their whole enterprise. Yeah.
- [28:02]
Interviewer
Because they made a huge investment into him and Trump didn't want him. But he, he had to win or he was going to go to prison. Donald Trump or, and, or face major, major consequences. Had Kamala Harris won, and so they sent the tech money. That makes perfect sense because they do seem a lot crazier. But go ahead.
- [28:20]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
One thing, and Vance has also, with the Catholicism issue, he's maneuvering himself into a space like in between a rock and a hard place. Because, of course, he's one of the voices of white Christian supremacy. That's the ideological plank of this state. And it's now seeped into foreign policy, national security policy. That's what it is. White Christian hegemony. But. And so he converts and he does this book, but he's attacking the Pope and a very loved, beloved Pope, an activist Pope.
- [28:56]
Interviewer
Did you read where Peter, till it was leaked, told him that he thought this Pope was an offshoot of the Antichrist and to ignore him.
- [29:04]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
That's right.
- [29:04]
Interviewer
Which is insane that we have this billionaire, Peter Thiel, whose side hustle is giving conferences about the Antichrist. I mean, this is just. If I saw it in a movie, I would be like, this can't be real. And we're living it.
- [29:18]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
That's why the Reverend Barber, he said, it's a war on divinity itself. And I'm interpreting that not only in the religious sense, but just all that is good, all that is love, all that is justice in the world. And so the Pope becomes the target. But this is not so. If Vance has to be. If the future of Maga is embedded with. In bed with white Christian nationalism, then Vance's stance is not helping. It's not helping.
- [29:53]
Interviewer
But what's interesting, and this is just what I know from Living in the Bible Belt, is white evangelicals, which are, you know, support Trump by. I think it's 90%. They don't like Catholics and don't think they're real Christians. So that was a really bizarre calculation on Vance's part, in my opinion. Like, his political instincts aren't that great because I know from just growing up, it'd be like, well, you know, Catholics, they're not real Christians. We're the real Christians. Like, my. A Baptist friend or some friend would say that in. In school.
- [30:25]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Yes. And my. And it's also the same. My mother's from Scotland and they're Presbyterian, and there was a black sheep in the family and he converted to Catholicism and no one spoke to him. Yeah, yeah.
- [30:39]
Interviewer
I mean, it's really interesting. Okay, so. So this makes perfect sense. All of these tech guys that invested heavily are crashing out Trump, in my opinion, with evidence, looks like he is making sure. Any hopes that J.D. vance has for being Mr. Maga reincarnated. That's not going to happen. And here's what everybody has to see. We've gone from the fight, fight, fight image, you know, a year, two year, two years ago, to this video here. And I want you to watch this as we. Okay, this is him last week in the Oval, and people are talking behind him. I mean, you can see his lip down. It looks like a stroke victim. I mean, he's a senior citizen. And I don't mean to, you know, be ageist, but this is not the commanding alpha male. And you'll see here in a second. He wakes up, kind of checks in on everything, and then he dozes right back there he is checking everybody out, and then he goes right back to sleep. So take me and the listener in on this. So strong man, toxic masculinity. Fight, fight, fight. Fast forward, fast forward. We're in a war. Approval rating 32%. That is the current situation. The cankles, the makeup on the hands, hiding the things. He recently had some sort of skin rash right here. Psychologically, is he aware what happens to the cult historically?
- [32:08]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Take us.
- [32:09]
Interviewer
What you think the imagery of this means?
- [32:12]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Well, two things stand out. One is that you saw there were people behind him and there was somebody gesticulating and talking, and they decided to completely ignore the sleeping and they just carried on. Because that they're in deny. They're not in denial. They know exactly what's happening, but they can't acknowledge it. They can't wake him up. They can't acknowledge that he's not listening to them, that almost he's a figurehead just sleeping there because that would puncture the cult. Because their job is to be subservient to him. So if something happens, you just carry on, right? You just carry on. And it also reminds me of late communism in ussr, where there were a series of leaders who were not very healthy and there was all kinds of popular criminal. Everybody became a Kremlin ologist. Like today, his eyes are slightly less opened. What does that mean? Because they were all like. Some of them were like half dead. Yeah. And so there's that going on. But the role of the elite standing behind him is just to just barrel on and barrel forward and just ignore the fact what everyone sees. So it's like. It's like an extreme. It's an extreme example of how you have to lie for the leader. And the better you lie for the leader, the more your political career does well. And that's why we have dozens of people in high office. This has Never happened. Who previously had on air positions at Fox. It's not just Hegseth. Pam Bondi had an on air position and she was Attorney General of Florida. There's dozens of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they know how to tell untruths and look good while they do it.
- [34:07]
Interviewer
Camera ready. Liars.
- [34:08]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Yeah. And that's why Hegseth immediately put a makeup studio in the Pentagon. That was one of his first priorities because he was a Fox weekend host. So these people know how to ignore and just dissemble, even if he's sleeping. The other thing that strikes me is that Trump woke up and he looked around and then he just went back to sleep, like, okay, nothing. He wasn't alarmed. This is interesting. If you fell asleep in an inappropriate time, your face would register some kind of alarm and you know the camera's on you.
- [34:46]
Interviewer
Right.
- [34:46]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
But he went back to sleep. And I don't know fully what to make of that. I think that he had no choice but to go back to sleep because he didn't do the opposite, which most people would have done and they would have been embarrassed. But this is also like, he's his own world. He can even in a perverted way, it's like a demonstration of his power. He can sleep on camera and he's still there. Like he didn't have the inner conscience to say, hey, I shouldn't be sleeping right now. I need to wake up. Because then he would be placed in a position of weakness. He's just going to sleep right on.
- [35:26]
Interviewer
Do those projections based on other autocracies you've studied? When you start to see the strong man appear as frail and you start to see in real time their health failing, does that produce fissures in the cult? Bickering in the cabinet, jockeying for does even though Helix, you know, asleep, does that escalate the mania surrounding him?
- [35:52]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
It does. But it can be in, in classic one party dictatorships, it can. It's a dangerous time for the leader. And Mobutu, who's in my book, he was a kleptocrat. He was the biggest kleptocrat before Gaddafi.
- [36:07]
Interviewer
And tell us what a kleptocrat is.
- [36:09]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Somebody who officializes stealing from the state. So he had mansions, he had his own Concord airplane with its own Runway. And the population was starving in, in the Congo. Okay. And he, he, you know, he was always like, he did these things with the purging. So there was a guy I talk about who he sent to jail. Then he made him a minister, then he sent him to jail again. It's like a constant chaos. So he became, after many, many years of this, very hated. And he fell ill. And this was the signal of people to act. So he left the country to get treatment. I forgot where he went. Maybe Switzerland, the places dictators go. And that was it. He was forced into exile. So he showed his weakness. So when they show their weakness, that's why Putin is very guarded about his health. Very guarded. And Putin disappears sometimes and no one can know because that shows people. It's a. It's like a survivalist mentality, especially in Russia, where people are falling out of windows. Right. Or you go into the hospital and you never come out.
- [37:21]
Interviewer
So if that's survivalist.
- [37:22]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Right.
- [37:23]
Interviewer
What is that? That I just showed you? What. What is that? Just full display. Just. I get to do whatever I wanted to want to do and nobody can stop me.
- [37:35]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Yeah.
- [37:35]
Interviewer
Flagrant entitlement.
- [37:37]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Yeah, yeah. And it works because the people behind him and around him and on Fox News and are.
- [37:44]
Interviewer
It's like active gaslighting.
- [37:45]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Yes. They are choosing to ignore it and. And saying that he is still the greatest leader in the world and ignoring completely. Well, Trump told us, and it was either 2015 or 2016, and he said, don't believe your eyes and ears. And so they're just deciding, I'm not going to believe that Trump is sleeping. He's still the great leader and I'm going to message that. Or they turn any kind of adversity into a heroism, and he's a victim. And so we have to help him. And that worked for a very long time.
- [38:25]
Interviewer
They wore the maxi pads on their ear and see.
- [38:28]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Yeah. Yes. That worked for a very long time. But now he's sleeping and we're at war and the economy's tanking and American science and medicine are being sabotaged. They really are in education and people are waking up now and there's fissures in the party, and I think that all of this is going to continue. So the sleeping is like a moment where, remember that the elite bargain thing, it only works if the people around you keep saying the emperor has no clothes thing. That's when they refuse to repeat the lies anymore. Then it can fall apart.
- [39:11]
Interviewer
So this brings me to my final question, which is the media, and you remember two and a half years ago, Joe Biden was president and they were brutal on him, as they should be. I'm a believer that if you're going to run for the United States of America, you have to have thick skin you have to be able to put up with comedians like, I think Donald Trump is wholly emotionally unfit fit for the job to be president. He's too thin skinned and he likes being a victim too much. But when you think about the, the way the press, whether you know, justifiably or not, went after Joe Biden, he chose to run for president, you're gonna have a lot of shiny lights on you. Any misstep, any nodding off. And then I see the disparity in the way this is covered. Fox News. If Joe Biden fell asleep like that in the middle of a war, I don't know that there's enough emergency rooms in New York that could resuscitate all of them. I mean, they would just completely go into overdrive. And so we saw in Hungary that Orban moved quickly to buy media companies. And we see Trump acolytes and supporters like Larry Ellison. He's bought cbs, now he's bought Tick Tock, now he's buying cnn. And on and on and on and on. And There was the 60 minute interview the other night right after the ordeal at the White House correspondence dinner so he could go pitch, you know, laser focus. We've got to get this ballroom built. There's reporting coming out now that that interview was 40 minutes long and they edited it down to 12 minutes. And you remember Trump famously sued CBS for deceptive editing in the Kamala Harris. Okay, so this girl that I love, she's excellent online. It's called decoding Fox News.
- [41:06]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Oh, yes, she's fabulous.
- [41:07]
Interviewer
And so she provides us all a wonderful service. And she watched the entire unedited version and talked about how deceptive the editing was. So if we don't have a mainstream media that, you know, like, this guy is clearly unfit, he's fallen asleep. Somebody needs to give him another cookie, will him on down, you know, to his nap time or something. It's troubling to me, but then I just think about what Hungary did. So if you'll address that and then leave us with. You're so good, Ruth, about finding hope and how much you believe in the, in the spirit of humanity and the spirit of freedom. And so if you'll just leave us with your thoughts on all of that.
- [41:51]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Well, Hungary shows, it's really interesting the more you look into it, because the way that Magyar campaigned was designed to get around this trap that Orban had essentially completed a level of media capture, as it's called when you have bought out, had friends buy or allies buy. So in the preceding elections in 2018, 2022, the opposition candidates and their messages weren't even heard by people outside big cities because all of the TV stations and radio stations refused to air them. They didn't give them any airtime. So Magyar did this thing, which at first I was like, why is he doing that? For two years he went on this like, you remember what Mamdani did, where he walked the length of Manhattan. Mazur did this all over Hungary, in rural areas. And he did a million step march and he went to like hundreds of small towns and small cities. He went to almost all the parishes in Hungary. So this is why it took two years. And he presented himself in person to these people and he held rallies, even small ones. And he just had this. He's in his 40s, so he had huge amounts of energy to do this. And guess what? It paid off because there's new data now about the voting and every village or town where he went in a rural area, you could map on who voted for him and it matched. So he showed up in person to get around the media block on him. Now, this is a very large country and you can't do that to that level. But. But that's a sense of hope. And the other thing, Hungary also, and we also are meeting. People don't like blatant corruption. They also don't like brutality. There had been things going on with education had been completely defunded. Did you know that the Department of Education equivalent in Hungary was moved to the Ministry of the Interior, which is the police, so that education now sat under the aegis of the police. And so there were like very repressive things that reminded some people of communism. So they had.
- [44:16]
Interviewer
Had.
- [44:16]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
They didn't want any more of this. But it was. It, It. It's all the more notable and it shows that even in a climate of media capture, you can prevail. And in our country, we have also this individualized media system, like you.
- [44:32]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [44:33]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
Like creators and people who are fighting the good fight, who have huge followings. Yep. Substacks. Right. I've got over 200,000. And you know, there's so many of us. Right. And. And, and we could coordinate our messaging more if we wanted to do that, but that's. It's strengthened diversity. Yeah. And so that's something that no one can take away from us. And Trump is not likely to shut down all of our substacks. And so there are ways that we can get around this. We shouldn't feel fatalistic. And it is dispiriting to see all the big media companies bought out and Barry Weiss and all of that, that's just, it's awful. But we are on the right side of history and no one can take away our ability to message for the things that we feel are important and to help people, to help to by speaking the truth about what's going on instead of being like those men, those white men standing behind Trump, deciding to ignore that he's sleeping while we're at war. Yeah. Yeah.
- [45:39]
Interviewer
The enabling of this is really one of the more fascinating components of it. I understand. A singular crazy person. We all know crazy people. We all know narcissists. The enabling and the collaboration with all of this is still takes my breath away. Ruth, thank you so much for joining me today in studio in New York. I really appreciate it. And go follow Ruth on social media, Ruth Ben Ghiat or go to substack and our substack is called called lucid. Thank you. How lucky are we, viewer that we have an expert, a scholar in fascism, authoritarianism educating us today? It's so therapeutic. Knowledge is therapeutic in the time of fascism. It truly is.
- [46:20]
Ruth Ben Ghiat
It's always so great to speak with you.
- [46:21]
Interviewer
Thank you, Ruth.
- [46:32]
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