'Lawless and corrupt': Expert lays out how Trump’s plan is 'straight out of the history of authoritarianism'

19 November 2023

Earlier this week, ex-President Donald Trump was recently added to the top of The Economist's list of the world's greatest dangers heading into 2024.

During a Sunday morning panel, MSNBC's Ayman Mohyeldin referenced a recent Axios report by Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, in which they exclusively report ex-President Donald Trump "allies are pre-screening the ideologies of thousands of potential foot soldiers, as part of an unprecedented operation to centralize and expand his power at every level of the U.S. government if he wins in 2024."

The MSNBC host asked historian and authoritarian expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat to "put this reporting into perspective," by explaining whether "this effort from the ex-president and his allies" is "something that is unprecedented as it seems on the surface — given the fact that our country has not had presidents who have lost and then come back to win reelection."

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Ben-Ghiat replied, "Yeah, well, you know, Trump is an autocrat, not a Democrat. What he is doing here is straight out of the history of authoritarianism. it is not just the content of what he wants to do, mask importation's mass detentions, and also if you get into it, he says he wants to expand psychiatric institutions, to put people in there. That is what authoritarianism always does. He mentioned [U.S. Department of Justice special counsel] Jack Smith — locking up and declaring insane an investigator is exactly what authoritarians do. The communists in the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics)routinely put dissidents in psychiatric institutions."

The New York University professor continued, "So it's not even just all that, it is the method. Because autocrats need a compliant bureaucracy to implement their repression quickly, and so they need a lawless and corrupt people who are not gonna have pangs of conscience. That's what happened the first time, he's learned from that. There were too many civil servants who actually had ethics. Too many lawyers. So this time, he's not making that mistake. And it's like, it's like seeing the corruption chapter of my book come to life, because I wrote about this, that you must have lawless and corrupt people in government in order to have an autocracy."

Watch the video below or at this link.

'Lawless and corrupt': Expert explains Trump's plans to implement an autocracyyoutu.be

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