Authoritarianism knowledgeable Ruth Ben-Ghiat says Donald Trump is falling into the identical lure that has undone authoritarian-minded leaders all through historical past.
Regardless of declining approval scores, Ben-Ghiat argued in a visitor essay for The New York Instances that the president is making the age-old error of believing his personal hype.
“I’ve seen this model of strongman megalomania and the hostile results it could actually finally have on leaders and their governments,” wrote Ben-Ghiat, the creator of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Current.”
Ben-Ghiat, a professor of historical past at New York College, described the phenomenon as “autocratic backfire.” It happens when leaders “lower themselves off from knowledgeable recommendation and goal suggestions,” “promulgate unscrutinized insurance policies that fail” after which “double down and interact in even riskier conduct,” she mentioned.
“The outcome: a disillusioned inhabitants that loses religion within the chief and elites who start to rethink their help,” she wrote, citing Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Russian President Vladimir Putin as historic examples of the sample she sees rising round Trump.
Ben-Ghiat has lengthy drawn parallels between Trump and previous dictators.
She has beforehand famous that his bombastic self-praise echoes a fascist slogan from Mussolini’s Italy: “Mussolini is all the time proper.”
