Fascism Expert Sounds Alarm as Trump Secretly Builds His Hiding Place While He Collapses

0:04Jennifer:All right, joining 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 Strongman and she has an amazing, amazing sub stack called Lucid. Ruth, welcome to iHip News. Welcome back. Thank you. So pleased to be here with you. You're one of our audience's favorites. I think you and I went to dinner a couple of weeks ago, and I was telling you, I think 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.

0:42Jennifer: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? 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.

1:26So 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 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. And that's by design. It's by design.

2:00Jennifer: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? 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. him. The same with Hegseth. Or the people have to be flawed so the leader has something over him or her.

2:44And 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.

3:38And 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, you know, 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.

4:05Jennifer: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, Bibi 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 Zelensky. 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.

4:44Jennifer: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. Oh, compromise. Who knows? Very deep tie. Very deep tie. But Putin is helping Iran. And as I watched 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 to me like his number one goal is self-preservation. Will you speak about the psychology behind autocrats and that being their North Star in all of their policy?

5:30It's pretty incredible. And it starts actually with way before they get into office because regular politicians, 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.

6:11Netanyahu 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 attack on the rule of law. 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.

6:52Jennifer:So recently over the weekend, there was the white house correspondence 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 right white house uh 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 maggot 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?

7:34Jennifer: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. 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.

8:14They 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 it was a recent Trump speech and I don't remember the content, but I wrote on social media that he was self-soothing.

9:04It 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, and they all have their inner sanctums. Mussolini did it, Hitler. And so they're reinforcing his sense that he knows what he's doing.

9:45And 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.

10:24Because his ego is, he's projected, 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.

10:53Jennifer:Oh, my God. It's really incredible. It's like his baby blanket. 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. Right, right. This is the United States.

11:32But 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, the difference is that Trump boasts about everything.

11:49Jennifer:Yeah. Putin and others do it in secrecy, a little more secrecy. Yeah. Trump is telling us everything about it because he has no filter. Very different than Putin, who was an intelligence officer. Putin is like super versed in what not to say. Right. He measures each word. He's still like this. Do you think this will damage Trump, his loose lips? Yes. Because it alerts people to what he's doing. And sometimes he's soft launching things that are horrible. Like maybe I should have a third term. Right. Right. So it has a propagandistic function, but ultimately the corruption, the denial, saying everything's going great, the Nobel Peace Prize when we're at war, because autocrats think that people are stupid because they scorn people.

12:39You might even, if you're an autocrat, make an AI video of you crapping on people. Right. Remember that? Right. Or post yourself as Jesus Christ. 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.

13:15Jennifer: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.

13:59Jennifer:So what are your observations in this just over a year into the second term of the escalating behaviors of him? 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. 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 to his level.

14:47Jennifer:Like Kristi Noem shot her dog and he thought, oh, that's perfect. That's the perfect person. She's perfect for this job. Yes. Flawed people. So Kennedy, think of all the cabinet. And he's also been collecting information on people since he was a businessman, like from the eighties. That's what he does. And his mentors were Roy Cohn and Roger Stone, and it's their version of Compromat. So that is going on. So 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 U.S. commanders with so many years of professionalism, they sat there.

15:35And 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 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.

16:20This 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.

17:06Because 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 simple values that you used to learn in school, you know, like justice, equality, don't beat other people up or there might be a consequence. Yeah. Golden rule.

17:41Jennifer:What about, 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, um, 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 and these award rituals.

18:25Jennifer: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? It is a feature and it's called the authoritarian bargain. And all of them do it. All the autocrats do it.

19:05It 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 Ukraine.

19:56That'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 so this is part of how autocracy works, 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. And then they finally decide to come out of their cowardice and venal posture, and they will retract their support for the state and for the leader.

20:48And 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. So J.D.

21:11Jennifer: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 apparent 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 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.

21:58Jennifer:Vance said no, because Vance is trying to position himself as, oh no, I'm the anti-war candidate. Trump's like, off to Pakistan, you go. And then the, now this is my favorite Ruth. 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 JD Vance in a headlock here saying, good luck, buddy, that he's sabotaging the alleged heir apparent of his 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.

22:43Jennifer: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. Yes, I agree. And 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, like 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, they're thinking they'll come back. In the Philippines, you had the Marcos dictator, and now Marcos Jr. Bongbong is there.

23:27So that can happen. But otherwise, they don't want, they're terrified of successors. Do you hear Putin talking about a successor? Never. No. And in Turkey, Erdogan, he's president and 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 anyone getting too much power. Now, luckily for Trump, Vance is a uniquely unlikable person with terrible instincts, a hypocrite, because he's evolved. We all know what he used to say about Trump.

24:11And now the thing about Catholicism, he doesn't seem to have very good instincts, like taking on the Pope, really, and lecturing the Pope. Right. And saying also his words. he chooses this where he's very smart in his in book way right 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 yeah you better be careful you better watch what he's saying yeah it's not it's not a good pr our strategy, shall we say?

24:55So there's all that. But it is complicated because we all know that why is Vance there? He's a proxy for Peter Thiel and the wider tech community. Just remember, Peter Thiel bankrolled his Senate race and his businesses, Vance'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, Alex Karp, who keeps appearing in public in some kind of 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.

25:38He'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.

25:57Jennifer:Interesting. Yeah. 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 released your 22 point manifesto right now. It was nuts. Said that they wanted the draft. It was so incredibly, I agree with you. There is kind of some sort of shared psychosis going on with them right now. And Musk, what the Washington Post found is that in the last months, he's posted 850 times on race, like laser focused, saying things like great replacement theory, that whites are a dying majority.

26:35And he's posted more than in these last months than 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, certainly in public opinion and being uncertain about what that means for their whole enterprise.