“There’s a lot of things when you write a book like Strongmen that goes over 100 years, a lot of things stay the same. And one of them is the personality cult, the leader cult. The kind of rules of the leader cult have, it’s incredible. They really haven’t changed.”
That’s what author and historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat told Frank Figliuzzi about just some of the similarities of the strongmen of the past and the comparisons to leaders like Donald Trump today.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat joined the The Frank Figliuzzi Show on Lincoln Square. She writes the Lucid newsletter on Substack and has taught how ideologies like fascism and totalitarianism have crept into societies across modern history. And since Trump’s entrance into U.S. politics over a decade ago, she has been sounding the alarm bells on how closely he’s modeled his governing style upon authoritarian figures of the past and present, like Viktor Orban in Hungary.
“Here we’re in a process where we’re starting to fit the conditions under which today’s studies say that people start to wake up. And one is blatant corruption. If the government and the leader are just getting really rich, that was partly why Viktor Orban lost and had to concede,” she said. “Another is autocratic overreach. Either the state is on the streets being openly brutal and we have ICE, or they’re actually, we don’t discuss this enough, they’re just absent because these people don’t care. They’re in power to get rich and to amass more power. And then the third is that when they cause hardship, economic hardship, and we are getting in that zone.”
You don’t want to miss a second of Frank’s insightful interview with Ruth Ben-Ghiat on how we got here and how we can beat back the Trump’s strongman politics.
Plus, don’t miss Frank’s comments on the court’s dismissal of Kash Patel’s defamation lawsuit against him on The Frank Figliuzzi Show, right here on Lincoln Square.
