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Historians and election experts warn Trump is behaving like Mussolini and despots that the US usually condemns
John Haltiwanger Business Insider Sep 25, 2020, 4:38 PM

President Donald Trump has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election.
Historians and experts on fascism warn that Trump is behaving like the dictators the US is often leading the way to condemn on the global stage.
"This is the way dictators come to power," historian Michael Beschloss warned in an MSNBC appearance on Thursday.
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President Donald Trump is refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, threatening to shatter a tradition that lies at the heart of the democratic process in the US. There are serious concerns among scholars that Trump is putting America's democracy in mortal danger.

Combined with Trump's relentless disinformation campaign, celebration of violence against journalists, and incitement of armed militias, historians and election experts warn that the president is mirroring the behavior of despots that the US generally leads the way in condemning before the world.

"I've been an election observer in broken authoritarian countries, and let me tell you: Trump's behavior would be swiftly and unequivocally condemned by all international election monitors if it was happening elsewhere. He is behaving like the despots past presidents condemned," Brian Klaas, a political scientist at the University College London, tweeted on Friday.

When asked whether he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power earlier this week, Trump suggested ballots would be thrown away.


"We're going to have to see what happens," Trump said when asked whether he would accept the final results of the election. "Get rid of the ballots and...there won't be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation."

Trump has given the country myriad signs that he will not concede under any circumstances, placing the US on the precipice of a political crisis the likes of which it has never experienced before. The president has repeatedly pushed the bogus assertion that the expanded access to mail-in voting for the 2020 election — a move designed to protect vulnerable people amid a pandemic — will lead to widespread voter fraud.

Top experts on democracy have been warning for years that Trump exhibits authoritarian tendencies. But their consternation appears to have ramped up significantly as Election Day draws closer and Trump essentially signals that he plans to do whatever it takes to stay in power.

'This is the way dictators come to power'
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Thursday asked historian Michael Beschloss if he could provide another example of a US president suggesting an election "ought to be disregarded."


"You want to go into history to look for something like this? Go into Italian history and look at Mussolini. This is the way dictators come to power," Beschloss said in response, comparing Trump to the fascist Italian leader Benito Mussolini.

"[Trump is] telling you what he intends to do. And we've got to make very sure that in the next five and half weeks and after, that we do not get into a situation where...Donald Trump announces that he's won and puts us in a situation where our democracy is being stolen minute by minute. This is not a drill," Beschloss added.


Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University historian who's written extensively on Mussolini, agrees with Beschloss that Trump's behavior mirrors that of the Italian fascist dictator. She noted that Mussolini was not immediately a dictator, but gradually consolidated power.

"The clearest parallel is that Mussolini was prime minister of a democratic coalition government from 1922-1925. During that time, he slowly chipped away at democratic institutions, insulting the press, using violence against the left, joking that he would be in office for 20 years, establishing a militia and a legislative body (the Grand Council) loyal to him," Ben-Ghiat told Insider.


"[Mussolini] bought off elites with privatizations of major industries and by ending worker and peasant strikes. In 1924, to consolidate power, he had a law passed that drew accusations of fraud but gave him a majority. He had his main opponent, Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti, killed for accusing him of fixing the election and for threatening to reveal his financial corruption — and then he declared dictatorship in 1925 to escape a special investigation," Ben-Ghiat added.


David I. Kertzer, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Pope and Mussolini," told Insider that comparing Trump and Mussolini does "a disservice" to the Italian leader given he "read newspapers every day in four languages, followed policy issues closely, played the violin and loved classical music, and was not particularly interested in lining his own pocket (although there was no lack of corruption in his regime)."

"What the present moment in American politics does make me appreciate more is how Italy, a parliamentary democracy, could so quickly become a dictatorship," Kertzer added.

Kertzer noted that Mussolini said "people were like sheep" and "craved being followers," adding, "Like Trump, he had very little in the way of strong ideological beliefs himself, and knew the power of emotional rather than rational appeals, and of the power of repeating simple, emotionally powerful yet substantively empty phrases (Make America Great Again)."


To Kertzer, the most striking parallel between Trump and Mussolini is that similar to the Italian fascist dictator, the president has enjoyed strong support from religious leaders despite not having "a religious bone in his body."

"Mussolini could solidify his dictatorship only by reaching a deal with the pope and gaining the support of the Church hierarchy, in a totally amoral exchange: he would give the Church leaders what they wanted (ending separation of church and state, religious instruction in schools etc) and the religious leaders would throw their support behind him," Kertzer said.

Recent research suggests the US is heading toward autocracy under Trump
Trump has spent the past four years eroding democratic norms and institutions at an astonishing rate.

A project that monitors the health of democracy across the world, Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), in its 2020 findings said the US has become more autocratic in the Trump era. V-Dem measures hundreds of different attributes of democracy — including freedom of expression, free and fair elections, and levels of government corruption, among many others — and the project involves over 3,300 scholars and other experts worldwide.

"The United States – former vanguard of liberal democracy – has lost its way," V-Dem's 2020 report said, adding that the US "is the only country in Western Europe and North America suffering from substantial autocratization."

Over the course of the past week, Trump at rallies repeatedly applauded an incident in which a journalist was struck with a rubber bullet fired by police during a protest, prompting laughter and cheers from supporters.

Last month, a caravan of Trump supporters drove into Portland with the sole purpose of antagonizing anti-racism protesters. Their presence in the Oregon city led to clashes that turned deadly. Trump referred to them as "GREAT PATRIOTS!" as he simultaneously condemned those protesting against racism and police brutality.

The president in recent months has moved from joking about removing term limits to suggesting he's "entitled" to a third term because he was impeached.

The Guardian 11-26-2020
Strongmen review: a chilling history for one nation no longer under Trump
Ruth Ben-Ghiat delivers a superb examination of how close the US came to fascism – and how it has propped it up before


This terrific history of strongmen since Mussolini makes it clear that despite a horrific pandemic and massive economic disruption, ordinary democratic Americans have more to be thankful for this Thanksgiving than ever before.


Trump's coup failed – but US democracy has been given a scare
Comparing the gruesome, granular details of the reigns of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Gaddafi, Pinochet, Mobuto, Berlusconi and Erdoğan to the acts and aspirations of Donald Trump, New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat makes a powerful argument that on the scary road to fascism, America just came perilously close to the point of no return.

Almost everything Trump has done has come straight from the authoritarian playbook. Every dictator, for example, has built on the accomplishments of his predecessors.

“Just as Hitler watched Mussolini’s actions carefully,” Ben-Ghiat writes, “so did Gaddafi learn from Lt Col Gamal Abdul Nasser’s 1952 overthrow of the monarchy in Egypt.” Then in the 1980s and 90s, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich served as models for Europeans looking for “a more radical form of conservatism”. Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America was echoed a year later by the Front National, with its “contract for France with the French”. Berlusconi’s Contract with Italians followed six years later.

In Egypt, Nasser hired “former Nazi propagandists for their expertise in antisemitic messaging”. In Zaire, from 1965, Mobutu Sese Seko’s media handlers reimagined Leni Riefenstahl’s image of Hitler descending from the sky by opening the television news each night with a picture of the dictator’s face, hovering up in the clouds.

The parallels between Trump and his role models are endless. Ben-Ghiat writes of “watching Trump retweet neo-Nazi propaganda, call for the imprisonment [of Hillary Clinton] and lead his followers in loyalty oaths at rallies seemed all too familiar”– and how it filled her “with dread”.

Before the Putin-Trump bromance there was Putin and Berlusconi, grinning at each other from Zavidovo to Sardinia. The way Trump talked about Mexicans was hardly different from Hitler’s words about the Jews or Berlusconi’s about Africans. The Italian media mogul and prime minister was himself just a pale imitation of Mussolini. In the pre-war period, he was responsible for the deaths of 700,000 Libyans, Eritreans, Somalis and Ethiopians.

Every authoritarian regime has seen a crucial alliance between big business and the dictator, from Putin and his oligarchs to Hitler and German industrialists and Trump and the Wall Street elite. The German businessman Ernst von Hanfstaengl, Ben-Ghiat writes, introduced a “cleaned-up Hitler to the moneyed social circles that mattered” – just as Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman helped legitimize Trump with tens of millions in campaign contributions to him and his Republican allies.

Like all his role models, Ben-Ghiat sees in Trump a “drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain. The men, women and children he governs have value in his eyes only insofar as they … fight his enemies and adulate him publicly. Propaganda lets him monopolize the nation’s attention, and virility comes into play as he poses as the ideal take-charge man.”

The US has done so much to promote authoritarianism abroad during the last 100 years, it’s actually surprising it took so long before we had to confront it at home.

When Mussolini desperately needed international legitimacy and economic aid in 1926, it was a fascist proselytizer and JP Morgan partner Thomas Lamont who rescued him, brokering a $100m US government loan. Fifty years later, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger told CIA director Richard Helms to make Chile’s “economy scream”, so Gen Augusto Pinochet could overthrow the socialist Salvador Allende. Kissinger and William F Buckley became fervent Pinochet apologists, even as thousands were tortured and disappeared.

Benito Mussolini tests a new type of gas bomb, in Rome in 1935.
Benito Mussolini tests a new type of gas bomb, in Rome in 1935. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images
In our own time, Trump has never criticized Putin for poisoning his enemies or even putting bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan. He has privately boasted about saving the skin of Mohammed bin Salman, after the CIA concluded the Saudi prince had ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for the Washington Post.

To Ben-Ghiat, the forced separation of nearly 70,000 children from their parents at the Mexican border “brings Trump’s practices in line with states like Hitler’s Germany and Pinochet’s Chile, where children were taken from Jewish, leftist and indigenous parents to be raised by more ‘appropriate’ individuals … Citing freezing temperatures, 24-hour lights, and lack of hygiene and medical care, Dr Dolly Lucio Sevier compared conditions” in camps in Texas “to those of ‘torture facilities’”.

Here's something to give thanks for this Thanksgiving: our democracy survived
Art Cullen
Read more
We can be grateful that the assorted criminals and white supremacists Trump chose to fill so many of the highest positions were too incompetent to keep this descent into fascism going any longer.

But most of all we owe gigantic thanks to the 80 million decent Americans who voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It is because of their courage and determination that our badly corroded but still functioning democratic apparatus has proved able to survive. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat makes all too clear, if we had gone any deeper into this four-year tunnel of doom, none might have escaped it.

What a gigantic load of glittering horsecrap.

GFY !

Troll Farm.

They breed like rats here.

The republicans are the majority, no matter what the corrupt media says. Good grossly outnumbers evil on this race. There’s way more good in the USA than bad. Trump has won this election………by a landslide . The democrats would not have to have cheated(and got caught) if they had the votes. No reason to cheat if you can win. When this is said and done a huge majority of the USA will thank all who stood for freedom.

The Boston Globe
In interview with ‘60 Minutes,’ Chris Krebs debunks Trump’s baseless election fraud accusations
Shannon Larson 5 hrs ago
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The Boston Globe logoIn interview with ‘60 Minutes,’ Chris Krebs debunks Trump’s baseless election fraud accusations

In a decision that received swift criticism from legal analysts, scholars, and elected officials alike, President Trump fired the nation’s top federal election security official after he repeatedly knocked down the president’s unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.

Christopher Krebs, who held the position of director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency until his firing via a tweet on Nov. 17, was regarded as a highly respected member of his administration.


He spoke publicly for the first time since his dismissal with Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” in an interview that aired Sunday night.

The lifelong Republican was appointed by Trump two years ago to lead the agency, which is responsible for securing computer systems in places where a breach may have dire consequences. Formerly the director of cybersecurity policy at Microsoft, Krebs was tasked with the job following Russia’s 2016 election interference campaign.

Krebs said while he’s not a public servant anymore, the conspiracy theories and falsehoods that are continuing to be peddled about the security of the election have motivated him to defend the integrity of the process.

“It’s hard once you take that oath to uphold and defend the constitution from threats foreign and domestic, it’s hard to walk away from that,” he said. “And if I can reinforce or confirm for one person that the vote was secure, the election was secure, then I feel like I’ve done my job.”


For more than three years, Krebs said, his agency dedicated their time to gaming out “every possible scenario for how a foreign actor could interfere with an election.” Ultimately, his team shifted some of their focus to paper ballots.

“Paper ballots give you the ability to audit, to go back and check the tape and make sure that you got the count right,” Krebs said. “And that’s really one of the keys to success for a secure 2020 election. 95 percent of the ballots cast in the 2020 election had a paper record associated with it. Compared to 2016, about 82 percent.”

With a paper record, he explained, officials are granted the ability to prove that “there was no malicious algorithm or hacked software that adjusted the tally of the vote.”

Krebs pointed to Georgia as an example, which has machines that tabulate the vote. When the state was ordered to hold a hand recount, the outcome was consistent with the machine vote.

“That tells you that there was no manipulation of the vote on the machine count side. And so that pretty thoroughly, in my opinion, debunks some of these sensational claims out there — that I’ve called nonsense and a hoax, that there is some hacking of these election vendors and their software and their systems across the country,” Krebs said.

He added: “It’s — it’s just — it’s nonsense.”

On the day of the Nov. 3 election, Krebs organized a team in his command center to defend the electoral process. Among those included were the Department of Defense Cyber Command, the National Security Agency, the FBI, the Secret Service, and representatives from the Election Assistance Commission, Krebs said.

Election equipment vendors — individuals on the ground who know if there are any issues with their systems — as well as representatives from state and local government were also present, he said.

There was no indication or evidence of “any sort of hacking or compromise of election systems” before or after the election, Krebs said.


Despite this — and facing a growing reality he had lost the election — Trump began his campaign to overturn the results on Nov. 5, throwing out baseless accusations that it was rigged. And only days after his remarks at the White House, the president tweeted that machines from the Dominion Voting Systems had deleted millions of votes.

In response, CISA and its partners issued the following statement: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes or changed votes or was in any way compromised.”

Krebs said in the interview that he still “stands by that.”

While Krebs said he doesn’t know if he was “necessarily surprised” by the president’s decision to terminate him, it wasn’t how he “wanted to go out.”

“I think the thing that upsets me the most about that is I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to my team. And I’d worked with them for three and a half years, in the trenches,” Krebs said, appearing to get teary-eyed. “Building an agency, putting CISA on the national stage. And I love that team.”

Since Joe Biden was declared the president-elect on Nov. 7, the Trump administration has engaged in a number of efforts to change the outcome of the election, with lawyers filing a plethora of suits — without evidence of fraud — and demanding recounts in key states. The vast majority of the court rulings have not gone in the president’s favor — often met with blistering dismissals from the judge in charge.


When Krebs watched Rudy Giuliani speak at the Republican National Headquarters on Nov. 19 — where he alleged election fraud as a brown liquid dripped down the sides of his face — Krebs said he found the act “upsetting” for all it stood for in his eyes.

“What I saw was an apparent attempt to undermine confidence in the election, to confuse people, to scare people. It’s not me, it’s not just CISA,” Krebs said. “It’s the tens of thousands of election workers out there that had been working nonstop, 18-hour days, for months. They’re getting death threats for trying to carry out one of our core democratic institutions, an election.”

He added: “And that was, again, to me, a press conference that I just — it didn’t make sense. What it was actively doing was undermining democracy. And that’s dangerous.”

Despite all the “farcical claims” being peddled by Trump and his team, Krebs said that the proof the election ran orderly and smoothly is “in the ballots.”

“The recounts are consistent with the initial count, and to me, that’s further evidence, that’s confirmation that the systems used in the 2020 election performed as expected, and the American people should have 100 percent confidence in their vote,” he said.


The presidential electors will cast their ballots on Dec. 14, which should settle the election saga once and for all before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20 — even though Trump has vowed he won’t concede.

Krebs told “60 Minutes” that it was ironic the disinformation campaign surrounding the election came not from foreign agents as feared, but from the White House itself.

“There is no foreign power that is flipping votes. There’s no domestic actor flipping votes,” Krebs said. “I did it right. We did it right. This was a secure election.””

Though I believe there was election fraud, and believe that the Democrats did indeed use the mail in ballots as the way to claim victory, I have to strongly disagree with you on several points.

First off, the Republicans are not the majority, at least not in the total numbers nationwide. The number of people nationwide who identify as Republicans or Democrats are about a 50/50 split, with the rest claiming to be Independent. The Republican Party does have the lead in the number of states that they control, which is what is enabling us to hold onto the Senate.

Next, while good may indeed outnumber evil in this presidents race, it does not do so by much, as the number of people who see nothing wrong with cheating to win is much more so than you might believe.

Lastly, Trump did not, and never was going to win in a landslide. I believe that had this been a fair and honest election, his margin of victory would have been about the same in 2020 as it was in 2016, with Biden probably winning the national popular vote, and Trump winning in the.Electoral College. This country is irrevocably split, and for every enthusiastic Trump supporter, than is one that favors the Democrats. The one and only thing in our favor is that we are in control of the majority of states, although that number is in danger of being lost, and if that happens, Conservatives in this country are screwed.

First I don’t need an internet troll to feed me leftist propaganda. Secondly, the Republicans better find a way to play the cheating game better than the Democrats in 2022.

It continually astounds me that these leftist idiots can sit there and claim there is "absolutely no evidence that the election was rigged and stolen." Just goes to show the lack of intelligence among them.

He would think that you are a pillow biting troll who is on ignore.

Copy and paste
Big deal

Since when do, news sites, pick a President?? This is all BS until the electoral college votes and the court cases are decided. Typical commies, say it enough till it is perceived as true.

Why do people put RR on such a pedestal, that homo signed a letter to help push republicans to support Clinton’s weapons ban. And that’s just one example.