Ruth Ben-Ghiat

“Trump is a marketing master…he’s very dangerous because he knows exactly how to communicate.”

“… authoritarians are continually testing the boundaries to see what they can get away with, and everything he does is a challenge to Democrats to mount some response against him,”

“Trump will become far more aggressive in the wake of the Mueller Report.”

“Now with Trump, he uses fascist tactics. One of them is the testing of the population, the media and the elites at the beginning. This is so key. There are many things Trump does that are fascistic without having to become a one-party state dictator.”

“Only certain people are America to Trump…he’s very purposefully shaping the image of American government to fit the white nationalist policy he believes in.”

“Authoritarians always tell you what they are doing to do.”

“Donald Trump is unfit to be President of America”

“The authoritarian wants us to lose our faith in our ears and our eyes, what we read and what we observe, so that we can be more dependent on him. ‘Reality is what I say it is.’ So it’s very, very dangerous that he is doing this with regard to the biggest index of democracy, which is free and fair elections.”

“There is no doubt that Trump has authoritarian inclinations. His labelling of the press as the ‘enemy of the people,’ use of threat, … need for loyalty, humiliation of all those around him, and admiration of leaders who have stifled democracy, are merely some of the qualities that he has in common with authoritarians past and present.”

“These rulers, when they’re still on their way up, they weaponize their bodies and their words. Authoritarians always tell you what they’re going to do.”