Ruth Ben-Ghiat

“This is not, strictly speaking, a constitutional crisis in that it was perfectly legal for Trump to fire the FBI director. What’s at issue is the politicization of the judiciary and intelligence which he’s been doing all along and the method.”

“Democracy is threatened in drips. You have drips and drips….then you have these [huge] events.”

“this creates a political discourse that emphasizes negative elements, that paints a picture of a society in crisis that needs a strong leader to save it. So you have people like Trump asserting that nothing is working, everything is a mess, and only they can set things right and ‘Drain the swamp.’ By the way, it was Mussolini who coined that slogan. Originally, he meant it literally: to invest in infrastructure and reclaim malarial swamps to transform them into beautiful modern towns. And then it became a metaphor for reclaiming, rehabilitating all of society. And the trick was, of course, that some people could not be rehabilitated. In World War II, this ‘draining’ included the Jews, many of whom had supported fascist politics early on.

“You find yourself with a state that is transformed out of all recognition, but it’s still ‘democracy.'”

“I think we’re definitely living in a new era,” says Ben-Ghiat, author of Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema. “We’re also being fed a series of crisis narratives by the new right, which would like us to be in a new era where everything is decaying and they are the answer; they are the saviours.”

“We put all the blame on Trump but the GOP has seen in him a kind of vehicle to get certain radical things they want done and [to push] a certain cultural shift in the nation.”

“It took people by surprise – What Mussolini did, he came from the left, the revolutionary left. He was a socialist.”

“There’s a template for authoritarian rule….So far, [Trump is] checking a lot of the boxes.”

“If we rate Franco and Mussolini as ten on a scale of classic fascist demagogues, Trump might get seven.”