The New Republic's Greg Sargent on Wednesday spoke with Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of rhetoric and communication at Texas A&M University, to break down what he described as the "bizarre, menacing" comments made by President-elect Donald Trump during his Tuesday press conference.
Mercieca took particular note of Trump openly boasting that his threats got Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to cave to his demands to end Facebook's fact-checking program entirely.
"That’s how authoritarians keep power," she said. "That’s how they gain and keep power and that’s how they maintain a compliant media that does and says what they want to do and say. The first thing that an autocrat does ... So someone like Mussolini taking power, someone like Hitler taking power, but not just them, all of them—the first thing they do is they want to control the media."
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And given that Zuckerberg has never been about defending free speech and is all about padding his own pockets, she added, it wasn't at all surprising to see him bend the knee to Trump's demands.
She also discussed the rhetorical strategy behind Trump's nonstop repetition of easily disproven falsehoods, such as lies about the 2020 election and the deadly riots at the United States Capitol building carried out by his supporters.
"Authoritarians use just that fire hose model of lying to create unreality," she contended. "They create this sense that nothing is true, create nihilism in a population. Everything is a lie. None of it matters. Again, authoritarians are cognitively irresponsible, if you have one takeaway from our conversation. That means that they want the power, an unquestioned power, to say what is true, to say what is real, to say what is good, what is bad, who is a friend, who is an enemy, and they don’t want anyone to ever question them. One strategy is to lie so much that people just give up."