Authoritarian expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat warned that the Republican Party is now the party of tyranny.
Speaking to MSNBC on Sunday for a special ahead of the first presidential debate Ben-Ghiat warned that the GOP has entered a kind of "spiral of radicalization."
"It is now a party that is dependent on lying, on corruption because election denial, a third of the House, Republican members are election deniers," she told co-host Ali Velshi. "Election denial is not just, denying a fact or a belief, having a false belief. It's an act of corruption. It is refusing to recognize the rule of law and the rules of democracy. They are also dependent on violence. The point is that when a party becomes yoked to the destiny of a lawless authoritarian. His goal is to debase them and bring them down to his level. And he makes them complicit in his crimes. And so, a kind of spiral of radicalization happens where the party, and now the party elites —some of them are under indictment, under investigation — they become more extreme and they take positions they never would've imagined they would take. This is why seeing the journey of this party, that's why I am calling GOP 2024 a race to the bottom."
Mehdi Hasan recalled a conversation they had where she compared Donald Trump to Mussolini.
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"Not just with the lies, but the fake humor," Hasan said. "It is so interesting what you say about power and the debasing of voters with dishonesty."
He went on to quote the CBS News poll, out this weekend, showing that Trump gets more than 60 percent support from the Republican Party and further that 70 percent of those Republicans trust Trump over their own friends and family members.
"They know he is a liar. It is to do more with the fact that this is about power, right?" asked Hasan. "This is about the followers and the cult leader."
She warned that some of them do believe Trump as if he is a cult leader and it started in the early days when he demanded a "loyalty oath."
"I have a line in my book, Strongmen, which Trump is in it, so is Mussolini, they believe him because they believe in him," Ben-Ghiat said, simply. "What Trump has managed to do is create this alternate reality, and to set himself up as the only arbiter of truth. There are those people. Rhen there are other people who don't believe him, and there are studies actually showing that some people like the fact that he's, like, a rogue figure and that he is kind of not telling the truth. That's part of his lawless appeal. There are many reasons people will say they trust him over their own friends and family, but from where I sit, the success of Trump as having a real personality cult that rivals those of other leaders I've studied."
See their full conversation in the video below or at the link here.