Donald Trump's post-inaugural rally was intended to project "royal" authority to keep Republican lawmakers in line, according to MSNBC's Joe Scarborough.

Bitterly cold temperatures forced his swearing-in ceremony indoors at the Capitol rotunda, and he held a celebration afterward at the Capital One Arena, where thousands gathered to hear the new president speak and sign executive orders while surrounded by law enforcement groups and marching bands.

The entire panel of MSNBC's "The Weekend" was left speechless before dissolving into nervous laughter after a noted expert on authoritarianism detailed how Donald Trump managed to get himself re-elected and what to expect now that voters have handed him another four years in office.

Co-host Michael Steele prompted historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat with, "I want to get your thoughts of what we can now say is the emerged, the realized form of American fascism that the American people, by some 50-plus percent decided, 'Yes, let's do that.'"

"I mean there is much to say," she began. "We are here now, you know, Donald Trump was very skilled at conditioning Americans to think that democracy and American democracy in particular was failing."

"He called America a garbage can. He spread with his allies disinformation about the economy, said that America was failing and praised foreign dictators so he could bolster his own idea of leadership, which is 'I alone can fix it,'" she elaborated.

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"And all the slogans we have seen for years from him add up to this kind of strong men model of leadership which depends on having an enemy and an internal enemy, the enemy within," she continued.

"So you can justify these kind of crackdowns on the vulnerable, these repressions," she predicted. " And so this is all very unfortunate but he did a good job of conditioning over and over. We've have had eight years of this, Americans to see democracy is inferior to something else. That something else would be strong men ruled by him."

After she concluded, there was a long pause before Steele and co-host Symone Sanders Townsend simultaneously uttered, "Hmmm," which then led to a smattering of nervous laughter before turning to guest George Conway.

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As soon as she fell, Deborah Buttgereit knew she couldn’t avoid going to the hospital.

“I could hear the bones moving around in my elbow,” said Buttgereit, who was 60 when she slipped on a patch of ice in December outside her apartment in Bozeman, Montana.

For months, the complaints have rolled in from parts of the country hit by natural disasters: The Federal Emergency Management Agency was moving far too slowly in sending aid to communities ravaged by floods and hurricanes, including in central Texas and North Carolina. Many officials were blaming Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, whose agency oversees FEMA.

“I can’t get phone calls back,” Ted Budd, the Republican senator from North Carolina, told a newspaper this month, describing his attempts to reach Noem’s office. “I can’t get them to initiate the money. It’s just a quagmire.” The delays were caused in part by a new policy announced by DHS that requires Noem’s personal sign-off on expenses over $100,000, several news outlets reported.