‘Rule of the lawless’: what does the authoritarian playbook look like?

Donald Trump has glibly remarked that he would be “a dictator on day one” if elected to a second term, and experts on authoritarianism say we should take him seriously.

The supreme court’s ruling earlier this month giving presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution heightened the risk that Trump could follow through with that plan.

“It is a democratic emergency,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and professor of Italian studies whose work has focused on fascism.

In her most recent book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ben-Ghiat explores the conditions in which democracies, including vibrant and apparently healthy ones, can fall – and the “playbook” aspiring authoritarians use to take power. According to Ben-Ghiat, Trump’s habit of maligning immigrants, casting himself as a victim, and attempting to discredit the media all align with the playbook.

The Guardian spoke to Ben-Ghiat about the contemporary threat of authoritarianism in the US.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

You have written and spoken extensively about the “authoritarian playbook”. What does that look like?

At its most basic, authoritarianism is when the executive branch of government domesticates or overwhelms or politicizes the judiciary, critiques and tries to silence the press, and when the leader has a party that he’s made into his personal tool, and in general, seeks to remove or neutralize any threats to his power.

As I described them in my book, the tools of rule are one: propaganda, so that the leader can go against the press early on; two: corruption itself – buying people off and getting a compliant civil service; the use of violence, which ranges from intimidation and threats to physical harm and the elimination of critics; and machismo – it’s the leader who’s the man of the people, but he’s also the man above all other men, and he’s the savior of the nation.

Trump just got a huge gift from the supreme court last week with the ruling that presidents enjoy broad immunity from criminal prosecution, and I’m wondering what exactly we should be preparing for now that he’s been emboldened by the court.

Trump is part of the category of authoritarians who run for office, or they run to get back into office, because they have charges against them, and they must get into power so they can make their legal problems go away. Regular politicians don’t want to run for office if they have indictments or charges, but the strongman must run for office because he must make himself feel safe from prosecution.

Authoritarianism is about replacing the rule of law with rule by the lawless.

It’s about taking away the rights of many such as voting rights or reproductive rights, and giving the leader and the elites more liberties to do what they want to do without fear of regulations or prosecution. So the fact that the supreme court agreed to hear the immunity case and then gave him immunity – even if he kills political opponents – is the autocrat’s fantasy.

So I guess preparing for the most dire possible outcome is something that we should be considering at this point – like the possibility of Trump throwing political opponents in jail, or, you know, assassinating them.

The United States is an outlier nation in having someone running for office who staged a violent coup to try and keep himself in power, illegally. In other places, where these are called “self-coups,” like in Guatemala, Indonesia or Peru, the leader ended up in jail or had to go into exile in the United States.

Trump is also uniquely dangerous because he has long indulged in fantasies of violence, and he made violence his brand. This is someone who started off his campaign saying he could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any followers. And he has used his rallies for almost 10 years now to preach that violence should be seen in a positive light. He’d say in the old days, you could beat up people, and that violence is necessary, sometimes, to “save the nation”.

This is someone who talks about executions. The reason he admires foreign leaders such as Xi and Putin is that they have the power to execute people and pay no consequence.

Something we’ve been reporting on at the Guardian is Trump’s habit of taking accusations from his political opponents, and spinning it back at them. For example, promising to go after his enemies, but then simultaneously claiming that he’s the victim of a witch-hunt, or claiming that actually, Joe Biden is a threat to democracy. What’s the function of this kind of “I’m rubber, you’re glue” rhetoric as a form of propaganda?

So you mentioned two separate things, and both of them are classic authoritarian maneuvers. The first is depicting yourself as simultaneously the defender of the nation, the all powerful man who can protect people and at the same time, the victim.

For Mussolini, the enemy of Italy – which was a poor nation – was the League of Nations. Today, Trump says the enemy is the deep state. Erdogan talks about witch hunts. Berlusconi talked about witch hunts by the press and prosecutors. It makes people get on board with any aggressive actions that this leader takes, because it becomes self defense. So for example with January 6, Trump said that he was a victim of a witch hunt and that the election had been stolen from him, and he summoned everybody to the rally, and he said, If you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have any country any more.

The other thing that goes with this is the prospect of some kind of existential threat – in fact, what does Trump say? He says: “They’re going after me, but I’m just standing in the way. They’re really going after you.”

From Putin to Orbán, all these authoritarians say that democracy is the real tyranny, and they present their way – whether it’s fascism or Trumpism – as the way to free the people. And so this idea that Biden is a threat to democracy – this is part of it.

Any aggression that Trump does is because he’s the defender of freedom, and the Democrat represents real tyranny.

And this goes into Project 2025, with its fake populism, which says, we are going to liberate the American people and allow them to have “self government from the tyranny of the administrative state”.

So it’s very seductive rhetoric, but it’s an inversion, so that democracy becomes the threat and tyranny and fascism, or whatever we’re calling Trumpism, becomes freedom, and that is how in history, we’ve gotten into situations where mass repression is hailed as something positive.

Think about the gates of Auschwitz: “Work makes free.” It’s a whole scary, horrible lineage. When you have this kind of inversion, I call this the upside-down world of authoritarianism.

I think there’s this common idea that American institutions are so strong they couldn’t possibly be worn down to the point of where we are facing mass repression. Or that a second Trump term might look illiberal, but that we could never go down the path of full dictatorship. What do you say to people who have that kind of strong faith in American democracy to persevere?

When I did the research for my book, I saw that around the world, people have always been unprepared, and thought that their institutions would hold. For example, Germany was one of the most sophisticated nations in the world in the late 20s and early 30s; it had one of the highest rates of literacy, it was known for science, technology, graphic design – it was so advanced, and people didn’t think in Germany that this ranting lunatic, Hitler, could possibly do the damage he did. And then he came in, and he did things very quickly.

And then in Chile, a coup occurred – and that’s like instant martial law, repression. The conservative Christian Democrats, who were the leading party, actually thought that the junta and Pinochet would establish order in the country and then give back power to them.

So my point is that it can be very scary to think that you’re in a situation of true emergency, and people are reluctant to see what’s in front of them – sometimes, because that means they might have to get out of their comfort zone and do something and become political in ways they they’ve never been before.

When Trump declared he was running for president, many major media, not the Guardian, but many major US media, they didn’t even mention January 6 in the announcement.

I don’t like to blame the media, so I don’t want to overstate it, but there are many ways in which the American public has been encouraged to feel that it’s not an emergency, when in fact it is a democratic emergency.

On the topic of the US media, I also wanted to ask how you see the media rising to the occasion in documenting the rise of the far right, and where do you see it failing to do so?

One of the best ways to go after authoritarians, whether left- or right-wing, is to investigate their corruption, and that’s one of the most dangerous things to do. The big, powerful papers that have resources, like the New York Times and the Washington Post, have done really good investigations into Trump’s corruption. In that way, they’ve been superb.

In other ways, the problem is that we have a very unique situation. We are a bipartisan republic in which one party has exited democracy. Here all the GOP lawmakers, they go on talk shows, and none of them will commit to accepting the results. They have exited democracy. And they also support January 6. They don’t disavow January 6 at all. They support Trump, even though he’s a convicted felon.

All of their behaviors are authoritarian, but the media has continued to have a coverage model that is suited for two parties that are in one political system.

On a similar point, I also wanted to ask about the role that liberals have historically played in either resisting rising fascism or, on the other hand, enabling it. Where do you see the Democratic party, as the largest political organ representing an alternative to the rightwing, doing correctly here? And where has the Democratic party failed?

There’s been a kind of timid stance in the Democratic party to be fully progressive. And if you look at what Biden and Harris have actually done, they have been one of the most progressive, socially-conscious administrations in history. Not only have they improved the economy and jobs, but they have stood up for America as a multiracial democracy, very, very strongly with their programs, with their legislation, they have helped working people.

So one of the lessons from the history of authoritarianism is if you have a far-right authoritarian threat, you shouldn’t move to the center, or even become center right, thinking you can placate. You have to have a progressive alternative. And in the Netherlands, in Israel, in Italy, in Hungary, for example, the opposition failed because it did not make a really strong progressive stance when faced with a far-right authoritarian. I think that the Democrats have not gone far enough in this.

At this point, what do we do to oppose this agenda?

I think Trump is one of the most successful propagandists in history. I know that sounds exaggerated, but he managed working not in a closed state, like Mussolini or Putin, but in a full democracy, with a pluralistic media, he still managed to convince tens of millions of people that he won the election in 2020. That’s how skilled he is, and he continues to have this enormous, enormous impact. So there’s a crisis of disinformation.

One of the best things we can do as regular people is to try and educate those around us as to the outcome. What is going to happen if Trump comes back in, how is it going to affect them?