Ben-Ghiat talked about a “moral collapse” in the GOP and Trump’s domestication of the party until it’s “become his personal tool.
Trump “tried to overthrow the government” following his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, noted the author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,”
And “the genius of what he did, seen from a diabolical authoritarian perspective, is that he targeted Republicans as well as Democrats,” she continued.
Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, went after his own then-Vice President Mike Pence and it showed “from an authoritarian perspective, is that no one was off-limits,” said Ben-Ghiat.
“Republicans were calling their family members, they thought they were going to die that day, and then they have had to kind of forget that trauma and publicly debase themselves by popping up and saying, ‘Yes, we’re here for you, leader,’” she added. Authoritarianism “doesn’t only require you to betray others, it requires you to lose your own conscience,” she said.
Watch from the 7-minute mark here: