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I had an enlightening conversation with Mary Trump on the logic of authoritarian complicity and why Republicans debase themselves for Donald Trump. We discussed Todd Blanche and GOP politicians such as Josh Hawley who were threatened with harm on January 6 and then have had to forget that trauma and praise their attackers as patriots. It’s how Trump broke the party for good.

The transcript is below for those who prefer to read. I hope you find it helpful.

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Mary Trump: Ruth, I think one of the challenges is the sense of being overwhelmed by so many different things happening, and I think in some way the antidote to that is to find the throughlines that help people understand that all of this is of a piece, and I wanted to start with this great piece that you wrote about Todd Blanche and the role of autocrats’ personal lawyers in general.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: To understand Trump and Blanche, you have to understand personalist rule, which is a form of authoritarianism where institutions, including the judiciary, are retooled to protect the leader, to indulge his whims, to boost his ego with personality cults, and very importantly, solve the leader’s financial, personal, and legal problems once and for all. So the judiciary, as we’ve seen in our country, is always targeted, and making your personal lawyer Attorney General is part of this process.

For this essay I decided to look at the fate of the personal lawyers of other authoritarians. Some go to jail, like Silvio Berlusconi,’s lawyer, Cesare Previti. Berlusconi tried to appoint his personal lawyer to be Minister of Justice, which is the equivalent of Attorney General, but the Italian president vetoed that, and Previti ended up going to jail for bribing judges on Berlusconi’s behalf. So one lesson is that sometimes these people are supposed to take the fall for the leader. Michael Cohen is an example.

Another strategy is to have your personal lawyer be a member of parliament, so they are voting on laws that will help their most important client, and their salaries are paid by taxpayers while they are also solving the problems of the autocrat. This was the case with Orban in Hungary, it is the case with Erdogan in Turkey. So this is the context for Blanche’s elevation.

Mary Trump: I think it’s worth pointing out that in the case of Blanche, he had a fairly respectable career as a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York. We of course understand why Donald would want somebody like Blanche to do his bidding, but why would somebody like Blanche be willing not just to put himself in thrall to somebody like Donald, but to use his power to dismantle the rule of law in America? I don’t think I’m overstating to say that the DOJ as it currently exists is Donald Trump’s personal defense firm, and it is antithetical to the rule of law in America.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: The Attorney General is supposed to represent the interests of the American people, and instead, with personalist rule, he ends up being the leader’s personal attack dog and defender.

You asked an essential question about complicity. Some were always fanatics, such as Stephen Miller. Other people decide that they’re going to ride this wave of power, they want power and they see they can have incredible power at a fateful time, and so they go with it, and they put aside their conscience and they adopt other values, and they’re rewarded for those other values. That’s Blanche. Then, with leaders like Trump, the lawlessness gets institutionalized, it becomes the law of the land, and Blanche will take on the qualities of a fanatic as he helps with that.

Mary Trump: Let’s talk about Donald’s war of choice against Iran. His arrogance and his complete inability to admit that other people know more than he does has created this debacle. It’s emblematic of the just grotesque corruption and incompetence that he represents, and now we have this Air Force One incident where he got whisked away in a catering truck, which is a sign of just how pathetic and weak he is, as well as, of course, demonstrating that he does not care about anybody but himself.

And yet he continues to be surrounded by a significant number of people who are willing to debase themselves for a man who couldn’t care less if they lived or died. Blanche is an example of that. We’ve seen some of his public statements about Donald that are just cringe-inducing. We’ve seen cabinet meetings in which every cabinet secretary outdoes him or herself in bending the knee and making complete fools of themselves. And now we have a situation where Donald potentially put people’s lives at risk knowing that he was doing that. And I can remind us that he did the same thing on January 6th.

Can you talk us through that? Because it’s like somebody who smokes four packs of cigarettes a day knowing that they could cause cancer, but telling themselves: that’s not going to happen to me. It’s like, as long as I debase myself and stay as loyal as he could possibly be, Donald will never turn on me. I will always be his favorite. What is going on there? And is there any example you can think of that really exemplifies how far people are willing to go for this guy?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I’m glad you mentioned January 6th because it was a very important psychological training for the GOP. So just to review, Trump incited a violent mob to go after Republicans as well as Democrats who were there at the Capitol. And those Republicans called their loved ones thinking they were going to die. They called their loved ones to say goodbye. But they are not supposed to remember that now.

Everyone saw Senator Josh Hawley do a fist pump to egg on the violent resisters and then run for his life. But then Hawley had to forget his trauma, forget he was running for his life, and move on and start calling his own attackers patriots. When you put someone in mortal harm and then ask them to praise those who attacked them, and make that praise the party line, you can break individuals and you can break a party. That’s what happened on January 6. It shocked the party into more complete submission and there it has remained.

The Air Force One incident is just another example of Trump being very obvious about letting people know he doesn’t care about them and that it’s a use and discard relationship. But that will not stop those people from continuing in their jobs because that’s how authoritarians’ systems have always operated. There are lots of stories in Strongmen about that.

Mary Trump: And the only one who never gets held accountable is Donald. it’s so weird to me that the people Donald chose to go with him in the canter truck were Natalie Harp, a 35-year-old, very blonde woman whose job it seems is to be by Donald’s side 24 hours a day; Walt Nauta, his co-conspirator in the Mar-a-Lago stolen classified documents case; and Dan Scavino, who used to be his caddy.

And in addition to the Washington press corps, about which we know Donald doesn’t care, being left on the plane, we have cabinet secretaries, Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, and advisor Stephen Miller, whom you think would be Donald’s closest confidants. So does it tell you anything about who Donald chose and whom he left behind? It’s bizarre.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: These are all people who are tied to him personally rather than having positions in the GOP. Natalie Harp is available 24 hours a day. She’s the one who physically posts the rants that go on all night. But she also sends him texts that say, you know, my whole world is centered around you. So you could say that she knows how to play him, or you could say that she’s sincere and she really has made him her world. Imagine feeling that you are so close to the most powerful person in the world.

As for Nauta, who was Trump’s personal valet, we still don’t know what the fate of those classified intelligence documents at Mar-a-Lago has been, although Nauta was involved in their transfer. We don’t know what might have been sold, etc. I would bet Nauta has that information. So these are people who were involved in complicity also in his private spaces. Scavino makes sense because golf is a big deal for Trump and it’s how he makes money, when he golfs he is really promoting his golf courses.

Mary Trump: I did want to turn to Bill Cassidy. Just a reminder, Bill Cassidy is a medical doctor who, even though he knew better, voted to confirm the sociopath Robert Kennedy, who has already killed a lot of people and has every intention of killing more. What is up with Bill Cassidy and why is he doing this?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: It’s a classic example of authoritarian psychological dynamics. First you debase yourself, casting the decisive vote to approve Blanche as Attorney General, but you know in your heart that it’s wrong. And so as you do it, you get all emotional and your voice cracks and you say something like, I know I’m going to be judged negatively.

Then you do damage control because that moment of conscience was against the party line! You go on all the major news shows, and you explain to the public why your voice was cracking. You can’t say that your conscience was bothering you, so you say I was emotional because I am part of a history-making event, I am making a difference.

I’ve read about such behavior many times before around the world. Once again, as unique and mystifying as it might all feel in the moment, it is of a piece with authoritarian history. I think it’s important that we all understand that context.

Mary Trump: Ruth, you always make me feel infinitely more knowledgeable and smarter. And again, everybody needs to subscribe to Lucid, and you must read Ruth’s brilliant, brilliant book, Strongmen, if you haven’t already.

And if you have already read it, buy another copy and give it to somebody else, because it helped me understand so much of what we were dealing with while we were living through it. And that was sort of a tremendous gift at the time.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Mary, I always feel better talking with you, even though what we’re saying is not necessarily cheery, because I think we’re coming to an understanding together, and with your political and psychological expertise, I think it’s really valuable.

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On Friday, August 28, 1-2pmET, we’ll have our regular Q&A. Paying subscribers will receive a link at 10amET to register for the Zoom gathering.

Our guest will be the Australian journalist and best-selling author Sarah Wilson, author, most recently, of the book I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World. We’ll talk about maintaining hope, being resilient, and the feeling of living through a fateful and historic moment.

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This week has seen an escalation of the Donald Trump administration’s attacks on Canada, with shakedowns (threats of 50% tariffs), and tired attempts at delegitimizing Canadian sovereignty. We have witnessed infantile behavior from Bully No.1 (Trump attacking Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney while posting multiple photos of himself with his second most favorite murderous dictator, Kim Jung Un) and from Bully No. 2 (Vance, posing as the champion of “fairness,” warning Canada to “stop taking advantage of America.”)

Here are a few of the narratives in play in foreign far-right propaganda about Alberta.

Divide and Conquer: Encouraging Grievances and Secession

Vladimir Putin has never recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he has dedicated himself for decades to efforts to make democracies implode from within. This is why the Kremlin has long backed separatist and secessionist movements in democracies all over the world, Canada included.

Western Canadian separatism has its own history, as this Center for Strategic and International Studies report relates, one that is grounded in the idea that the region’s economic and political interests are not served by Central Canada. Separatists such as Tamara Lich, a proponent of “Wexit,” were prominent in the convoy movement that brought together anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists and other extremists to disrupt and destabilize Canadian democracy.

Now those sentiments have gained traction. On October 19, Albertans will answer an official, non-binding referendum question: should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or pursue a future binding referendum on separation?

The idea of Wexit is that Alberta and other Western provinces would secede from Canada to gain independence. And that would serve the interests of Russia, by weakening Canada and depriving it of Alberta’s vast natural gas reserves and other national resource riches. That’s why the Kremlin has escalated its influence operations. From late 2025 onward, the Pravda News Network, Sputnik, RT, and a vast network of paid North American collaborators have stoked grievances about Alberta’s exploitation and brought extremist views into the mainstream.

MAGA Energy “Diplomacy”

The plunderers at the White House have a different aim. They covet Alberta’s enormous natural gas reserves, which a recent study found to be six times more abundant than previously estimated. For MAGA, secession from Canada is just the starting point: the endgame is to put that American flag on Alberta, and claim the prize, or make Alberta more vulnerable to American shakedowns.

So MAGA propagandists have their marching orders: create momentum around Alberta becoming part of the United States.

“SECEDE AND JOIN THE USA,” is how Ed Daugherty, “Chief Content Officer” of several right-wing websites, communicated the party line to his 1.1 million followers on X. Here is the tortured reasoning: “We’d gain a red state, 2 GOP senators, beautiful land and natural resources. And Alberta would likely gain even more in return.”

What exactly Alberta would gain from becoming part of Trump’s America is unclear. But the Russian and American players in this propaganda game know that the point is to weaken Canadian democracy.

Leave it to Bully No.3, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, to present the most sophisticated argument for Albertan secession. “People are talking,” said Bessent, parroting Bully No.1’s rhetoric. “People want sovereignty. They want what the US has got.” In fact, the US wants what Alberta has got: exceedingly valuable natural gas. Putin understands that reasoning.

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Our guest will be Barb McQuade, who is a professor from practice at Michigan Law School, and former US attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, and the terrific new book The Fix: Saving America From the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government.

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During the Cold War, America played a double game, fostering democratic ideals and culture in Europe while backing coups to install right-wing dictators in other parts of the world. That game is over. Now, President Donald Trump and his fellow saboteurs are taking down the world’s most important democracy so that right-wing and selected Communist tyrants can prosper.

Autocrats often tell us what they intend to do, and Trump was no exception. He ran for president on a platform of helping some of the world’s most murderous leaders. During his campaign, he repeatedly “joked” about becoming a dictator himself, and declared at a June 2024 rally that a “smart president” would not consider North Korea, China, and Russia as enemies, and would “make them do great.”

In case this message was not clear enough, he asserted in October 2024 that America’s “enemy from within…the people actually running the government,” —United States Democrats—were “more dangerous…than Russia and China and other people.”

Then came the blitzkrieg tactics of early 2025. I spent those months writing essays to help us understand the unthinkable: America was being wrecked from within, at record speed, and was shifting from deterrent to enabler of autocratic expansionism. I forecast a “dialing back of America’s global soft and hard power footprint in the world” to “create a vacuum of American power and influence in the world that China, Russia, Turkey and other autocracies can fill.”

I also wanted us to have the right language to convey this exceptional moment in American history. I came up with four concepts that describe the qualities and operations of Trump’s government: Engineered Incompetence, National Sabotage, Plunder and Shakedown Operations, and Leader Self-Enrichment.

Twenty months later, all of these trends have tragically advanced, and the language is all too accurate. The Trump administration is kneecapping the country by wrecking American science, medicine, and education, creating the conditions for diseases to spread, while also perpetrating massive environmental depredation that makes natural disasters far more likely (and cutting FEMA funds).

The United States is also rolling back its soft and hard power presence in the world, retreating from intelligence and military alliances and commitments to democracies that made autocrats think twice about armed aggression, while forging partnerships with dictatorships.

The developments in this direction are, sadly, too numerous to list, but a few recent ones include:

• FBI Director Kash Patel has approved law enforcement partnerships with Russia and China (supposedly to combat transnational drug trafficking, cyber fraud and child sexual exploitation), and Patel will also visit Moscow in October, hosted by the FSB.

• The Pentagon is withdrawing U.S. military personnel from Baltic states and other areas vulnerable to Russian autocratic aggression. It also redeployed the USS George Washington to the Middle East, leaving the vast Pacific without any U.S. aircraft carrier, fueling “fears of a U.S. retreat from Asia” that leave Japan and other countries more exposed to Chinese imperialism.

Lest North Korean leader Kim Jong Un feel neglected, since he was included on the list to be made more successful:

• Trump also ordered military exercises with South Korea to be scaled back because they could be interpreted as “hostile” to North Korea and might disturb his “very good relationship” with Kim.

Kim benefits from Trump long feeling an affinity with him, in fact having told the world that “we fell in love” after a meeting during his first term. Kim benefits from Trump seeing him as important due to his heightened status as a supplier of troops and technology to Russia, and, crucially, as someone who has nuclear weapons. He has the kind of power Trump wants, he is helping Putin, and maybe one day he will even be open to a real estate development deal, as per the proposals made in a film made for Kim during Trump’s first administration.

Communists with Nukes and Absolute Power are OK for Trump

And that brings me to the hypocrisy of MAGA anti-Communist rhetoric. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is spearheading efforts in Latin America to prop up far-right leaders and encourage the exit of leftist ones, even recently hosting a “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism” that identified Marxists and Communists as the enemies of “civilization.”

The Communist dictatorships of China and North Korea are evidently exempted from this crusade. That’s because Trump’s “anti-Communism” is transactional. He is happy to enable Communist leaders who “count” because they have nuclear weapons and prop up Russia in its fight against Ukraine and can enter into dirty deals with him unencumbered by any scruples or scrutiny.

Behind Trump’s “anti-Communism” lies a fantasy of becoming just like current Communist Xi Jinping and former Communist Vladimir Putin (who stopped being a Communist only because Communism collapsed in Russia and Eastern Europe, to his great dismay).

Unfortunately for Trump, America is not a Communist regime, and he will never succeed in becoming a dictator. He has failed to consolidate power before becoming deeply unpopular. He may inflict huge damage on our beloved country, but it will backfire on him, and then he will be gone, and we will rebuild.

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Professor Acemoglu’s findings about the importance of community and giving people more voice in politics dovetail in part with a December 2025 Lucid essay on how large-scale, multi-national surveys have found that people want more democracy, not less:

Here is the video of our conversation. It is also posted on the Lucid home page and is available to everyone. A transcript is below. It has been edited for clarity.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat (RBG): Welcome, Daron. Congratulations on this new book, which offers recommendations on how to restore faith in democracy, including by embracing a “working-class liberalism” marked by policies that aim at shared prosperity, more value given to community, expanded public services, and more voice and self-government for people. Can you talk about these central ideas of the book?

Daron Acemoglu (DA): Let me take a step back and say I’m writing this as a believer in liberal ideas and in democracy. So part of the book is devoted to explaining why they are the best framework for our future, and why they’ve succeeded in the past. But the book also comes out of a belief that liberal democracy is in crisis: there is no sugarcoating it.

My proposals are around dealing with those problems at a time when technology, the nature of polarization, and the way we communicate are very different than in the past. But I believe the founding pledges of liberal democracy are still the same.

Shared prosperity, which means economic growth from which all segments of society will benefit, high quality widely available public services, that are so important and have always been sought by people throughout the last 200 years, and self-government, not just talk about how people are sovereign, etc., but real participation by people shaping their lives [through citizens assemblies, town halls, etc].

Community is so important, because it’s the nexus of all of these things. Local politics is where self-government takes clearest shape and where liberal ideas can spread.

RBG: I was pleasantly surprised to see that the book’s final chapter is entitled “Working Class Liberalism.” That should certainly be a priority right now, as we live through the most accelerated process of oligarchic concentration of power and subtraction of benefits that people depend on.

DA: It’s very important to go back to stating what might seem obvious: that rights are part of a contract and a compact of what can be a working class liberalism which is oriented not to elites, but to regular people, like back to basics.

RBG: The book also addresses the challenge posed to liberalism in an age of algorithms and AI. I really liked your discussion of the promise of what you call pro-worker AI.

DA: Let’s go back for one second to the diagnosis of the book. It starts with the rise of post-industrial society. And it has two aspects. One is the collapse of shared prosperity. And the way that I analyze that as an economist is the emphasis on automation. In the 1920s, 30s, 50s, 60s, there was an industrial formula for shared prosperity. Businesses would expand, they would innovate, but then they needed more labor. And within a democratic society, the way you get more labor is by paying higher wages.

You create jobs and you pay higher wages, and that’s a powerful pathway from business expansion to shared prosperity. Digital technologies, especially digital technologies used for automation, severed that link. Now you can grow and at the same time lay off workers because you can get robots to do those jobs.

And AI, at least as currently conceived as a technology which will do better than humans in everything, then is the apex of that automation agenda. And if it goes down that path, I think shared prosperity would become just a fantasy. And according to my diagnosis, liberal democracy would as well.

Are we doomed? No. I argue that AI can do many things. And in fact, it’s a technology that can provide information to everybody, including workers in many different sectors, to become more expert, to do new things, to develop new capabilities.

And that type of pro-worker AI is very consistent with shared prosperity. But that’s not where we’re heading, and that’s why it’s very important to think of AI’s future within a framework that’s informed by the future of liberal democracy.

The second aspect of algorithms is their role in our communication, which social media defines very clearly, but of course AI is going to play an important role there as well.

I am a free speech absolutist when it comes to people. I do not think that free speech should be restricted for people in any way, even when they are saying intolerant things, bigoted things, and even wrong things.

But free speech doesn’t apply to algorithms. We should not then say, oh well, then Facebook, Twitter, TikTok should be able to amplify the most incorrect messages in a way that creates more polarization. That’s not the same as free speech.

So we have to regulate what algorithms do to our free speech in order to protect the meaning of free speech, and also in order to protect information. You cannot hope that democracy will survive unless you provide people with accurate information.

RBG: My last question is about class, given that you discuss “working class liberalism” and “pro-worker AI.” Are you feeling as an economist that we need to bring class, understood in a non-Marxist way, back into our discussions?

DA: I do believe the emphasis on workers is very important. I do believe class broadly construed in non-Marxist term exactly like you said, as economic situation emphasizing the value of skills, et cetera, has to be brought back.

Capital-labor distinction is very important for policy, as I discuss in the last chapter, But I think the Marxist notion of class doesn’t fit the current environment. The industrial working class, the blue collar workers, they are a smaller and smaller fraction of the workforce. The industrial sector is still critical, but it’s not the future in the same way that many other occupations are. And we know that businesses will use the ample automation tools that AI and tech companies provide them with, and eliminate more jobs.

So that’s why labor organizations and workers themselves have to find the right compromise about how technology should be used, how workplaces should be organized in ways that benefit workers. That’s critical for shared prosperity and for democracy.

RBG: We have been talking with Daron Acemoglu, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, a professor at MIT, and author of the new book What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Thank you so much, Daron.

DA: Thank you, Ruth. This was a true pleasure. Thanks for your very kind words and for spending the time with me.

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This essay is a bit long but once I delved into the subject of personal lawyers of authoritarian leaders it was hard to stop. Many autocrats, Putin and Xi among them, don’t have designated personal lawyers, or ones that are known publicly, in any case. But those who do offer some interesting context for Todd Blanche and his likely dereliction of duty as Attorney General.

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The appointment of President Donald Trump’s personal criminal lawyer, Todd Blanche, as Attorney General, is the latest sign that America is experiencing a form of personalist rule. This is a form of autocracy which organizes governance around the self-preservation of a leader whose private interests prevail over national ones in shaping domestic and foreign policy.

While it is more common in established regimes, personalist rule can emerge in degraded democracies, such as Italy under Silvio Berlusconi, and in countries in transition from democracy to autocracy, which is the case with today’s America.

Personalist leaders have no interest in public welfare or serving the people. Holding public office is a vehicle of private enrichment for them, their families, and their allies, and a means of finally solving their abundant legal, financial, and other problems once and for all.

Having the right custodian of justice, who real job is freeing the autocrat from the obligations and burden of obeying the law, is key to success.

This essay places Blanche’s appointment in comparative perspective, looking at the fates and roles of other personal lawyers of autocrats. As we’ll see, the proprietary view personalist rulers have of their jobs means that quaint notions such as conflicts of interest, or the separation of public and private, do not apply.

Government institutions are “hollowed out” under autocracy, meaning that the civil service must lose its professional ethics and impartiality and do what the leader asks. Yet government institutions are also retooled and infused with new missions and priorities. Number One is: always defend the leader from prosecution, including by targeting anyone who tries to expose his wrongdoing, such as journalists, opposition politicians, lawyers, and judges who stand up for canons of judicial impartiality and rule of law.

In personalist states, government-allied media, politicians from the leader’s party, and government institutions, the judiciary included, devote time and resources to satisfying the leader’s personal vendettas and obsessions, as sycophants and toadies who serve as officials compete for his approval by translating his will into policy.

Historian Ian Kershaw described this situation in Nazi Germany as “working toward the Führer,” and the Third Reich provides one of the most extreme examples of the personalization of rule and justice. The Führerprinzip, or Leader Principle, decreed that Adolf Hitler’s will was superior to any written law.

Hitler’s Personal Lawyer

Hans Frank, an architect of the Leader Principle, served as Hitler’s personal lawyer starting in the Weimar Republic. Frank participated in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch as a stormtrooper, and attended the 1924 trial. He passed the bar in 1926 and started working for Hitler in 1927, representing the future Führer and other prominent Nazis in hundreds of trials. In 1931 he also became the Nazi Party’s legal advisor, a job he retained for over a decade.

Once Hitler came to power he appointed Frank to important posts: the Bavarian region Minister of Justice, Reich Minister without Portfolio (so he could fix Hitler’s messes under the radar), and the head of the Academy of German law and the National Socialist Jurists Association. Hitler’s legal needs were now taken care of by the state apparatus, but Frank parlayed his status as Hitler’s former personal counsel into positions that determined the norms of Nazi jurisprudence –including the idea that Hitler’s personal will was a source of authority beyond all law.

Frank is infamous for his role in Nazi atrocities as Governor-General of Poland from 1939 on, which accounted for his presence at the Nuremberg Trials and his war criminal conviction. At his 1946 trial, he testified that he only met with Hitler in person six times during the Third Reich. This seems unlikely, given their long history, and a statement by Frank quoted in Gerry O’Connor’s book, The Butcher of Poland, sums up the exhilaration that came with feeling needed by a man who seemed like a God.

I know why Hitler loves me…I so appeal to Hitler’s vanity. But there is a further reason. It is my secret, and it is Hitler’s too. I cannot describe the ecstasy I feel, the rapture, the high peak of my emotions.

Berlusconi’s Personal Lawyers and Personalized Laws

Berlusconi, a billionaire, was one of the most corrupt leaders ever to govern a democracy, with a range of crimes that rivals Trump’s in number: he and Trump both have Wikipedia pages devoted to their thousands of litigations. Throughout his terms as Prime Minister (1994, 2001-2006, 2008-2011) personal lawyers helped Berlusconi to destroy the legal system as it had existed and arrange for new laws that benefited his personal circumstances.

Italian Parliament passed dozens of ad personam measures that made it easier for him to disobey the law without consequences. A series of laws from 2003 onward granted Berlusconi and other high state authorities immunity from prosecution while they served in office. Did I mention that Berlusconi was then on trial for his involvement in bribing judges?

Here we arrive at a key duty of the autocrat’s personal lawyer: to take the fall for him, even if that means going to prison (Michael Cohen may come to mind). That was the fate of Cesare Previti, who was convicted of bribing judges on Berlusconi’s behalf when he was Il Cavaliere’s personal attorney in the 1990s. Back then, Berlusconi tried to make Previti Minister of Justice –the equivalent of Attorney General—but that move was vetoed by the Italian President, so he made Previti Minister of Defense instead.

Once Previti was out of the picture due to his conviction, other personal lawyers perfected the arts of harassing judges and running out the clock, taking advantage of Italy’s famously slow court system. Berlusconi also tried a new strategy: he appointed two personal lawyers, Niccolò Ghedini and Piero Longo, who were members of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, respectively, both of them representing Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia. This means that their salaries were paid by taxpayers while they helped Berlusconi to evade justice.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Viktor Orban also saw the wisdom of appointing personal lawyers who were members of Parliament, so the lawyers could be voting on laws that would help the leaders’ personal situations. Ali Ozkaya, Erdogan’s personal attorney, represents Erdogan’s AKP party, and is heavily involved with policing his boss’s image: he has been an architect of the “insult suit” strategy to sue Turks at scale (over 160,000 and counting) for criticism of the leader.

István Bajkai, Orban’s personal lawyer until his death in 2023, was a co-founder of Fidesz, represented the party in parliament, and had a similar function to Ozkaya: he was a board member of the massive pro-government media conglomerate (the Central European Press and Media Foundation) that funded about 80% of Hungarian media under Orban and shut out criticism and news about corruption.

The priorities, fears and fantasies of autocrats can be gleaned by who they hire for this sensitive role and what they ask their personal lawyers to focus on.

Blanche: Chief Epstein Coverup Official

And so we come to Blanche, who journalist Nina Burleigh calls “Trump’s Chief Epstein Coverup Officer.” Here she describes the credentials that likely got him the job:

Blanche has already proven his eagerness not merely to preside over the Epstein Files Coverup, but to personally engineer it – from executing an apparently illegal quid pro quo with sex monster Ghislaine Maxwell, to overseeing the redaction of names of rich predators in the files, to publicly promising to flout the Epstein Files Transparency Act entirely and withhold millions more pages of evidence that Congress has demanded be released.

Enabling the Epstein coverup is only part of the calamity of this appointment, which lawyer and civil rights advocate Sherrilyn Ifill sees as the collapse of rule of law in America. As she writes, Blanche affirmed at his confirmation hearing “what he believes is the right of the President to fully control every apparatus of the federal government, including federal prosecutions.”

In other words, Blanche sold himself to GOP politicians as the perfect tool of a personalist state vision of justice, and as the servant of a man who, in his reading, is bound by no checks and balances, who has immunity for official acts and the right to control prosecutions. With Blanche, Trump has found the perfect partner to complete his reengineering of the judicial system to make himself feel safe and beyond the reach of the law no matter what he does.

Luckily, we are not Orban’s Hungary, with an 80% media capture. We can continue to speak out and educate others about the conversion of justice into a system that allows the powerful to get away with crime. And the robust legal pushback against the Trump administration, which now has hundreds of successes in court, is another difference.

As Trump becomes ever more unpopular, he and Blanche will lose legitimacy. Personalist leaders have a much higher rate of involuntary exits than other kinds of authoritarians: there are only so many people to take the fall for you before it is your turn to be held accountable.

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Since then, the dramatic pace, variety, and import of technological change, from the centrality of drones (now used in 80-85% of frontline targets in Ukraine) have led analysts to argue that we are living through a revolution in military affairs. An RMA happens when bundles of new technologies drive the development of new operational doctrines, bringing about shifts in strategy, priorities, and thinking about armed conflict.

The two world wars are obvious cases, but regional conflicts can spark RMAs or serve as testing grounds for technologies that will be scaled up in future significant conflicts.

This is the case in Ukraine, where the Kremlin’s quest to annihilate Ukraine has instead seen Ukrainians increase their status and geopolitical footprint, becoming leaders of a new mode of war “increasingly shaped by operators, engineers, and algorithms,” as Kateryna Odarchenko writes.

Ukraine has engaged in “drone diplomacy,” assisting Gulf states with drone and counter-drone technologies (several hundred Ukrainian experts are deployed to the UAE and Qatar) in return for financial support, fuel supplies, and more. Ukraine also has defense agreements with many European countries. The greater transparency of the 2020s battlefield allows many foreign militaries to learn about unmanned aerial vehicles, while Go-Pro-equipped Ukrainian soldier-filmmakers on the front are documenting the war “from the inside.”

These technological teachings by a country that is under siege make the failure of most countries to provide Ukraine with sufficient weapons to defend itself against Russian ballistic and cruise missiles more ignominious. As Anne Applebaum and I observed in our recent conversation, the stakes of the war are existential for Ukraine and for democracy in Europe. If Russia stops fighting, the war will be over. If Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine will be over –it will cease to exist as a sovereign entity and culture and Russia and its allies will feel empowered to move on their next democratic targets.

The United States under the Donald Trump administration is in a class by itself in terms of this hypocrisy. While US companies such as Anduril test their drones in Ukraine, as a Modern War Institute report detailed in January 2025. Trump has refused to give Ukraine Patriot missiles. He cites depleted U.S. inventory, but has approved the sale of missiles to Saudi Arabia. Trump’s slavish relationship with Putin means that America will never seriously compromise Russian military capability or act in ways that would significantly boost Ukrainian success.

Ukraine: Ground-Up, Flexible Infrastructure and Motivated Citizen Mobilization

In 2022, virtually everyone underestimated Ukraine’s military capabilities, despite the country having massively reformed its military after the Russian annexation of Crimea. Ukraine may have been motivated to invest in drones due to the lack of a large modern air force. Yet as Andriy Zagorodnyuk observes, Ukraine is not using drones to compensate for a lack by the metrics of conventional thinking, but rather changing the whole operating system of war.

What Applebaum calls a “ground-up” national culture has made that innovation possible. Ukraine has a distributed, bottom-up innovation model with hundreds of firms and volunteer groups developing technology as well as combat formations being part of the research and development process. Zagorodnyuk has written about a shift toward brigade-centric innovation, “with individual units increasingly acting as focal points for experimentation, adaptation, and capability development.”

Russia: Centralization, Combatants as “Meat Grinders”

In contrast, here is the Russian military as described by Col. Schmidt: “Archaic, costly, and overly political, protective, and bureaucratic processes and decision-making frameworks are self-defeating encumbrances.” Russia’s assault on Ukraine in 2022 immediately exposed the toll of Kremlin corruption on the military and how Russian fighting capabilities had been overestimated. Russia’s centralized, statist approach to war means changing operational and production systems is not easy.

Yet Putin does not seem to care what happens to Russian soldiers: he shares the autocrat’s use-and-discard view of people, including in war.

Russia has sustained devastating losses at every rank and in almost every unit, including elite corps such as the 331st Guards Parachute Regiment. An astounding number of generals died in the first year: they were at the front to impose discipline on unmotivated and badly trained soldiers saddled with inferior equipment and rancid rations. As of 2024, nearly 20 percent of Russian casualties were highly trained officers.

“This isn’t war. It’s the destruction of the Russian people by their own commanders,” said Mikhail, a Russian soldier wounded in Ukraine, in December 2022, referring to the Kremlin’s callous treatment of Russian troops. Then and later, hundreds of thousands of young men fled Russia to escape being killed in “meat grinder” offensives that bring home Mikhail’s observation.

CIA director John Ratcliffe recently disclosed a shocking statistic: the average Russian recruit on the front lines in Ukraine survives only 20 or 30 minutes before being killed or wounded, in part due to the proliferation of AI-powered drones as “low-cost killing machines.”

This enormous loss of life is one reason why the Russians are using foreign soldiers in Ukraine. “Putin had to dial 1-800-NorthKorea to scrounge for aid for his ravaged army in Ukraine,” Thomas Friedman observed in October 2023, and this is even truer today. Almost 15,000 North Korean soldiers have fought for Russia in Ukraine, absorbing lessons in 21^st century combat, and North Korea is now deploying a ballistic missile unit against Ukraine.

Robots May Fight, But People Still Die

War may be changing, but the idea that drone use can reduce casualty numbers should be received with some caution, because several factors could cause a rise in losses for societies. Autocrats routinely create cultures in which war crimes become normalized, and wars of ethnic cleansing and cultural annihilation (as in Ukraine and Gaza) mean that more losses inflicted, including on civilians, is considered a win. By this measure, every day that the Russians stay in the war, killing Ukrainians, is a victory for Putin.

The revival of urban warfare in this conflict, and cities as major theaters of 21st century war, also means increased casualties. “The idea that we used to have sacred territory of civilian and critical infrastructure — these targets are now all in play, and that really changes the nature of how war is fought,” commented Jenny Town, senior fellow at the Stimson Center and director of 38 North.

In the rush to fund war by robot, and by letting Putin’s war continue, we are setting the stage for a heightened geopolitical volatility and a dangerous situation in which autocrats feel further empowered to enter and wage wars without regard for international law. Robots may do the fighting in the future, but people could die in increasing numbers, as war becomes even more dehumanized.

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It is long but very worth your time, and it’s the Lucid weekend read. I’ll be back early next week with a follow-up essay about what North Korea and other autocracies are learning from this conflict that blends cutting-edge technologies with older practices such as the capture of large numbers of POWs.

From our discussion of the differing stakes of the conflict for Russians and Ukrainians: “If the Russians end the war, if the Russians stop fighting, the war is over. If the Ukrainians stop fighting, Ukraine is over.”

Anne is a historian and journalist and a staff writer at the Atlantic. She is the author of Gulag, a history of the Soviet concentration camps; Iron Curtain, a history of the Sovietization of central Europe; and Red Famine, a history of the Ukrainian famine. Her more recent books, Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy Inc., look at how leaders of the autocratic world cooperate to undermine democracies and promote their interests. She publishes the Open Letters newsletter.

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_________

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I’m Ruth Ben-Ghiat, publisher of Lucid. You’ve got two historians here today. I’m here with Anne Applebaum.

Anne Applebaum: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be with you again transatlantically, if not in real life.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: You have observed that Vladimir Putin has been bringing back certain features of the Soviet age: habits, imperialism, types of repression. Putin has established a Stalin Studies Center, has erected Stalin statues here and there in Russia, and the numbers of political prisoners are going up, and many of them are in gulags and camps that date from the Soviet age. Alexei Navalny died in what had been a Stalinist-era gulag in Siberia. So I thought we could start by talking about that.

Anne Applebaum: One thing to understand about Russia is that after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a limited attempt to reckon with the communist past. There were a few things that were done, but the system itself never really confronted what had happened under Stalin. So much so that these prisons you were rightly speaking about remained. I actually was in one of those prisons, in Arkhangelsk, well after the fall of the Soviet Union. It had been a Soviet-era prison, and it looked exactly like the prisons I read about in memoirs of the Gulag.

So there are elements of the old system that never went away and were never successfully removed. And there are many people who believe that that’s part of Russia’s problem, that literal KGB playbooks are still being deployed.

The Russian occupation of Ukraine, starting with Crimea, but including now the territories of eastern Ukraine, looks exactly, I mean, down to the last detail, like the Sovietization of Poland and eastern Hungary and so on at the very end of the Second World War. How you occupy and Sovietize or Russify a country. This is exactly what he’s doing.

The use of old symbols, for example, this annual victory parade where they celebrate Stalin’s victory over Hitler, is also designed deliberately to intimidate people and remind them of Stalinism so that people remain afraid. As in, we all remember how bad that was, or our grandparents told us how bad that was, and now we’re prepared to be afraid again. So some of it is him reestablishing a system in which there won’t be objectors and there won’t be dissenters, or at least they’ll be limited to really tiny numbers.

When Propaganda and Reality Collide

Anne Applebaum: The interesting thing that’s happening now is that some of that is now beginning to confront reality. So this year when they had their annual victory parade, they had to cut it short. The Russians didn’t put big pieces of tanks and military equipment on the streets of Moscow because they were afraid of Ukrainian drones hitting them. There was a kind of panic in Moscow about hidden Ukrainians, and they were looking in sewers and manholes and there was panic about security in the city in the weekdays before the parade.

So you’re beginning to see rhetoric run into reality as Russians can see now that Ukrainian guns can hit Moscow and St. Petersburg and many other cities. And they’re especially experiencing these attacks on their oil refineries, but also now on the Russian equivalent of Amazon, these huge warehouses. And the Ukrainians have started hitting those, arguing that they’re a legitimate military target because it’s a system that’s used to also fund soldiers at the front. But you have these billions of dollars of commerce mostly affecting small businesses going up in smoke.

And so you’re beginning to have people feel, OK, we have this language of great power, triumph and success. And yet we can see that we have fuel shortages and my business is going back as the Ukrainian drones hit the warehouse. And so we’re now we’re approaching in the next weeks and you’ll see it in the next two months or three months or the other, a real crisis. It might take the form of a Russian attempt to accelerate. But a feeling of crisis is growing.

I mean, it’s partly a reflection of Ukrainian success at hitting these Russian targets. The Ukrainian success with drone technology has really prevented the Russians from moving forward. They have gained really no significant territory. So the system is running into reality, which interestingly is how the Soviet Union finally broke down. Conflicted reality and then nobody believed the propaganda anymore.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: That’s also how fascism started deteriorating inside Italy and Germany, when Allied bombs and wartime shortages and losses made people realize the hollowness of Hitler and Mussolini’s claims of infallibility. War is often a moment when propaganda contrasts with the reality of people’s everyday experiences.

Your point about business losses is also important. Businesses are always one of the pillars of autocratic regimes, and they often are given goodies by the leader in return for supporting the regime no matter what. Their loyalty is more absurd in the Russian case because so many private businesses have been plundered and harassed by the state. But when they start to wake up and see their profits affected is when disaffection can spread.

I wonder if the attitudes of young people, who have more information today because of digital media and transnational networks that form on social media, will accelerate that process.

Anne Applebaum: Yes, but Putin has really specialized in learning how to make the internet work for him. And, of course, many of the tactics that he invented we see in use in many other countries, including the United States. And so rather than presenting Russians with a single line, you know, here’s one narrative and you see it in all the same newspapers and all the television stations, he will present many conflicting narratives all at once.

This is a difference from Stalinism, to make people see so many different explanations and so much information that they say, right, I have no idea what’s happening. I don’t know what’s true. I don’t believe in anything. I’m staying home. And so the purpose of Russian propaganda nowadays, and this is also true of other autocratic states as well as would-be autocrats in democracies, is to confuse people and make them nihilistic and make them apathetic. And so his goal is to prevent people from wanting to become dissidents or wanting to really do anything or participate in politics at all.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: This reminds me that in my book, Strongmen, I observed that in 1939, Mussolini, the old-school dictator, who had been a journalist, and micromanaged the press to a crazy degree, forbid the use of question marks in newspaper article titles. Because then propaganda was about establishing (fake) certainties. I contrasted this with Putin, who raises question marks about everything. So that’s one of the differences between the old and the new.

The Toll of the Personalization of U.S. Foreign Policy

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: So how would you characterize the state of U.S. policy toward Ukraine? Speaking of confusing people, it seems difficult to get a handle on the Trump administration’s stances, and part of that’s by design. I also want to mention to everyone that we are seeing a big change in how policy is implemented and negotiated. We’re seeing a partial privatization of foreign policy, when a few people, who have no expertise in the region, they’re not professional diplomats, are making policy. They usually include family members, cronies: so here we have two real estate executives, Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, representing the U.S. on Ukraine and Iran. The sidelining of experts cuts into competence, and we see mistakes and impasses during which more lives are lost needlessly.

Anne Applebaum: You’re absolutely right that the use of Witkoff and Kushner has had a pretty profound effect on how negotiations have been conducted. And it’s not positive. It’s my view that they prolonged the war. Because their attitude was, we’re going to Moscow. We’re going to do deals with Russian companies. And of course, the Russians were delighted by this. And we know that they were offering them stuff in the Arctic and minerals and so on. This has been in the newspapers. It’s not a secret anymore. And so they gave the Russians the impression that the Americans were on their side and that the Russians could somehow buy the Trump administration and that they would eventually defeat Ukraine with the help of the United States.

Kushner and Witkoff were people who didn’t understand Putin. They seemed at one point have misunderstood something Putin was offering them to be some kind of land swap deal, which apparently was not on offer. They don’t really know the geography of Ukraine. They don’t know what we’re talking about when we talk about this part of Donbas or that part of Crimea. And so they were seen by the Russians and really by everybody as incompetents who were bumbling along. The Russians thought, well, we can rip these people off.

This matters because the war will end when the Russians stop fighting, when the Russians say we can’t defeat Ukraine, Ukraine’s not going to become part of Russia. And we stop fighting and then we have a ceasefire. We begin to negotiate. Instead, the Americans put new life in the belief that the Russians would win the war militarily.

Drones, and a Secret of Ukrainian Resilience

Anne Applebaum: Russia has not won this war, mostly because of Ukrainian ingenuity, which is reinventing modern warfare by using drones in new ways and using them even to substitute for other kinds of weapons. European countries, I think against many expectations, have also stepped up to the plate and began funding the Ukrainian war effort and the Ukrainian economy. So you have now this so-called Coalition of the Willing, which does not really include the United States anymore, but includes most countries in Europe, plus Australia, South Korea, and others. And they have kept the Ukrainians fighting.

The Ukrainians have been holding the line for some months now, and there is some grudging recognition by President Trump that Zelensky represents a country that’s very talented and has new assets. You know, it has this new kind of warfare that other people want, including people in the Gulf and elsewhere in the world. Remember, Trump’s sons now have big investments in drone companies. I don’t know whether that’s a factor, but it could be something that he’s aware of.

And so he now grudgingly sees Zelensky as not a loser, and Trump likes to be on the side of whoever wins. That hasn’t stopped him from saying contradictory things. He says he will help the Ukrainians have access to more anti-ballistic, anti-missile technology one day, and then the next day he says that he won’t. Trump continually says contradictory things in public. He’s warmer about Zelensky than he was, but not warm enough to actually do much that makes a difference.

And so you have this situation of general confusion, which works to Putin’s advantage because Putin still thinks that he can outlast the Ukrainians and that he can break up Europe and that his propaganda will help get pro-Russian political parties elected in Europe and he can still win that way.

If Trump would say, I’m going to help Ukraine. I’ll make sure they don’t lose, that might be the thing that would convince the Russians to stop the war. Instead he says things like, well, Zelensky has to end the war or something. Zelensky can’t.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Well we all know why Trump will never help Russia be defeated, and will never do anything that could seriously destabilize Putin’s power. In fact, he and MAGA often parrot Kremlin talking points about Zelensky having started the war!

You will remember early on in the war, people who didn’t understand Putin’s autocratic psychology or strategy kept saying that if we just give Putin an off-ramp, he’ll stop. I was like, no, that’s not how autocrats roll.

The other thing to understand is that for Russia this is not just a war about territory. It’s a mission to obliterate Ukraine as an independent, sovereign culture and nation. I’ll repeat a bleak thought I had a few years ago: in a conflict aiming at such annihilation, every day that Russians stay in the war, killing Ukrainians, is a victory for Putin. I also want to mention the Russification of over ten thousand kidnapped Ukrainian children. And so there are larger cultural and ideological reasons to keep on fighting.

Anne Applebaum: It’s important that you pointed exactly to the difference. If the Russians end the war, if the Russians stop fighting, the war is over. If the Ukrainians stop fighting, Ukraine is over. Ukraine doesn’t exist anymore. Their country will be occupied and terrorized. They will lose their state. They will lose their language. The current leaders will be murdered. So they have no choice but to fight. They have to continue to fight to defend their country.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I wanted to talk about how this war has become a laboratory for new kinds of weapons, new kinds of strategies. Ukrainian ingenuity was seen early on with urban warfare and the battle for the cities. And then we have, of course, drones and electronic warfare.

Anne Applebaum: I’ve written several times about Ukraine and drones (you can find my articles in the Atlantic or on my Substack), and I’ve spent a lot of time both with people who build them and with people who are learning how to use them. My most recent trip was a couple of months ago where I watched people who used drone interceptors. So the Ukrainians have created a kind of drone that intercepts other drones. When the war in Iran broke out, this is why the leaders of other Gulf states were all very interested in meeting with Ukrainians to understand this technology, And the Ukrainians are world leaders in this innovative use of drones.

But It’s important to understand that this success also comes from the nature of Ukrainian society. Ukraine is a ground-up society for historical reasons. They’ve been a colony of Russia. Before that, they were part of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It’s a nation that is used to organizing itself at the ground level. They’re not so good at building state structures, but they’re very good at grassroots movements and always have been.

And the drone revolution is coming very much from there. It’s lots and lots of small companies. It’s lots of individual initiatives. It’s lots of people who used to do something else, like they were architects or working in some other industry. I was in one drone factory, one of the most successful, the last time I was there. And the guy who runs it did make drones before the war, but they were agricultural drones. And he quickly reset what he was doing, and now he’s one of the most cutting-edge manufacturers there.

There are a lot of stories like that: people who changed their lives after the war began in order to begin to make this new technology. And it wasn’t something that people were ordered to do, or there was a procurement process whereby a guy at the top told everybody what to do. It was rather small companies, very often working directly with battalions or with army units. You know, each army unit would have their relationship with a drone manufacturer or producer. It doesn’t function the way we think of armies functioning, in a top-down fashion.

And that’s really a reflection of how Ukrainian society works. So this transformation is deeply connected to, as I say, these grassroots structures and to the Ukrainian democratic urge or the democratic spirit, whatever language you want to use. This remains a country where people are very independent, where they believe in freedom, where they believe in self-organization. So they decide what they’re going to do and how they’re going to help their country. And that’s been true since the beginning of the war. And it’s maybe the one real advantage that Ukraine has over Russia.

And I think it was the thing that wasn’t seen by anybody else. It was very hard to guess that this is what was going to happen. But it’s a really important lesson because it tells you, you know, where does innovation come from? Where does creativity come from? And Ukraine, despite everything and despite its bad luck in history and despite a lot of bad governments and bad leaders, still has this.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: That’s a good ending point, and it’s very moving. It’s about resilience. It’s a good ending to pay tribute to this nation that has gone through so much and continues to go through much and yet is able to innovate and build. I thank you so much, Anne. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, and thanks to everyone for listening!

Anne Applebaum: Thank you, Ruth, and pleasure talking to you as well. So I hope to see you in real life soon.

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The video and edited transcript of the conversation are below. First, a few words about upcoming Lucid events.

Our next Q&A will take place on Sunday, August 2, 8-9pmET. Our guest will be one of the country’s premier disinformation experts, Renee DiResta, who is the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, and recently won a court victory against Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Defense Fund. Paying subscribers will receive a link at 5pmET that day to register for the Zoom gathering. If you can’t attend, you can view the video at lucid.substack.com, videos tab.

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_______________

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: So without further ado, I’m really delighted to have Jonathan Swan with us, really one of the premier reporters and also researchers and interviewers in the world, I believe. He is a White House correspondent for the New York Times. He’s originally from Sydney, Australia. And he’s been reporting on Donald Trump for over a decade. He won an Emmy Award for his 2020 interview of then President Trump and received the White House Correspondents Association Aldo Beckman Award.

We’re discussing his bestselling book, co-authored with fellow Times reporter Maggie Haberman called Regime Change, Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Welcome, Jonathan.

Jonathan Swan: Thanks so much for having me, Ruth. Really appreciate it.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Regime Change is a provocative title. Having done so much research and so many interviews, do you see this presidency as qualitatively different, aiming at something different than others in U.S. history?

Jonathan Swan: Yeah, I mean, the title was not forced upon us. Quite the opposite. We came up with the title before [Trump] started to do foreign efforts at regime change in Venezuela and Iran. We realized that we were covering a presidency that was A, unrecognizable from his first term, But B, could not be fit into the framework of a normal transition from a Democratic president to a Republican president.

The primary issues were not debates about the marginal tax rate or what should the level of regulations on this industry or that industry be? They’re about much more fundamental issues. And what we wanted to capture with that title, is that we were actually covering a form of regime change in this country, in the United States. And that we were covering a president that was expanding power and using power like no president in our lifetimes. And in some respects, like no American president ever. So it was very, very deliberate choice of title and not one that we walk away from at all.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I agree with that analysis, and I’ve always maintained that authoritarians are in office for totally different reasons than democratic with a small d presidents. They’re not actually that interested in governing. We’ve seen that Trump often falls asleep, is arguably bored by meetings, is not interested in governing.

Why are they there? They’re there to make money, enrich themselves privately off of public office, and to consolidate so much power that they have de facto or real immunity from prosecution. So this is a qualitative difference.

Does that match up with your findings? Spending time on things that will enrich him, spending time on things that will consolidate power, or are there other things that I’ve missed?

Jonathan Swan: Well, those two are big focuses of our book. We get very much into the self-enrichment and the family profiteering, which has been unprecedented. We’ve never seen anything on this scale in American history. There is no one even in the neighborhood of the sums of money that we’re talking about. So there’s that.

And then consolidating power and retribution, which is a huge thread throughout this book, not just his own immunity, which was conferred by the Supreme Court in the 2024 decision, but also turning the Justice Department essentially into his own personal law firm and instrument to go after his enemies, which we’re seeing. I would say there’s another third area, and we saw this very vividly when finally he agreed to sit down with us, which is his desire to be a capital G great man of history and to put his own stamp on the world.

When we finally met Trump for an interview, he handed us this document, which he says has been written by a historian [who turned out to be a golf caddy, not a historian as the book recounts]. And this was describing his power and comparing himself to who he described to us as the top ten. Top ten. And it was... Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, the Caesars…You get the idea. Not many small D Democrats in that group, I would say. And the whole point of the document was all about power and power projection.

And the conclusion of the author of this document was that Donald Trump is the most powerful man who’s ever existed because he’s in charge of the most powerful military that’s ever existed. The most powerful technology that’s ever existed. The most powerful economy that’s ever existed. But he’s willing to use that power in ways that other American presidents hadn’t. And that whereas all of these previous leaders and conquerors and dictators and in many cases monsters had enormous power, their power was much more circumscribed geographically. Trump has much more ability to project power. And that’s what he wanted us to do. It was an incredible moment because he was essentially, in a strange way, repeating our thesis back to us.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: This is indeed very instructive about his psychology. It’s also interesting that he showed you with pride a document that compares him to Hitler because when he was out of office, in 2022, he sued CNN, asserting that some of its contributors and anchors were comparing him to Hitler. I know all about that lawsuit because one of my op-eds was cited in the lawsuit. So when he was out of power, he took umbrage at this fact. Now he’s in power, and drunk with power, he seems to want to be compared to Hitler, as though it’s a good thing.

Your book documents logics and processes that are unfolding and have unfolded in history. What you experienced is described for other authoritarians in my book Strongmen. That’s where we are now.

Jonathan Swan: I don’t know if you noticed this comment from Tucker Carlson recently where he described being around Trump as like being under a spell. He used the word spell and I wouldn’t endorse that word because it has sort of supernatural connotations that I don’t apply here. But I know exactly what he’s getting at.

Trump creates around himself his own reality field and it’s quite powerful. And you have a group of people around him who this time around, it’s not just that they don’t resist him or obstruct him. It’s that they believe in him very deeply. And after the assassination attempts against him in 2024, you would hear much more from his advisors, God has put him here for a reason. This is very much a divine plan for Donald Trump to be back in power. And so that is very much a governing mindset within his inner circle.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: This was my next question, and it comes from a Lucid subscriber who read your book and noted that your reporting found that the people around Trump have a mystical belief in him. They treat him as magical, as someone for whom things will always turn out right, no matter what, as someone who is invincible.

Mussolini enabled this same quality in people, it is part of having charisma. They have an absolute belief in themselves. And as Jonathan said, they create their own reality field and draw others into it. And it’s one of their superpowers. I have a phrase in Strongmen, I believe it’s in the propaganda chapter, that says about the strongman’s lies: “They believe him because they believe in him.:

Okay, I had another question. America is unusual in having a bipartisan rather than a multi-party system. So those elites who fawn over Trump, are invested in Trump, if they start to doubt him they don’t have anywhere to go, they have no other political home. What do you foresee? Do you think they’ll just go on either really believing or pretending to believe as the errors mount?

Jonathan Swan: Well, I suppose it depends which group you’re talking about because we’ve already seen empirically that he’s lost a lot of support. It’s profound, actually. And particularly when you look at the core group of voters that delivered him the 2024 election, which was independents, swing voters, his popularity has plummeted. Absolutely plummeted within that group.

I mean, two of his greatest electoral successes were the inroads he made with Black men and with Hispanic men. And in both categories, his support has fallen. So there is still a core group in the GOP that supports him and is not receiving any negative information when it comes to the media they consume. But you are seeing within Republican voters disappointment at his handling of the economy. Because it is just an area where you can’t talk your way out of it. The price of eggs is what it is. The price of gas is what it is. And he made very explicit promises that he’s not been able to live up to. So you’re seeing them change their opinion there. It hasn’t quite translated across to their view of him. They’re still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I think the much more interesting question is what comes after Trump. Whatever you think of Donald Trump, he has an incredibly powerful charisma. I remember in 2016 going to the Trump rallies and just seeing the emotional and visceral connection that his voters had with him. I’d never seen anything like it in politics. It was overwhelmingly powerful. I think partly because of that, maybe even mostly because of that, Trump can glue together this sort of impossible coalition. I mean, 2024 was an impossible, a magical, from their perspective, political coalition.

You could have someone like Lindsey Graham and Tucker Carlson, who their worldviews are polar opposite, who despise each other, who think each other are evil. And yet they both enthusiastically endorse and campaign for Donald Trump and consider themselves part of MAGA.

Can someone like J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio, whoever the inheritor is, can they do that? Do they have that level of charisma? It’s hard to see. So what happens then when you have a less charismatic figure who doesn’t have this incredible force of personality? I don’t know how that resolves itself because the Republican Party doesn’t really exist outside of Donald Trump. It’s just Donald Trump. He’s absorbed the whole party. So I don’t know what that looks like when he exits the stage.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: You know, it’s so interesting to have this conversation because the other charismatic authoritarians I’ve studied and written about, and not just old-style dictators, but also Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, who was very much a precursor of Trump, they did the same thing with the Impossible Coalition. They had housewives, bankers, religious authorities, and Mafiosi. People who have nothing in common, truly, except their adulation of him. It is hard to have successors to that.

One last question: What surprised you in researching and writing this book?

Jonathan Swan: So many things surprised me. One thing that really we tried to emphasize in the book is that this is a government being run by the tiniest group of people. They view the government as essentially a hostile enemy force, and they don’t include subject matter experts or bureaucrats or people who have long decades of experience on whatever the issue is. It’s really a group of five, six, seven people making all the decisions with Trump at the center.

We report in the book about how did we got into this war with Iran. And just to give you one example of this dynamic, the war quite predictably kicked off the biggest global energy shock in history. The two people who would have to manage that shock, the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, and the Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, weren’t even in the room for the meetings that led up to the war. They weren’t included in the planning meetings because the core team was so worried about leaks and wanted to keep things so tight that they didn’t include them. So that just gives you one little vantage point into all of this.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Ah, well in authoritarian context, this is called the inner sanctum. It does not include experts, people who actually know things. It often includes just the staunch loyalists, family members such as sons-in-law, and what I call “people from the old days,” and thus we have Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff showing up rather than seasoned diplomats at the negotiations in Ukraine and Iran.

Okay, we’ve been speaking with Jonathan Swan, co-author of the new book Regime Change. It’s very illuminating, as you see from our conversation, of how authoritarian dynamics that have unfolded abroad are now part of governance in America. So thank you, Jonathan.

Jonathan Swan: Thanks so much for having me, Ruth. I really appreciate it.

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History is the study of the past, but identifying historical patterns, including how autocrats behave when their power is threatened, can help us to understand what may happen in the future. The exact action the autocrat may take is hard to predict, but we can know that he will do something.

This was the feeling I had, based on my historical studies, when Donald Trump refused to concede the 2020 election. As the days passed, I grew more and more worried that we were entering into an unprecedented and fateful period, and I wanted to get the word out that we should be prepared for anything.

I started a video blog called The Transition to document this “state of exception,” as I called it in a November 15, 2020, video you can view here. I observed that we had entered as a nation into “uncharted territory” due to the refusal of Trump and the GOP to accept the results of the election, and forecast continued instability. “Crisis time is exhausting. Conserve your energies. You may need them in the weeks to come,” I counseled.

I had just published the first edition of Strongmen, which looked at the violent and lawless things other leaders had done to get to power and stay there. I had turned in the book to the publisher in May 2020, and inserted a warning that Trump’s fear of being held accountable lay behind his desire to remain in office no matter what.

The 2021 paperback’s epilogue includes the Jan. 6 outcome of that fear. (It also warns that Putin’s persecution of Navalny would lintensify, and saw the neo-Fascist politician Giorgia Meloni as a likely future female head of state).

Buy the 2021 Edition of Strongmen

I also published an op-ed in the Washington Post on November 9, 2020, which I have excerpted below. “The rage that will grow in Trump as reality sinks in may make for a rocky transition to Biden’s presidency. Americans would do well to be prepared,” I concluded.

The op-ed reminds us that the destructive dynamics unfolding in 2026 America are not new: the fixation on having bunkers and places to hide, the loyalty tests, and the loss of power experienced as a personal betrayal, leading to a will for vengeance that becomes all-consuming. Ultimately, that vengeance is exacted against the American people who committed the sin of rejecting him, and now must pay the price.

Excerpts from my November 9, 2020 Washington Post Opinion Piece

The authoritarian playbook has no chapter on failure. Nothing prepares the ruler to see his propaganda ignored and his charismatic hold weaken until his own people turn against him. It has no pages on the horror of being voted out of office, as happened to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, or forced into exile, like Ugandan despot Idi Amin.

Democratic heads of state often see their departures from office as an opportunity to build on their legacies of leadership. For rulers with authoritarian inclinations, loss of power looms as a kind of psychological annihilation — even as it also often evokes practical concerns about the end of immunity from prosecution for them and their families.

While Trump was not in power long enough to dismantle American democracy, he did succeed in installing a form of the “personalist rule” that characterizes Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and other autocrats he so admires. Personalist governance concentrates power in one individual, whose own political and financial interests (and relationships with other despots) often prevail over national ones in shaping domestic and foreign policy. Loyalty to the head of state, rather than expertise, is the primary qualification for serving him. By way of example, look to the Republican Party itself, which reduced its 2020 party platform into a mere expression of support for Trump.

Of course, this high degree of personal power brings no security to strongman rulers, who are pursued by the demon of fear. Fear impels them to buy off and intimidate elites, making it harder for their supporters to separate themselves. It is fear, too, that makes them throw on a cloak of masculine invincibility and seek out other strongmen as partners who will legitimate their authoritarian worldview.

Having it all is never enough for men like Trump, who consistently make recourse to behaviors that let them feel safe but ultimately prove counterproductive. Chief among these is erecting walls to shield themselves from unwelcome realities. These are not just physical barriers, like bunkers and compounds, but also a style of governance that privileges inner sanctums filled with flatterers and family members who screen out unwanted input and criticism and tell the leader only what he wants to hear.

None of this cushioning serves the leader well. Living inside his cocoon, he inevitably comes to believe his own propaganda. This encourages his worst traits — paranoia and hubris are common — and leads to bad decisions that eventually turn his people against him. Authoritarian history is full of disastrous actions taken out of pride and megalomania. Benito Mussolini insisted on entering World War II at Adolf Hitler’s side, against the advice of many of his generals.

It’s not surprising that most authoritarians leave office involuntarily. They experience decreasing popularity as a personal betrayal and often abandon their people, blaming them for the messes they themselves have caused.

Trump hews to this history of denial in front of adversity. He has refused to accept defeat by Biden, seemingly embracing as true the fiction that the election was stolen from him, rather than accept responsibility for mismanaging the pandemic. The president reportedly has no intention of preparing a concession speech, leaving his cowed inner circle to contemplate holding an intervention to get him to accept the truth. As Bess Levin writes in Vanity Fair, “Trump apparently thinks he can just go on being president even though the American people have fired him.”

Strongmen have gained power in different ways over a century, but one thing holds true: They are especially dangerous when their power is threatened. Trump could not pull off the solutions his illiberal contemporaries have used to stay in office, such as gaming elections through digital and legal manipulation (Russian President Vladimir Putin’s methods), or by consolidating power sufficient to rule by decree (Orbán’s way).

But the rage that will grow in Trump as reality sinks in may make for a rocky transition to Biden’s presidency. Americans would do well to be prepared.

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