Today we are publishing in its entirety my recent Inside Briefing with Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat of New York University. Prior to the Trump Era, her main subject area was Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism, particularly the cultural dimensions of the fascist era. Since 2015 she has become a public commentator on the rising authoritarianism we see across the globe and with particular force right here in the United States. In our culture, discussions of right-wing authoritarianism and fascism almost always spur mentions of Adolf Hitler, if only as a canonical point of reference. But as you’ll see in our conversation, with Donald Trump, Benito Mussolini is a much better analogue. The parallels are more pregnant with potential insights into both men and their movements. Ben-Ghiat also explores this question in a new book coming out in November, Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present.
I was really looking forward to this discussion with Ben-Ghiat who I’d come to know mainly through her Twitter presence. I was not disappointed. I hope you enjoy the discussion, which you can watch after the jump …
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Now is a good time to remind ourselves that all this week and going through November numerous mainstream media reporters — most of whom aren’t consciously rooting for President Trump — will find themselves parroting Trump attack lines, amplifying Trumpite misinformation and more. In most cases they will do so because of the structural imbalance to the right which is built into political news coverage in the U.S. and in an effort to fairly cover “both sides” of the issue. I was inspired to note this for perhaps the 1000th time here at TPM when I saw this fairly mild example.
This is from a White House reporter for CNN …
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It’s a meme that’s been circulating across social media for months, since George Floyd was murdered by police, sparking a reignited nationwide movement against police brutality and racial injustice: guilty people don’t deserve to be killed by police, either.
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As I’ve mentioned a few times, today it seems obvious that an evangelical leader like Jerry Falwell, Jr. would endorse and support President Trump. After all, almost every major conservative evangelical leader strongly supports President Trump. But it wasn’t like that back in late 2015. Trump’s irreligion and libertinism were obvious obstacles to becoming the candidate of conservative evangelicals. Perhaps the iron alliance we’ve now known for four years was always in the cards. But Jerry Falwell’s endorsement – in January 2016 – was a key bridge to getting there.
With that in mind I thought I’d go back and look at press coverage at the time, without the gloss and overlay of subsequent events. Remember that at this moment Trump was locked in a pitched battle for evangelical voters in Iowa with Ted Cruz, then a leading candidate of the evangelical right. Falwell had actually allowed Cruz to launch his campaign at Liberty University back in March 2015. Cruz would win the battle in Iowa – he came in first and Trump second. But of course he would lose the war.
Let me share a few snippets.
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If I were younger and living in Kenosha, Wisconsin, I would have been in the streets protesting the police shooting a Black man in the back as he got into a car with his three children already seated there. There may have been extraordinary extenuating circumstances, but based on the video, it would seem that this was as egregious an act as the killing of George Floyd and that the officers involved should be prosecuted and that the city’s police department dramatically reformed. Read More
All the cable news pundits have been talking about it as if its some surprising new theme, a novel take on a night laced with apocalyptic doom and sweaty aggression.
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I’m now very curious to see the day-two stories about Jerry Falwell, Jr.
As you can see from the headline, after a day of equivocating, Falwell has now officially resigned his post at Liberty University. We now know pretty definitively what has been fairly obvious for a couple years about Jerry and Becki Falwell’s sexual practices. It seems highly likely that there will be other similar stories about other young men in the couple’s lives. But as we discussed yesterday, the really consequential news will be on the Falwell’s critical 2016 endorsement of then-candidate Trump and what role Trump and Michael Cohen’s knowledge of Falwell’s private life played in that decision.
Since I wrote the Falwell update below, Giancarlo’s story has been published and it’s about what most of us have long suspected: Giancarlo had a relationship with the couple in which he and Becki Falwell had sex while Jerry Falwell watched. Other than the hypocrisy and the payoffs (which were likely illegal since they used money from Liberty University) more power to them. But I want to zoom in on the 2016 endorsement that I mentioned in the previous post.
I imagine there are quite a lot of details to emerge. But let’s go just on what has been reported very reliably so far.
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Glancing through tonight’s lineup of speakers suggests that, this evening, we are in for a journey down to the depths of the Trump fever swamp, with only a few potential opportunities to come up for air, when folks like Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) speak.
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