Corruption Is at the Center

In conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat

[ Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

You know who calls other people losers all the time? Actual losers. This is one of the many things Donald has in common with someone nobody should want to have anything in common with. They need a Mussolini. Oh wait, sorry, my mistake. Silvio Berlusconi was a sort of wannabe Mussolini, just as Donald is a wannabe Kim Jong Un.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I have been saying for a long time that there is a huge wave of resistance in the world, and a lot of these guys are not getting any younger. Flávio Bolsonaro is young, and Nayib Bukele is young, but there is an arc to history, and I am hoping the United States will be next.

Mary Trump: That is a good place to start. We have seen Hungary, where strongmen who seemed inevitable were voted out of power. We see Narendra Modi having some issues in India, and Bolsonaro’s corrupt and traitorous son lost in Brazil. There have been good times, and Serbia got its act together. One of the things that has been of great concern over the last couple of years is what happens when the remaining world superpower becomes a fascist country. How does that influence what happens in the rest of the world? Weirdly, it does not seem to be having a great deal of influence. I should not say it has no influence at all, but Donald seems to be empowering a small number of totalitarian dictators who were already totalitarian dictators. And as you mentioned, they are not getting any younger. Do you see this global trend as disconnected from what is happening here in the U.S.?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: A common thread is corruption, because Donald has been making these deals. There is so much going on. Do you remember how we spent forty billion, or was it forty million, who knows, to bail out Mr. Chainsaw, Javier Milei, in Argentina?

Mary Trump: Yes.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: And they were trying to give him more too. There are all kinds of deals going on with sitting authoritarians, and of course there is the whole heist in Venezuela. As a group, MAGA elites like Jared Kushner are leading countries like Albania into sparking huge opposition movements, because I am really seeing authoritarianism now. We often use a legalistic or political explanation, namely the expansion of the executive over the other branches of government and the capture of institutions. That is all true, but it is not the full story. I am focusing now on authoritarianism as the removal or restriction of the rights of the many so that the very few can plunder. They can plunder the environment, natural resources, female bodies, and the workforce, and that is what the Elon Musks, the Peter Thiels, and the elites in all of these countries are after. Kushner wants to make these real estate deals and wreck the natural and national resources of other countries, and it is hugely backfiring.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: So corruption is at the center, both of the damage Donald is doing abroad and of the reaction against it. It is not only in Albania. It was not just a reaction against Kushner and foreign people. It was the collusion of local elites. We are getting lessons from this, and they are causing a backfire. There is a backfire going on in our country for sure, and we can talk more about how Donald’s own autocratic project is backfiring. But they are causing backfires in other countries too.

Mary Trump: That is becoming increasingly obvious, and if Donald is good at one thing, it is making the grift and corruption so out in the open. He also shows a complete lack of concern for the plight of working Americans. This is what Donald said recently:

I don’t care that people are suffering at the pump because we’re making so much money.

By “we,” he means him and his useless children. He does not mean the people. None of us are sharing in these ill-gotten gains. I think Americans are waking up to this and recognizing that the corruption is directly related to their increasingly dire straits. Corruption is not just stealing money, engaging in a grift, or making illicit deals at the expense of the American people. It is ruinous. Too corrupt is to ruin. Do you see that as part of the equation voters are making?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Yes. There are a bunch of new studies, because there is so much resistance around the world, including the Gen Z movements in Serbia and others before that. People have analyzed these movements, and three factors lead to the conditions for mass movements to form or for resistance to have an impact. The first is corruption combined with economic hardship. The corruption leads to some of that hardship, because, as we all know, tax money and money for social welfare is funneled into vanity projects and wars. The second is state brutality, which some people call overreach. That overreach can be violence, like the militarized occupations by ICE, but it can also take other forms, such as when your life is upended by state policies. That is what Donald has done by firing hundreds of thousands of people working in government and upending the way governance works. Taking money away from SNAP benefits and Medicare causes hardship too. So it is the corruption, the economic hardship that results, and then people feeling that the state is hostile to them or does not care.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Donald also said, before that, that Americans complaining about hardship were losers. That is one of his favorite words. It was actually one of Mussolini’s favorite words, perdenti, and Mussolini used it against anyone who complained. When I hear those things, I think, well, that is not very original.

Mary Trump: This all seems alarmingly familiar. It is ironic, because Donald is the most apocalyptically tragic loser I have ever met in my life. On some very deep, dark levels, he knows it, which is why lobbing those accusations at others is how I think he immunizes himself against that terrible knowledge. This perfect storm of events will hopefully bode well for us next week, and it is happening alongside an election that they are also very blatantly trying to steal. They are bringing as many levers of government to bear as they can to make sure people either cannot vote, their votes will not count, or voting is harder. Ruth, they are pulling out all the stops of election interference. They are undermining people’s faith in free and fair elections by claiming voter fraud that does not exist, and they are engaging in gerrymandering, voter suppression, and voter subversion. How do we stay the course and recognize that the best way to combat all of this is to vote in such massive numbers that we can turn this thing around?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Turnout has been key to the victories we have seen, in Hungary and in Brazil definitely. In Brazil, the story in the first round of voting was that Flávio Bolsonaro, who was basically running so his father could give him a pardon, did himself no favors. He reappropriated a Mussolini propaganda piece and put his own face where Mussolini’s face had been, so he came out as a fascist, basically. There was overwhelming turnout in the second round, and that is how Lula won. We see this in multiple places: huge turnout is important. A lot of what the administration does, and what authoritarians do, is try to intimidate people so they are scared to vote. But in these other examples, you can have a buddy system.

There are ways to get over your trepidation about voting and to understand that it is absolutely key never to give up on elections. That is one of my slogans. You never give up on elections. You take your courage, as people have done even under military dictatorships, and you go to the polls. We know that they have a bag of tricks. I have been analyzing it for an elections chapter in my resistance book. The bag of tricks includes the things you do beforehand to get people not to vote, the things you do on voting days, and then, if you do not like the results, other things afterward. You can contest the election or the new government, and you can send a mob to make sure the results are not certified. We know these things, but we also know that voting in huge numbers works.

Mary Trump: What is unique in at least modern American history is that Donald did a lot of those things in 2020, but he had not completely co-opted the Department of Justice. The Constitution has elections run by the states, so the Department of Justice inserting itself into elections is in contravention of that structure, and that is alarming. I say this not to freak people out, but it is important to be honest about where we are so that we know better how to deal with it. How worried should we be about Todd Blanche and his so-called Department of Justice?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: He is there because he was Donald’s personal lawyer. By the way, Berlusconi in Italy tried to put his personal lawyer into the equivalent of the attorney general’s office, and he did a lot of the same tricks as Donald. He was prevented by the president of Italy, because Italy has more checks and balances. It had a very long fascist dictatorship, so its constitution was redone as a kind of antifascist document with gatekeeping and guardrails. That did not work for Berlusconi. The purpose of Todd Blanche is to protect Donald in every way possible. We know he is going to pull these tricks, and many good, smart people have been working on what they will do. People are prepared with remedies and pushback. That should not stop us from doing our civic duty by voting, because that is what matters in the end.

Mary Trump: Right. Otherwise, as your friend Timothy Snyder says, we are obeying in advance, and that is not something we should ever, ever do. They have done a pretty decent and comprehensive job of turning our institutions against us and putting mechanisms in place to protect themselves from a Democratic win. That is why massive turnout is so important. I want to check in with you about how you are feeling about this election. If Democrats win a majority, certainly in the House, if not both the House and the Senate, what is the very first thing they need to do? They will not have the majority until January, which is another massive flaw in our system, so how do they start mitigating the damage and turning things around?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: The long period between the election and the new people being seated in office is a huge liability. We saw that in 2020. It is also quite unusual in a global framework, and some countries do not do it because they know it is a danger zone. Many people are hurting economically and worried about the future. They are also worried about AI wrecking jobs, along with this perfect storm of things. So I think Democrats have to be very visible and united as a group and speak directly to the American people. I would love for them to have live streams every day, being present, explaining what they will do, and talking about affordability. We ran on affordability. Here is what we are going to do. We ran on anticorruption. Here is what we are going to do. Some of the things that most need to be done, like getting billionaires’ money out of politics and restoring a sense of democratic government with a small d, are essential. Authoritarians are not even in office to govern. They do not care about governing. They are occupying their offices, even though they were elected, but they are there to make money and to amass so much power that they cannot be held accountable. Clear communication to the American people about the plan matters: the immediate plan, and what they would like to do later. Whether they can do all of these things depends on what happens in Congress, but showing good faith and intention, and publicizing that very clearly, is essential because this is a national crisis. People need to see that the people they elected to serve them, to govern for them, and to realize their hopes are up to the moment. That is why these people are in Washington.

Mary Trump: One way to do that, as I have been saying for a long time, is for them to have experts like you help explain it, so they can explain it to the American people better. This is not just about corruption, and it is not just a one-off rogue regime outside the norm for our politics. This is a trend, a movement, and it is the entirety of the Republican Party. We miss massive opportunities when we make an election about one thing, and this year it is about the economy. I am not saying it should not be, because it is a massive issue, but there are so many factors involved. We have a party that has enabled the worst instincts of its leader and allowed him to get away with the most horrific crimes against the American people.

If the American people have context for that, it would go a long way toward educating them for the future. Hopefully we will never face this kind of situation again, but if people are educated, that makes it less likely. So, Democrats, when you are elected, have Ruth come and talk to you and talk to the American people, because she knows more about this stuff than you do, and the American people need context for what we are going through. It is difficult. The administration creates so much chaos that it is hard for people to keep things straight. What role do you think that kind of communication can play, not just in the interregnum, so to speak, but going forward? I am asking how people can connect why they are suffering so much, even if it feels mostly economic, to the darker forces behind it and the endgame that inevitably leads to economic hardship and the loss of civil liberties.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: At the end of the Biden administration, we had the strongest economy in the world, and The Economist had a cover saying America was in an enviable position.

Mary Trump: They used the phrase the envy of the world.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Yes, exactly. Then in February, Time magazine, also a liberal publication, had a cover showing Musk sitting alone at the presidential desk in the Oval Office. As I was saying at the time, it was a new kind of coup. Musk was like a co-president, allowed to come into the system and take over through DOGE and retool government for his own personal means. That is why he wrecked USAID so quickly: they were investigating his companies. These structural things are new. This co-presidency is new. The oligarch usually is not allowed to come into government and be part of it, because the whole point of the oligarch is that he stays outside. So communicating very clearly what has gone on is important, and so is ICE.

It is important to rein in ICE and reform it, and some people want to abolish it. People need to talk about it, and I think they understand the magnitude of what has gone on, which has no parallel. What has happened in the last twenty months has no parallel in the first twenty months of Erdogan, or even Putin or Orban. The amount of destruction is incomparable. But as long as the goodwill is there and there are plans to address the most urgent things, I think it is all about communication. The last thing I will say is that a lot of Americans have been watching Fox and Newsmax for so long that they have been indoctrinated to see Democrats as some kind of evil clique. It is important for Democrats to be out publicly in front of the American people so there is a new chance to remake that relationship.

Mary Trump: Yes, and it is up to us to make that possible. Everybody, your right to vote is sacred, and exercising it is the only way we are going to turn this around. We did it in 2020, and we are going to do it again, but it is going to take all of us. Ruth, I have taken up far too much of your time. I know it is a really busy week, but I hope we get to catch up again after the midterms. When Democrats win, and hopefully they will win very big, we will potentially have another set of problems to deal with, and we all need to be prepared.

Everybody, Ruth’s Substack, Lucid, is one of the essential Substacks out there. If you have not subscribed, what is going on? Go subscribe, please. Also, Ruth’s book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, is a foundational text. If you want to understand what is going on, how we got here, and what to expect in the future, read this book. It should be living permanently on the New York Times bestseller list. So go do those two things. I am not going to say they are more important, because they are very important, but vote. Make sure you register to vote, and make sure everybody you know is registered too. Bring a whole bunch of people to vote with you. Ruth, we will check in next week.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Thanks for all you are doing. I voted early, and it felt so good to vote. It is the way forward. It is the way we start this long road of retaking our democracy, improving it, and living up to our potential as a just, equal, and caring democratic nation.

Mary Trump: That is right. Let’s finally fill our great potential. I always vote on Election Day because it gives me a thrill, and it makes me feel proud. I live in New York, so I do not have to worry about it, because not everybody has that luxury. Ruth, thank you so, so very much for everything you do. Thanks, everybody, for joining us, and please stay engaged.