In Conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat

20 June, 2026

[Transcript edited for clarity, flow, and length]

I had a chance to talk with my friend, the amazing Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and we dove deep into what happens when a society becomes centered around greed and personal wealth, and the inevitable consequences of allowing so much dark money into our politics. You could say that everything we’re dealing with right now has been inevitable, and we covered much more as well.

Mary Trump's Transcend PAC

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Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I don’t think we’ve ever talked about how you came to choose the very fitting name, The Good in Us, for your Substack.

I’ve known you for several years now, and as a psychologist, your temperament and worldview seem perfectly reflected in that title.

Mary Trump: Thank you for asking.

Unfortunately, I’m not going to remember the quote exactly, but it’s inspired by something Oscar Wilde wrote in De Profundis, the letter he wrote from prison after being imprisoned for being homosexual. He wrote it to his former partner, and although the version I first encountered is actually a variation of the original, it carries the same idea.

We live in a world where the worst qualities are often rewarded while the good in us is suppressed or punished.

That observation feels especially true today.

We live in a time when our leaders are trying to convince us that cruelty is strength and something to aspire to, while kindness and empathy are signs of weakness.

I completely reject that idea.

It’s especially important during difficult times that we elevate the good in ourselves and remember that goodness still exists despite the darkness and the horrors surrounding us.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: That’s beautifully said.

The way I’ve come to understand these problems is through the study of systems.

I began my career as a scholar of Italian fascism, studying Mussolini and how his regime influenced Hitler. Then a certain someone came down an escalator talking about shooting people on Fifth Avenue, and my focus expanded to include the United States.

Fascist states are societies where everything Mary just described becomes public policy.

Empathy and compassion become liabilities. They become excuses to isolate people, remove them from society, imprison them, or, in the Nazi model, eliminate them entirely.

That’s why it’s so important to understand how demagogues, institutions, and political systems adopt those same values.

For ten years, Donald Trump has been engaged in an effort to emotionally recondition Americans to believe that kindness, empathy, and solidarity are for losers, while violence is presented as the proper way to solve disagreements, navigate political transitions, and deal with people who are different.

We’re pushing back against that by showing there is another way.

Mary Trump: It’s more important than ever.

We also have to recognize that one of their goals is to co-opt our empathy and kindness.

You often talk about the personalist regime, and part of how we arrived here is by elevating somebody who devalues kindness and empathy because he never experienced either in the way every human being needs.

Donald was raised by a sociopath who wanted his sons to become killers.

That’s an important fact to remember.

Kindness and empathy are strengths.

Especially now, it is extraordinarily difficult to remain a kind and empathetic person.

The people who reject those qualities are actually the weak ones.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Exactly.

When someone like Donald becomes the leader, his psychological fixations begin shaping the entire government.

They determine who gets appointed to positions of authority, which is why we see so many damaged people occupying critical roles, whether it’s the Secretary of Defense or the Director of the FBI.

Then we witness spectacles like transforming the White House into the setting for a cage match celebrating ritualized violence.

At the same time, we have Donald’s obsession with his ballroom, which, according to reporting by The Washington Post, is one of the subjects he talks about most.

I’ve wondered whether that ballroom functions as a representation of his ego.

It’s the place where donors gather to praise him, surrounded by white walls, cheap gold accents, and constant displays of wealth.

Meanwhile, beneath it sits the bunker he frequently discusses as a place of safety, complete with a military hospital.

The space above ground reflects his inflated ego and insecurity, while the space below reflects his deepest fears.

He is literally redesigning the White House into a monument to himself.

Mary Trump: It isn’t a perfect one to one correspondence, but it’s remarkably close.

That’s exactly what happens when somebody possesses an inflated but extraordinarily fragile ego, an overpowering id, and virtually no superego.

The ballroom is simply another example of the same pattern we’ve seen throughout his life.

Every event, every monument, every spectacle exists to protect somebody suffering from severe psychiatric disorders that have gone untreated for decades.

Those conditions inevitably deteriorate over time, and on some level Donald knows it.

He knows he is losing control of himself.

He knows he is losing control of the narrative.

His entire life has been dedicated to protecting himself from the truth that he is none of the things he claims to be and none of the myths created around him are true.

That illusion is unraveling.

It’s making him increasingly desperate.

Everything he’s doing is an attempt to protect himself from that humiliating reality.

Humiliation is what he fears most.

I’ve often described Donald as a black hole of need.

The one thing he wants more than anything else is the one thing he can never have, and that’s love.

My grandparents rendered him incapable of giving or receiving it.

He doesn’t know how to love other people, and he cannot accept love when it is offered.

That leaves him constantly trying to fill an unfillable void.

The ballroom was supposed to cost two hundred million dollars and now costs six hundred million.

The arch has to become the tallest arch in the world.

The oversized cage on the White House grounds cost sixty million dollars.

But none of it will ever be enough because none of it is love.

None of it can substitute for love.

That’s why we have to prepare ourselves for increasingly desperate, increasingly grandiose, and increasingly dangerous actions.

He woke up the morning after that sixty million dollar obscenity we all paid for feeling exactly as empty as he did the day before.

It accomplished nothing except reinforcing his narcissistic injuries.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: It’s interesting that you use the word empty because I wrote in Strongmen that no matter how many people, riches, possessions, or displays of power these leaders accumulate, they remain secretly empty and profoundly unhappy.

Mary Trump: That’s exactly right.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: The ballroom also leads directly into another issue, corruption.

I’m hoping the sheer scale of Trump’s corruption and the expanding network of corruption surrounding his family and his officials begins opening people’s eyes.

What starts as isolated corruption eventually becomes something resembling a mafia state, where different families and factions accumulate wealth and power through interconnected patronage systems.

We’re seeing the early stages of that now.

It also reminds us that Donald didn’t create this environment by himself.

He benefited from decades of decisions that normalized dark money in politics.

I know you recently started a PAC designed to support candidates differently, so I’d love for you to talk about Citizens United and what you’re trying to accomplish.

Mary Trump: As you said, this has been building for a very long time.

There are many reasons we find ourselves in this dark moment with a fascist party in power and an oligarchic structure increasingly controlled by technology billionaires.

Part of it is unaddressed white privilege.

Part of it is what happens when a society values personal wealth above everything else and rewards selfishness and cruelty.

Running alongside all of that is the myth of rugged individualism.

The truth is that many of these multimillionaires, billionaires, and trillionaires built their fortunes with enormous government assistance.

My grandfather’s fortune was certainly built that way.

It’s both absurd and alarming that so many people in positions of power continue enriching themselves while making life worse for everyone else.

Citizens United accelerated our decline toward kleptocracy and oligarchy.

We have John Roberts and the corrupt, illegitimate Supreme Court supermajority to thank for that.

At every opportunity, they make things worse while simultaneously creating an imperial presidency that allows Donald to enrich himself, his useless children, and his cronies with virtual impunity.

It has also created a political system that actively invites greed and corruption.

When people become wealthy simply by raising money for politics, you inevitably attract a certain kind of person.

That exists in both parties.

The long term solution is straightforward.

We need publicly funded elections.

Until that happens, my wife, Ronda Cress, and I decided to create a PAC called Mary Trump’s Transcend PAC.

Mary Trump's Transcend PAC

Its purpose is exactly what the name suggests.

We want to transcend cruelty, chaos, division, and partisanship while supporting leaders who understand what’s at stake and possess the courage to meet this moment.

That means electing people willing to make difficult decisions, challenge concentrated wealth, and build the truly representative multicultural democracy America has always claimed to be but has never fully achieved.

We’ve also committed ourselves to something many PACs unfortunately don’t do.

We’re determined to direct as much money as humanly possible to candidates and causes while keeping overhead as low as possible.

It costs money to operate any organization, but our mission is to maximize the impact of every contribution.

We’re incredibly excited about it.

There are excellent organizations already doing this work, including End Citizens United and Jane Fonda’s climate focused PAC.

We simply need many more organizations that exist to serve democracy instead of profiting from politics.

We launched on Sunday and will begin announcing our first slate of endorsed candidates in July.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I’ve believed for a long time that one path out of authoritarianism requires a new politics grounded in values.

Policies should grow out of justice, solidarity, empathy, and shared humanity.

Those values naturally produce economic and social policies that serve people.

We’re living through a laboratory of destruction, but Americans are also receiving an education in what government should actually do and what happens when those functions disappear.

Disaster relief, public services, and basic protections all reflect underlying values.

If leaders genuinely don’t care whether people live or die, as long as profits continue flowing, then disaster relief stops mattering.

Beginning with human values allows us to imagine a very different future and very different leaders.

Mary Trump: That’s exactly right.

Human beings unfortunately haven’t evolved enough to avoid learning through catastrophe.

Sometimes we have to be brought incredibly low before we find the courage to do what should have been obvious all along.

When an entire society is organized around self enrichment and zero sum thinking, overcoming people’s attachment to wealth and personal gain becomes extraordinarily difficult.

That’s why this moment is also an opportunity.

We can explain how we got here and why.

We can make the bold changes necessary to ensure we never travel this road again.

We can create a country where every person enjoys equal rights and equal access to the promise of the American dream.

Most importantly, we can finally decide who we are, who we want to become, and the kind of leaders we need to help us get there.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I think that’s exactly right.

Resistance isn’t only about pushing back against the present.

It’s about creating a better future.

Throughout history, resistance movements have served as incubators for the next generation of leaders.

People who struggle to defend democracy today often become the leaders capable of rebuilding it tomorrow.

Those forged in difficult circumstances may be exactly the people we need.

Mary Trump: That’s why one of our goals is to develop a concrete checklist of the qualities we want in our leaders.

Ideally, politicians should be experts in government just as pilots are experts in flying airplanes.

We want people who understand public service.

I’m fortunate that my co founder is exactly that person.

Ronda spent her career as an attorney working in disability rights, most recently in the Disability Rights Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

She embodies the spirit we need in public leadership.

Government should never be about raising campaign money or returning favors to corporate PACs.

It should always be about serving the people who place their trust in elected officials.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: That’s exactly why this conversation matters.

Autocrats teach societies that government exists to serve the leader rather than the people.

We see institutions repurposed to protect the president instead of the public, whether it’s the Department of Justice, the IRS, or the Supreme Court.

Long lasting autocracies inevitably produce widespread impoverishment while the ruling class becomes unimaginably wealthy.

That’s why leadership, values, and public service matter so much.

Mary Trump: Exactly.

For decades Americans have been told that government itself is the problem.

Government is us.

It’s our responsibility to reclaim it and shape it into an institution that truly serves every person.

Mary Trump's Transcend PAC

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