[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]
Watch entire video here:
Mary Trump: A public execution carried out by our military to be live streamed. That is a line we do not want to cross, but that is the line Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth wanted us to cross. The only way Donald could make this worse, and I’m very afraid we’re heading in this direction, is to make this event, this public execution, pay-per-view.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat from the essential SubStack Lucid has been writing about this. She obviously understands the historical context in which this is happening better than most. For me personally, emotionally, it felt like we have crossed a line and that this is something we do not come back from if indeed just even talking about it is problematic. Ruth discussed this in the context of trial balloons, which Donald is expert at floating. But just as an expert in the history of fascism, she can help us understand why this is a line we should never even contemplate crossing.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Trump has been, for a decade, speaking about violence and speaking about how we need to hurt each other more as part of a kind of emotional and political reeducation of Americans to create a climate conducive to this. He started this in the campaign of 2016, he did it in 2020, and of course there was January 6th, and then the campaign for 2024. He is trying to create a climate conducive to having people accept violence as part of governance, as a necessary part of governance. The case of the live stream represents one aim: to desensitize the public to violence, to make them complicit by watching it as though it were entertainment. And then the last thing is that this is also targeted to the military. It is designed to domesticate and really delegitimize the military as a democratic institution, and it makes the military complicit.
A lot of my work on fascism and Chile and Pinochet examined what happens when militaries make themselves the tools of spectacles of violence. This is why it felt particularly like an escalation.
Mary Trump: Luckily people have been speaking out, former military and even Republicans, which you can never count on them to be on the right side of things. Admiral William McRaven had a piece in the Atlantic in which he called public execution shameless and ignoble. I want to start by looking at this narrowly. This is not about the death penalty. It does not matter what you think about the death penalty. This is about something else entirely.
Something we have talked about before is the ways in which Donald uses micro-aggressions to soften the ground to get people to accept worse outcomes. We went from his telling police cadets about not worrying so much about protecting someone’s head when putting him in the back of a police car to now talking about executing somebody. I do want to say, Ruth, that I think it is very important that this is not about trying to generate sympathy for Nidal Hassan. He committed a horrific, unspeakable crime for which he must be punished. This is not about that either. This is about the ways in which it degrades us, but also the ways in which it can backfire. This is the logical conclusion to where Donald started ten years ago.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: It is no accident that his escalation and his wanting to do more and more violent spectacles is coming now because as his popularity decreases, he feels more desperate and impotent with the midterms coming up. The way these people think, and you are the psychologist here, their megalomania and their denial of reality increases. We have seen recently an escalation to wanting to annihilate entire peoples. He repeatedly talked about annihilating Iran, including at the UN, and that has its own logic because he is trying to discredit the UN because it is democratic. But then he also talked about Iran maybe taking out entire cities, and of course they are Californian cities in a state that has a democratic governor. He said they could take out a city, let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. In the essay I just published on Lucid, I talk about this as trial balloons.
It is very unclear whether this live stream will go forward, the execution, because he is having second thoughts. But he knows that one of his goals, his propagandistic goal, his reeducation goal, his exposure goal has already been met because everybody is talking about it. The trial balloon is when you put into circulation an extreme or heinous idea and people talk about it, both people who like it and then people who think it is disgusting. It gets talked about and then it becomes a thing. It becomes a thing that could be possible. It is a thing that is out there. Even if you cannot do it now, you can do it in the future. Trump has had this idea for years to use firing squads. I started my essay with reporters at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone talking about this in 2023.
Now is his big chance, but because he is declining in every possible way, physical, mental, and politically, he is grasping at something that can make his mark on history. A large scale thing, live stream and execution, annihilate a whole people. This is why it is very dangerous right now.
Mary Trump: I do not know that we have ever been at a more dangerous point for the reasons you just said. You are right that he often floats it, sees how it plays, plants the seed, and then revisits it later. The only time I have ever seen him abandon one completely was when he was in a rally in 2020, and he was talking positively about a COVID vaccine and the crowd booed him. He never ever heard that again. Of course, that was not violence. That was actually a good, positive thing that he was promoting, but it got rejected out of hand. He is not interested in things that are therapeutic or good for us in any way. But the violence will be something that he hangs on to. Based on what you have said in terms of his deterioration across pretty much every category of what it is to be human, it is a form of self-soothing.
It is born out of his and Pete Hegseth’s deep insecurities because it was Hegseth who first said this publicly from what I understand. This is a perfect storm of problems for us because, as you certainly know, Donald is a nihilist. If he feels threatened, he will do whatever he needs to do to protect his ego. I think that is also where the spectacle comes in and you use Muammar Qaddafi as a test case of how that played out and how he used the violent spectacle to entertain and degrade his people. Do you see us tending towards that? Do you see Donald tending towards that?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Qaddafi came to power late in the 1960s in a coup and he lasted 42 years because he had oil. But each of these strongmen uses the media system that is most common in their day. He used television and he televised executions. It is totally ghoulish, and I did not enjoy writing about this for Strongmen. Television was the way he would have televised executions of students and other people. He would have televised trials and then you could see they were beaten up and sometimes they would come back for a sequel. He staged spectacles in a depraved manner. He made school children come to a stadium to see a dissident being hanged, and that was the field trip. It is live spectacle, but it is also televised spectacle.
When Trump and those around him are doing AI things and generating this constant stream of fantasies that are both grandiose and also violent, this is just the latest chapter using social media and now AI to generate spectacles. From Mussolini forward when he had newsreels and Hitler with radio broadcasting violent fantasies, they knew that having people imagine violence and having that be part of everyday life is crucial to having them accept violence and believe that it is part of how you have to govern in order to insert the narrative, save white people, save civilization, prevent communism from taking hold. Whatever the narrative is, violence has to be the answer. You have to desensitize people to violence. Hegseth is the one who first proposed this publicly, and he has been reducing the mighty and powerful US military’s mission to what he calls lethality. He has his own fixations with violence. It is all he talks about: lethality. It is not defending democracy. It is not making the world safe. It is lethality, which is killing people.
Mary Trump: That is born out of their insecurity about their own idea of what it is to be masculine in part. You mentioned, of course, that one thing Donald does understand and is quite savvy about is visual spectacle, the aesthetics of that. We have seen him try in the last almost two years now to put on spectacles like the UFC cage match on the White House lawn, the bizarre Formula One race thing in DC, and of course building monuments to himself, naming everything after himself. But I think what is going to be a problem for us is that he is recognizing that spectacle alone is not enough and that violence is integral to what is going to come next. The violence will not work permanently, but the violence will make him feel better at least momentarily. That is why, as you point out, the rhetoric is getting increasingly extreme. I do think, as you mentioned, he is stepping back from this because it is not getting picked up the way he probably would have hoped, but it will resurface.
Even if there is not a public execution carried out by the US military, which would degrade them and all of us, there may well be in the future. The narrative is in our culture now. We are now a people who have considered this abomination. I think the one piece that is missing though is Donald monetizing this in some way. When I first heard this, I was like ten dollars, he is going to make this a pay-per-view event. Given the way things like prediction markets and sports betting are just driving so much of our economy and everything is getting gamified, I am really worried that when he does revisit this next time, that is where he is going to go.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I would not be surprised because one of the things I am always trying to figure out is how what we are living through resembles in some way other autocrats, past or present, and how it is a little different. But one thing is the commercial entertainment, the melding and blending of politics and entertainment. Berlusconi in Italy, who is also in my book, was a creature of television. He did this too, but not to the extent of Trump. In particular, he had spectacles of sexism and so does Trump, but I have totally forgotten about that cage match. This is how many things are going on. That is a good example because this is a commercial enterprise that took place on the White House lawn. It is part of the corruption stuff that everything is privatized, and there we had the spectacle of violence, so it is appropriate to talk about now.
It is this toxic coming together of violence, entertainment, propaganda, machismo, and lawlessness. We see it on the streets with ICE, and that is their culture too. An important thing is that when you are living through ascending authoritarianism, you have to watch what happens to institutions and the party, who has to leave because they are too law abiding and who instead comes in. We know ICE has been hiring people with a lot of domestic abusers and criminals. They are not interested in training them for that long. The GOP also has a lot of people with legal problems, corrupt people. When you fill the institutions, especially the ones with interface with the public, you get executions on the street. In a way, we have been seeing executions in the Twin Cities, in LA, and now in New York.
A culture is formed from the bottom up, from paramilitaries and militias that you see in other countries, gangs who collaborate with the government like under Duterte. You see this everywhere. It is a lawlessness. It is a broader cultural shift that Trump and Hegseth are trying to carry out. That is what is really terrifying because it is from above, but it is also from below. There is the violence as entertainment. That is something that Trump, the reality TV host, brings to this authoritarian playbook.
Mary Trump: Nobody is stopping them. That is clearly a big part of the problem. This has not happened yet. I think if it does, then we have crossed a line that we do not come back from. The reality is that Donald is not, unless the universe is much crueler than I give it credit for, going to be around for 40 years. I do not think there is anybody to fill the void he will leave, thankfully.
So to the extent that it is possible, what do we need to do in order to immunize ourselves against such depredations and how do we recover to the extent that is possible?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: As you know, I am writing a book on resistance. I have been talking about this value shift, lawlessness, and machismo, but there is a counter value system. Love is part of it. Togetherness, solidarity, unity. When Elon Musk, the former co-president in 2025 and now coming back to the Pentagon, talks about empathy being suicidal, we have to flip this. We know from resistance all over the world that empathy and love, however we are defining it, civic love, love for your neighbor, Christian or other religious love, is key to getting out of this mess. From that comes solidarity. Solidarity is not just a word, it is a practice on the ground. We saw it in the Twin Cities during the militarized occupation. It is mutual aid. That is what we do and that is what we have been doing. There is a way out of this.
The last thing I would say is that there are studies showing that you can get rid of an autocrat. But if you do not do this value shift to replace or at least start to replace this lawless culture, another autocrat could come back because legal reforms and institutional reforms are not enough. You have to have an on the ground shift of values to support democracy. That is where we have to work.
Mary Trump: Absolutely. It is not an accident that these people, including the oligarch tech bros, attack things like empathy. It is part and parcel of why Donald has championed cruelty and has tried to convince us that kindness is weakness somehow, because that is the family he grew up in, in which kindness, empathy, generosity, and sensitivity were all seen as weak and feckless and unmanly. I love the idea that resistance is love and resistance is solidarity and resistance is radical acts of empathy and kindness. People are finally starting to recognize just how far down this very dangerous road they have taken us. The lines in the sand are being drawn. As Donald gets more dangerous and more violent and more grasping, people are seeing it for what it is. If there is a good thing that we could say about this current time, it is that.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Your work and your books have been absolutely fundamental. You have been saying this for years, and the title of your Substack, The Good in Us, is part of it. We cannot allow the autocrats to make us our worst selves because Donald wants everybody to be like him, and that way he can do everything he wants to do with no pushback. But we are not like him. The good in us is very, very important to cultivate because the bad actors are cultivating other things. You have been absolutely fundamental in giving this message.
Mary Trump: You jumped on my line because I was about to say the same thing about your work. Seriously, Lucid is an essential Substack. It is compulsory. I like to assume that everybody watching has already subscribed, but if you have not, go subscribe now. Also, your book, Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, was fundamental in helping me understand what we are living through from a historical perspective. Your work continues to be vital and resonant. Everybody should go subscribe to Lucid and buy Strongmen. Let us get it back on the New York Times bestseller list because it should be. It should never leave the New York Times bestseller list.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I like that idea.
Mary Trump: I like that idea too. If I could get a commission, that would be great, but it is not necessary. Just kidding. Seriously, Ruth, I am so grateful to have you in my life and so grateful that you keep raising your voice and staying in this fight because we desperately need you.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Well, thank you. It is always a pleasure and full of respect and admiration. And thanks to everyone for watching us. These hearts are for you.
Mary Trump: Yeah, we had a wonderful turnout. Thank you everybody so much. Thank you, Ruth.
What we are witnessing is not politics as usual. It is the deliberate attempt to normalize the unthinkable through spectacle, violence, and the systematic erosion of democratic institutions. History offers warnings about what comes next if we do not resist with love, solidarity, and unwavering commitment to our values.
Subscribe to Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Lucid on Substack for ongoing analysis of authoritarian patterns and resistance. Buy her book Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present to deepen your understanding of how we got here and what comes next.
Trump could star in the third “The Running Man” as the egotistical game show host.
---> The only way Donald could make this worse, and I’m very afraid we’re heading in this direction, is to make this event, this public execution, pay-per-view.
^^^ I don't know why they didn't. I certainly expected it -- if their trial balloon on whether there was a audience for this kind of horror gained traction. That's the only reason I can come up with as to why it wasn't presented as PPV from the start.