The Personal Attack Dog

In Conversation with Ruth Ben Ghiat

[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

Mary Trump: I had a chance to catch up with my friend, NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of fascism and authoritarian leaders. She’s also author of the bestselling book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present and is the proprietor of the essential Substack Lucid. Ruth and I discussed the role of self debasement in keeping people close to Donald in line and the implications of their subservience. Hope you enjoy it.

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Mary Trump: I’m here with the amazing Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who is the proprietor, as you should know, of Lucid, which is one of the essential Substacks out there. So if you haven’t subscribed already, you need to. Ruth, I think one of the challenges, as I started to talk about, 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 through lines that help people understand that all of this is of a piece, even though the onslaught of news is crazy.

I wanted to start with this great piece that you wrote about Todd Blanche in particular and the role of the personal lawyer in general to personalist rule. So if you could walk us through it and answer this question: Has Donald finally found his Roy Cohn in Todd Blanche?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Yeah, and he’s also found his equivalent of some of the personal lawyers who other autocrats have had. Mary mentioned this idea of personalist rule, which is a kind of subset of authoritarianism, almost like a concentration of a political system that’s designed to retool institutions and everything to protect the leader, to indulge his whims, to boost his ego with personality cults. And very importantly, the purpose of the institutions, including the judiciary, becomes to solve the leader’s financial, personal, and legal problems once and for all.

So the attorney general and judiciary, as we’ve seen in our country, are targeted early. And so I went down a rabbit hole. The piece, if those of you have read it, got a bit long because I decided to look at what were the fates of the personal lawyers of other authoritarians, either real dictators or authoritarian style leaders.

Some go to jail, like Berlusconi’s Cesare Previti. Berlusconi worked in a democracy, and he hugely damaged that democracy. He tried to appoint his personal lawyer to be Minister of Justice, which is the equivalent, but the 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.

And then, one more thing I’ll mention, there are all kinds of strategies. These people get promoted to important posts, and one of them is to make them, or appoint people who are already members of parliament, like members of Congress, so that the personal lawyers are doing this. Their salaries are paid by taxpayers while they’re also solving the problems of the autocrat and doing lawless things, and they’re in Congress or parliament to vote on laws that protect the leader. It was the case with Orbán in Hungary. It is the case now with Erdoğan in Turkey. And so you see that what’s happened with Blanche has a context.

Mary Trump: Yeah. And it is, I think, worth pointing out that certainly in the case of Todd Blanche, he didn’t start here. He had, as far as I’m aware, a fairly respectable career as a prosecutor for the SDNY, the Southern District of New York, also referred to as the Sovereign District of New York because getting a job there is considered such a pinnacle.

And how far has he fallen? It sort of begs the question of why. Now, 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 it. I think it’s fair 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: Yeah, because the attorney general is supposed to represent the interests of the American people, and instead, this is personalist rule. He ends up being the personal attack dog and defender. And so the entire judicial system is retooled, redone to suit the leader.

What you asked is the essential question of complicity under authoritarianism and how these regimes function. Sometimes you have people who get swept up and they become fanatics. Some people were always fanatics, with long histories of fanaticism. Other people decide that they’re going to ride this. They buy into this. They want power. They decide they can have incredible power at a fateful time. So they go with it, and they just put aside their conscience, adopt other values, and they’re rewarded for those values.

That’s the key. Individual loss of conscience can happen, but in authoritarian states with leaders like Trump, it gets institutionalized. Your lawlessness isn’t just tolerated, it’s actually rewarded because lawlessness becomes the law of the land.

And then other people, I do have to mention, because we are talking about Trump and who adopts through Roy Cohn and also Putin, Trump collects information on people. I’m not saying that’s the case with Blanche, but there are other people who collaborate or continue to collaborate because Trump has stuff on them. And he’s been doing that for decades, way before he went into politics. Roy Cohn taught him to do that. And Roger Stone, let’s not forget Roger Stone, another mentor.

Mary Trump: Wish we could, but we could. Yeah, I think it’s important for people to realize that it’s not because Donald is, across the board, some strong, charismatic leader, although sadly he is for some people. He also just has dirt on people, which is ultimately a sign of weakness, but it still allows him to have power over people he might not otherwise have.

I think Blanche is a good example of something else I wanted to talk to you about. We have this string of events happening, seemingly insignificant in some ways and others deeply significant, that don’t seem to have much in common. So you could say that Donald’s war of choice against Iran is kind of a sign of his arrogance and his complete inability to admit that other people know more than he does. The reflecting debacle is emblematic of the just grotesque corruption and incompetence that he represents. And now we have this Air Force One thing where he got whisked away in a catering truck, which is just 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.

But I think the through line of all of these things is, despite the demonstrations of the corruption and the incompetence and the cruelty, what have you, 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, truly.

Mary Trump: Blanche is an example of that. We’ve seen some of his public statements about Donald that are just cringe inducing. It’s just so pathetic and groveling. We’ve seen his 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 in which Donald potentially put people’s lives at risk knowing that he was doing that. I can remind us that he did the same thing on January 6th. So 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 it’s not going to happen to me. It’s like, as long as I debase myself and stay as loyal as I 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? Before we continue, please take a second to like this video and subscribe to the channel. Also, leave a comment below and let’s keep the conversation going. Thanks for watching.

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 in two seconds, he incited a violent mob to go after Republicans as well as Democrats who were there. And those Republicans, we know, called their loved ones thinking they were going to die. They called their loved ones to say goodbye.

And so everyone saw the two acts of Senator Josh Hawley, who did the fist pump to egg on the violent rioters, thinking he wasn’t going to have a problem, and then had to run for his life. That’s act two. But act three is the key here to set up what we’re going through today. Act three is when that same senator had to forget his trauma, running for his life, and eat it and move on and start calling his own attackers patriots.

When you force someone to forget that you put them in mortal harm and praise the attackers as patriots, and that becomes the party line, then you’ve broken them. You’ve broken them emotionally, psychologically. So many other things have happened along the way to produce what we have now, where these are people who will continue to praise him, even though the examples of Trump putting them in mortal harm potentially, like Air Force One for Secretary of State Rubio, Bessent, all of them.

It’s very clear that he doesn’t care about them and that it’s a use and discard relationship, but that will not stop them from continuing in their jobs because that’s how authoritarian systems have always operated. There are lots of stories in my book, Strongmen, about ministers. It’s like a revolving door of ministers where you’re in, and then you’re in prison or you have to go into exile, and then you can come back and be a minister again.

All of this is called divide and rule. The only one who never has to lose his position is the leader, until he does later.

Mary Trump: Yeah, right. And the only one who never gets held accountable is Donald. But before we get to, because I know we want to talk about Bill Cassidy, it’s so weird to me. The people Donald chose to go with him in the catering 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. It’s creepy. 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, as you mentioned, Cabinet secretaries Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, Stephen Miller, whom you’d think would be one of Donald’s closest confidants, and Karoline Leavitt, whom you also would’ve thought would’ve made the list of people to put on the catering truck. So does it tell you anything about who Donald chose and whom he left behind? It’s bizarre.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: In a way, these people, well, Natalie Harp is a little newer to my understanding, but from the reporting that I’ve seen, she is available 24 hours a day. She actually posts for him. She’s the one who physically posts the rants that go on all night, but she also sends him texts that say:

My whole world is centered around you.

So you could say that she knows how to play him. You could say that she’s sincere and she really has made him her world. And imagine feeling that you are so close to the “most powerful person in the world.” So she’s a newer addition. The others, as you mentioned, Walt Nauta was. We still don’t know what the fate of that classified intelligence and those documents has been, whether Trump was selling intelligence when he took the classified documents to Mar-a-Lago.

And by the way, that is a perfect example of personalist rule because you do not accept any division between public and private. Everything is yours. So everything that should be classified or belongs to the government, and you are a custodian for four years and then you leave, that’s not how authoritarians think.

So these are people who were involved in complicity also in his private spaces, like the caddy, because golf is a big deal for him and it’s how he makes money, promotes his golf courses. And so it’s also a narrowing of the world, and the more corrupt they become, the more paranoid they become.

Trump has long been, and now especially, in what I call the bunker stage. And that’s why there was a picture the other day of him golfing with what looked like a missile launcher, some kind of major weapon defense system right next to him, and then a whole bunch of barbed wire.

Now, the last thing I’ll say is one of the biggest threats to American safety has always come from Iran, many years of Iran being responsible for lots of plots. Trump has provoked Iran hugely, which makes everybody less safe. And so the Air Force One incident, along with building the ballroom and especially the bunker for himself, he’s obsessed with the bunker, is an example of how he’s making all of us less safe. At the same time, he’s seeing to his own security needs because that’s all he cares about.

Mary Trump: Right. Yeah. And I would hope that that’s obvious to everybody by now. And just really quickly, I’ll say the one tiny, perhaps, glimmer of hope here is it does feel like things, for the first time ever, are starting to stack up and stick. So here’s hoping.

But 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. So Ruth, what is up with Bill Cassidy, and why is he doing this?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Yeah, for those of you who read Lucid, I was writing some notes up because I wanted to discuss this with Mary, who, it’s important, is a clinical psychologist, because what I’ll say is probably more her territory in this sense. And I’m going to probably do a little essay on this.

It’s like a classic example of authoritarian psychological dynamics. So stage one, you debase yourself, and this is our theme, and yet you do it in a very fateful way. You cast a decisive vote to approve Blanche, but you know in your conscience 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.

He said that he couldn’t help himself. Stage two, the day after, or days after, you have to go on all the major news shows, and in one of them, you explain to the public why your voice was cracking. You can’t say that your conscience was bothering you. So what he said is that, what’s interesting to me is that he felt the need to bring it up and explain. And what he said is:

Oh, it was the emotion of being part of history.

And then stage three, to salvage your professional identity as a doctor, you start speaking out again about the vaccine policies, even though, as Mary just mentioned, you confirmed this lunatic Kennedy and you keep confirming lunatics and fanatics. And so the fact that he needed to explain why he was emotional and that was his conscience talking to the nation is the saddest thing, and I’ve seen it many times before around the world.

Mary Trump: Yeah. And it’s just as everything that’s going on now, as disparate and unique as it might all feel in the moment, it is of a piece just in terms of what this country is going through, and it’s of a piece in terms of history. I think it’s important that we all understand that context.

Ruth, I can’t think of anybody better to help us do that than you. 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, 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. So Ruth, it’s always amazing to see you.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Likewise. It’s always great to talk. 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.

Mary Trump: Well, thank you. And again, it’s always awesome to see you, and I hope we see each other again soon.