Lee Moran
Updated Mon, September 23, 2024 at 7:05 AM MDT·3 min read
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Authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Sunday summed up former President Donald Trump’s latest brag as “fascist talk.”
Trump, the Republican nominee, who has repeatedly boasted about his role in overturning Roe v. Wade that ended the constitutional right to abortion, this weekend declared at a campaign rally and also on his Truth Social platform that if he wins the 2024 election, “Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion, because it is now where it always had to be, with the states, and with the vote of the people.”
Ben-Ghiat, appearing on MSNBC’s “The Weekend” show, responded, “It sends a chill down my spine when Donald Trump says women won’t have to think about abortion anymore because he also said something similar about voting when he talked to a group of evangelicals.”
“He said, ‘After this election, you will not have to vote anymore,’ as if voting is a kind of burden,” continued the history professor at New York University. “And so this is fascist talk, where the fascist leader says, ‘I will free you from all decision-making. Just trust in me and you will not have to worry about any problems anymore.’”
Watch from the 4:30 mark here:
In a separate interview on MSNBC’s “Ayman” show, Ben-Ghiat drew damning parallels between the “dehumanizing rhetoric” that Trump and his running mate JD Vance are using towards immigrants to that spewed by Nazi German dictator Adolf Hitler.
On Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933, Ben-Ghiat noted that Germans had been hearing him slam and dehumanize Jews for more than a decade.
“One thing about propaganda is that you hear extreme things over and over again then they don’t seem so extreme anymore and they become familiar,” she explained. “Now Americans have been hearing Trump malign immigrants for almost a decade now and so what Trump’s method is, is to slowly introduce more and more extreme ideas.”
Trump and Vance are now “introducing this idea of remigration, which is really scary, because this is an idea that’s very popular with the most extreme far-right people in Europe and it holds that you should be deported and sent back to your country of origin regardless of your citizenship status because if you really want a racial state, a white-ethno state, then whether you’re legal or illegal doesn’t matter,” she said.
It’s been “a journey of language and a journey of concepts that these people have very knowingly taken Americans on” and it’s “really disturbing,” she added.
Watch that interview here:
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