Comparing Trump to Authoritarians of the Past

Since the Nazis have always been the all-too-predictable go-to for an evil wielding of power, I thought I'd explore beyond them, in order to broaden the palette of potential comparisons for what is currently playing out in the United States. Who else in human history has moved so quickly to centralize power, gut whole agencies, and bring proud institutions to heal, intimidating anyone who dares stand in his way? 

The first realization is how many potential comparisons there are. Mussolini to the Present, a book by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, explores a long list of authoritarians past and present, among them Mussolini, Hitler, Augusto Pinochet, Francisco Franco, Muammar Qaddafi, Silvio Berlusconi, Mobutu Sese Seko, Viktor Orban, Rodrigo Duterte, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi. Unfortunately, according to a New York Times review, the author "provides no conceptual framework for distinguishing between different types of strongmen." 

And in distinguishing one authoritarian from another, what to call them? The word "strongman" limits the playing field to men, and confuses power with strength. (In many ways--running from tough issues like climate change, propped up by propaganda, hard on others, soft on self--Trump is a very weak man.) On my list of potential labels thus far are demagogue, authoritarian, totalitarian, dictator, autocrat, despot, tyrant, and fascist. Though each of these terms has its own history, the distinction is most clear between the first and all the others.

Demagogues vs. Fascists

During the 2024 presidential campaign, it became common to call Trump a fascist. Washington Post opinion writer Eli Merritt explained why "demagogue" is a better term.

The wikipedia description of a demagogue matches the Trump we've seen thus far:

"... a political leader in a democracy who gains popularity by arousing the common people against elites, especially through oratory that whips up the passions of crowds, appealing to emotion by scapegoating out-groups, exaggerating dangers to stoke fears, lying for emotional effect, or other rhetoric that tends to drown out reasoned deliberation and encourage fanatical popularity.[4] Demagogues overturn established norms of political conduct ..."

As Alexander Hamilton pointed out at our country's founding, those who begin as demagogues can end as tyrants. Though Merritt makes the case that Trump is not as yet a fascist, he acknowledges some fascist qualities in Trump's behavior and inclinations. Fascism, founded by Mussolini, is defined in wikipedia this way:

Fascism's extreme authoritarianism and nationalism can manifest as a belief in Manifest Destiny or a revival of historical greatness (like Mussolini seeking to restore the Roman Empire). It may also centre around an ingroup-outgroup opposition. In the case of Nazism, this involved racial purity and a master race which blended with a variant of racism and discrimination against a demonized "Other", such as Jews and other groups. Other marginalized groups such as homosexuals, transgender people, ethnic minorities, or immigrants have been targeted. Such bigotry has motivated fascist regimes to commit massacres, forced sterilizations, deportations, and genocides.[17][18]

 Some of these qualities can be seen in Trump's "make America great again" theme, the demonized "Other" of immigrants, and attacks on homosexuals and other marginalized groups. Mussolini's pro-natalism can be seen in vice president JD Vance's call for more babies. There are echoes of Mussolini's and Hitler's nationalistic appetite for expansion (spazio vitale and lebensraum) in Trump's quest to acquire Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. 

Musolini and Hugo Chavez

I took a closer look at Italy's Mussolini and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Mussolini proved a big surprise. Later to become a brutal dictator, he began as a socialist and journalist, an avid reader and intellectual with a nuanced understanding of and admiration for Marxism. This is about as far as one could imagine from Trump, whose capacity to read is extremely limited. Mussolini grew disillusioned with the socialist party, however, and went through a radical transformation, ultimately founding what we know as fascism. Mussolini also distinguishes himself from Chavez and Trump due to his having achieved power on his first try, when he marched on Rome with 30,000 Fascist blackshirts in 1922. 

Though Chavez was a leftist, his ascent in 1998 has parallels to Trump's in 2024. For both, success began as failure and prosecution for crimes. Chavez's attempt to overthrow President Carlos Andres Perez in 1992 failed, followed by conviction and jail time. Trump, too, attempted a coup of sorts, unleashing a mob on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, followed by years of trials. Having failed to take or hold onto power by illegal means, both achieved success legally and electorally years later. 

Like Trump, Chavez proved charismatic even in failure. According to one account, having surrendered after his botched coup attempt, Chavez "appears on national television to inform rebel detachments to cease fighting, and is subsequently imprisoned. The brief speech—in which he jokes that he has only failed "for now"—establishes a connection with viewers that makes him a political star." Chavez's "for now" sounds eerily like Trump's "stand back and stand by."

The importance of that stretch of years between failed coup and successful election cannot be overstated. For Trump, those four years inbetween, spent in litigation but also in planning his return, provided the crucible for a far more radicalized second term. Through four years of stalling and impeding justice, he was able to further probe the weaknesses and limitations of the courts and gain confidence in avoiding accountability while living outside the law.

Hitler's success also began with failure. In 1923, inspired by Mussolini's success a year earlier, Hitler attempted a coup. He was arrested and spent a year in jail, during which time he wrote much of Mein Kampf. After ten years marked by banishment and regrouping, electoral success led to his taking power in 1933.

Thus far, as of March, 2025, Trump has taken over the Republican Party, cowed Congress, intimidated and defied the judiciary, fired inspectors general, and launched a lawless gutting of government. He certainly looks to be headed down that road Hamilton described, from demagogue to tyrant--a road all too well trodden elsewhere in the world. 

Multiple Entrapments in a Supposedly Free Society: Cellphones, Social Media and a Fossil Fuel Economy

A talk by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (pronounced "height") is packed with data and insights, metaphors and meaning. Blessed with a mellifluous speaking voice and a mind brimming with curiosity and ideas, he fills you with an articulate vision of a deeply troubled world salvageable only through specific collective actions. 

He visited Princeton University this month to deliver a talk entitled "Far Beyond Mental Health: What the New Phone-Based Life is Doing to Human Development, Social Capital, and Democracy." 

According to Haidt, as the power and appeal of the cellphone has increased, young brains in particular have grown around it as a tree's trunk and roots might grow around a rock or a gravestone. This growing attachment, despite considerable benefits, has spawned a long list of maladies, beginning most visibly with pinky fingers deformed from constantly grasping a phone. Myopia has become more prevalent as people spend more time indoors, staring at their screens. 

At the same time, parents perceiving a more dangerous world, have deprived their kids of the chance to explore the world on their own. Largely limited to adult-supervised activities, kids have little opportunity to learn self-government. As neighborhood connections have broken down, phones have delivered increasingly addictive content, calculated to keep kids continually online. Suicides among girls have increased. Boys interact primarily through their computers, spending hours on customized video gaming maximally experienced only on their own computers at home. Though it can be potentially heartening that accidents and injuries have dropped among young people, it also points to a drop in physical activity and risk-taking that are an important part of growing up. 

Young people trapped in cellphone use:

Significantly, surveys show that youth are not necessarily enamored with this constant attention to the screen, but say instead that they are glued to their phones because everyone else is. To put the phone down is to risk social isolation and diminishment. 

At one point, citing young men of the past who made transformative contributions to society in their 20s--Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg--Haidt asked the audience for names of young people who have proved transformative more recently, excluding the music world. Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai were mentioned, but no young men, and no one outside of advocacy. His suggestion is that young people's attention is now largely consumed by the phone, leaving no time for the mind to wander and mull things over.

Starting around 2012, Haidt's collection of data shows, youth became increasingly trapped--by their own and their parents' perceptions of lurking dangers, in sterile subdivisions, in schools running lockdown drills due to mass shootings, and most of all by increasingly sophisticated phones and software calculated to suck them in and keep them fixated on the screen. Internal communications reveal that tech companies learned early on the physiology of how to manipulate phone users, providing dopamine-inducing reward with every click. 

Another, even more widespread form of entrapment:

Unmentioned in the talk is a strong parallel here with another form of entrapment that affects people of all ages. We are all trapped in a fossil fuel economy. The drop in happiness among youth coincides with increasing awareness that each one of us contributes in a small but measurable way to the destabilization of the earth's climate. Here, too, the social pressure to participate in this collective rush towards dystopia is overwhelming. Advertisements urge us to buy more, drive bigger cars, fly to appealing destinations. Our primary role in society, we are constantly being told, is to seek fulfillment and happiness through consumption. As with the youth locked onto their phones by social pressure, all of us risk social isolation and diminishment if we unilaterally withdraw from a fossil fuel-dependent lifestyle. Here, too, internal communications in fossil fuel companies have revealed efforts to keep us addicted to their products, regardless of consequence.

Though fossil fuels have enabled us in many ways, the mobility and comfort they make possible has often kept us isolated in our cars and homes. Machine-scaled development spreads us out in subdivisions notable for their sterile landscaping and detachment from places to socialize. Unable to get anywhere or see a friend without the assistance of a parent and a machine, kids in particular have been disempowered. 

Also unmentioned in the talk, nature, once a playground and source of refuge and endless fascination for childhood, has changed as well. What woodlands and fields remain have become impoverished and tangled with the dense, thorny growth of invasive species. Exploration carries the risk of tick borne disease.

Haidt cited evidence that those of a more liberal persuasion, and/or lacking in religion, have proved more prone to unhappiness. He quotes about the hole in our hearts that can only be filled by God. I believe he said that past efforts to replace religion with various forms of spirituality lacking God have not been very successful. Though an atheist, Haidt takes his kids to the synagogue, and encouraged the audience to explore the role religion could play in bringing solace in troubled times. 

At this point in an otherwise highly convincing talk, I grew skeptical. Conservatism in many ways has devolved into illusion and irresponsibility. Unchastened by truth and evidence, denying our collective impact on the climate, ignoring massive deficits caused by tax cuts, coddling its own while projecting harsh criticism outward, it excuses its adherents from caring about our collective fate and the plight of others. Conservative happiness appears dependent on being gaslit and let off the hook. 

Religion can foster a similarly dubious happiness, believing God has a plan that will ultimately supersede current earthly suffering. Embedded in denial and passivity is a deeply pessimistic view that we cannot understand nor solve society's problems. A liberal, seeking happiness on earth, feels trapped in a political climate where we are free to collectively create problems, while political sabotage prevents us from collectively solving them.

Haidt has a solution, however, at least for kids trapped in social media: phone-free schools, no smartphone until highschool, no social media until age 16, and encourage real-world independence and play. That might help youth trapped in social media, but all of us will remain trapped in a society destabilized by our machines' emissions and a seemingly uncontrollable proliferation of lies, while collective action to solve problems is stymied. 

It's a sign of just how rapidly our world is unraveling that the title of Haidt's lecture, advertised as "Far Beyond Mental Health," had become the more deeply urgent "Far More Than Mental Illness" by the time he showed up to deliver it. 

Part of a lecture series named for Harold Shapiro, whom I remember as president of the University of Michigan when I was there, the talk was hosted by the James Madison Program, led by Robert George and known to have a conservative leaning. 

Robert George (on the left in the photo) promotes a diversity of views on campus, which is a fine sentiment, but ten years ago, when he hosted columnist George Will, that promotion of diverse views was used as an excuse to deny and delay while climate destabilization continued unchecked.

Haidt seems optimistic that the case he and others are making about smartphones and social media will lead to action. We've seen, though, how even overwhelming evidence of climate change's perils can be resisted and denied. I grew up in an era of free-range childhoods, exploring nature and playing pickup games with no grownups in sight. It was a time when facts still mattered. We enjoyed the comforts and mobility of fossil fuels without the knowledge of the havoc they ultimately wreak. Technological innovation has brought new freedoms, and yet we and kids especially are increasingly trapped, indoors, in social media, in ideological echo chambers, in a fossil fuel economy, with resistance to collective solutions deeply entrenched. 

Forced and Unforced Lies in Political Discourse

Here's an interesting distinction that is not currently being made by those in the media who report and interpret the news. Broadly speaking, politicians generate two kinds of falsehood--forced and unforced. This distinction is borrowed from tennis, where there are forced and unforced errors. A forced error is due to the pressure an opponent exerts, while an unforced error is the player's own mistake. For example, when a player sends two straight serves into the net, committing a double fault, that is an unforced error, because the opponent was just standing there, waiting for the serve.

Now, in a political context, a forced lie would be the sort of lie that is committed to cover up an embarrassing truth. This is the old style form of lying. A politician lies to cover up something that the opposition will otherwise be able to pounce on and take advantage of. This sort of lie can also be called a defensive lie. Nixon lied about Watergate; Reagan and George H.W. Bush lied about the Iran-Contra affair, and so forth. 

In contrast, an unforced lie is a lie that no one is forcing the politician to make. A false attack on an opponent would be an unforced lie. The perpetrator is not trying to cover something up, but instead using a lie as a weapon. Propaganda often takes the form of unforced lies.

The forced/unforced terminology can be applied to Trump's troubled nomination of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. Among allegations of a drinking problem, sexual impropriety, and financial misconduct, the most provocative was an email written by Hegseth's mother to her son while he was in the midst of a contentious divorce. In the email, she told him "I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man ..." That email can be viewed as an unforced truth. Hegseth's mother didn't need to forward the email to Hegseth's wife, who presumably shared it with others through whom it ultimately was made public. The mother's recent disavowal of the email (“It is not true. It has never been true.”) can be seen as a forced lie, that is, a predictable defensive attempt, given social and political pressures, to contradict the unforced truth she herself had revealed.

An internet search uncovered precious little, but there's an anonymous post on reddit that also divides lies up into forced and unforced. Here it's an atheist's interpretation of God as a Big Lie that spawns forced lies to deal with the inconsistencies between the Big Lie and reality.

"Even if you have reasonable critical faculties in other areas of life, people who have bought into the big lie construct very complex additional lies as part of the apologetics process. These additional lies are forced lies in the sense that they need to be constructed to paper over the (increasingly many) inconsistencies between the big lie and reality. This is somewhat understandable, if one is empathetic enough to accept the power of buying into an ideological big lie in the first place."

Later in the post, the author introduces the concept of a debt to the truth, the idea being that, just as governments can accumulate debt, people can accumulate a debt that expands with each new lie they tell.

"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid."

How satisfying it would be if people who accumulated a debt to the truth ultimately got their comeuppance. It is an appealing notion that speaks to faith in a moral universe, even among those who question the existence of God. What I see, however, as 2024 comes to a close, is a world or at least a nation where lies, now primarily of the unforced variety, are ascendant, tolerated, often rewarded.