Good evening and welcome to this episode of the Mary Trump show. I am thrilled and honored

to have as my guest Ruth Benjert, author of the very prescient Must Read, Strong Men from

Mussolini to the present, sorry, Strong Men, and the excellent newsletter, Lucid Ruth, it is

really good to see you and have you on this evening. How are you? How are you?

We're happy with the fact that you were right about everything and I'm going to say

to you Sim, you would rather have been wrong. And you know, like stuff keeps happening.

The hits keep coming. We've got bad news out of Italy. Things here are dire. So how are

you? I'm good. No, I'm good. I'm really pleased to be speaking with you. You two have been

prescient about so many things. And I don't know as a historian, which is how in my case, I've

been able to kind of see Trump for what he was really early. Somehow there is a certain

consolation that history has certain patterns. Doesn't mean that good things are going to

come of those patterns right away. But that society, we're not the first society to go through

this. And there are ways that we can learn from resistance efforts and stuff like that.

So that's the optimistic side. That is optimistic. Although I had to be honest, I just read your

book again and it had a very different experience from when I read it, when it first came out

a couple of years ago, because things are worse, quite frankly. And I don't think a lot of

us anticipated that they would be worse if done lost, which he did resoundingly. But

you know, part of the problem is the Republican party didn't lose resoundingly. And I'm beginning

to wonder, do we learn? Do we learn enough? Because we are at what seems to be, or on what

seems to be a knife said here. And this is happening. It feels like it's happening again.

And in terms of, you know, the rise of authoritarianism in Europe, we already have some entrenched

autocrats there. We've got Orban and Hungary. We've got Erdogan and Turkey. And now in

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