Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Gaelin. Today, I'm joined by Ruth

Ben Gaelin, author and professor of Italian and history at New York University. Ruth's

an expert on fascism, authoritarianism, war, propaganda, and Donald Trump. She's also the

recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright, and other fellowships. Ruth has written over 100 op-eds

in essays for a wide variety of outlets including CNN, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post,

has authored multiple books, including her latest, Strongman, from Mussolini to the present,

now out in paperback with a new epilogue. Ruth, welcome to the show. Thank you, I'm glad to be here.

So I'm very excited to have you on because you are incisive and experienced in this field. And I

think it's one, as we were talking just a minute ago before we started recording, that I think a lot

of folks, even folks who are tuned into American politics seem to really miss what's going on,

or don't want to think about it. But give us a sense of in your experience and your education

and your work, you know, how you came to a place where you now find yourself at the center of

this discussion about the future of American democracy and the fight against authoritarianism.

So I had started writing for CNN because I'm an academic and I had written many academic

things and I started writing for CNN in 2014 on historical things. So I already was writing when

Donald Trump came on the scene. And it became instantly clear to me because of my background

in studying fascism that he was behaving like an authoritarian and not like somebody running

for office in a democracy. And this became stronger and stronger. And so many things began to happen

in 2015-16 that people were at a loss to interpret or they just glossed over laughing nervously

such as in January 2016 when he said, I could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone

and I wouldn't lose any followers. And this made no sense because nobody of either party

says such things. But Duterte says them, Bolsonaro says them. And to me, it was instantly clear

...