Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

As with Berlusconi, governing for the scandal-ridden Trump has been about self-defense. He has claimed that a mainstream press dominated by liberals and the left conspires to silence him, but has tried to shut out journalists he sees as critics, as when he temporarily revoked access to White House press briefings for CNN’s Jim Acosta in 2018. He asked former FBI director James Comey about imprisoning reporters in 2017. “The fake news is creating violence,” he told reporters in 2018, preparing public opinion for future repressive measures against the press. By 2019, he was declaring in meetings attended by former national security adviser John Bolton and former defense secretary James Mattis that journalists should not just be jailed if they refused to divulge their sources, but physically eliminated. “These people should be executed. They are scumbags,” he said, sounding like strongmen from Mussolini to Putin.