It's Always Great When Two Guests Who Have Appeared on The Chauncey DeVega Show are Quoted in The Washington Post

Today's Washington Post has a great summary of the ongoing madness and chaos that is Donald Trump's regime. It is also nice to see two guests who have appeared on The Chauncey DeVega Show quoted in the piece:

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University who writes extensively on authoritarianism and Italian fascism, told me that a discernible trait of authoritarian and autocratic rulers is ongoing “frustration” with the “inability to make others do their bidding” and with “institutional and bureaucratic procedures and checks and balances.” 

“Trump doesn’t respect democratic procedure and finds it to be something that gets in his way,” Ben-Ghiat said. “The blaming of others is very typical of autocrats, because they have difficulty listening to a reality that doesn’t coincide with their version of it. It’s part of the authoritarian temperament to blame others when things aren’t working.” 

Trump expects independent officials “to behave according to personal loyalty, as opposed to following the rules,” added Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale University who wrote “On Tyranny,” a book of lessons from the 20th century. “For Trump, that is how the world is supposed to work. Trump doesn’t understand that in the world there might truly be laws and rules that constrain a leader.” 

Snyder noted that authoritarian tendencies often go hand in hand with impatience at such constraints. “You have to have morality and a set of institutions that escape the normal balance of administrative practice,” Snyder said. “You have to be able to lie all the time. You have to have people around you who tell you how wonderful you are all the time. You have to have institutions which don’t follow the law and instead follow some kind of law of loyalty.”

We are doing some good things on the show and have had some amazing guests who are leading the national conversation in this moment of crisis.

In my best NPR fundraising voice, I would like to thank all of you who have donated to the June fundraiser to support The Chauncey DeVega Show. We still have a very long way to go. If you can and are willing and have the means to do so any donation into the virtual donation pile that can be found via the Paypal link on the right-hand side of the screen would be very much appreciated.