"We're living in a time of intense of these past regimes... including to remove their violence, so... Putin erects statues to Stalin, but then sends historians and others who comment on the s into penal colonies, and Amazon... sells t-shirts that say, "Pinochet did nothing wrong"... [etc.] ...I wrote it as an American watching Trump... holding rallies... s, and institutionalized lying, and I wanted to document and figure out this experience with some history. ...[I]t's the first book to put Trump's presidency in the context of 100 years of authoritarian rule."
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ruth_Ben-Ghiat