"Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a distinguished historian of and a prolific political commentator, belonged firmly to the alarm-bells camp over the past four years. Less than two weeks into Trump’s presidency, she wrote an article titled “Donald Trump and Steve Bannon’s Coup in the Making.” Her new book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, elaborates on... the ways ambitious strongmen can damage or destroy democratic regimes. The book features Trump prominently, but it sets him in a rogues’ gallery of authoritarians and would-be authoritarians ranging from Hitler and Benito Mussolini to late-20th-century dictators like Augusto Pinochet, Moammar El-Gadhafi, and Idi Amin to present-day populists like Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, and Jair Bolsonaro."