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I agree completely with this article.
‘The Worst Type Of Leader To Have In A Crisis’ | HuffPost
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has an urgent message during the coronavirus crisis: Authoritarians like Trump don’t care about human life. They care about power.
Far-right leaders across the globe are responding to the historic coronavirus pandemic with an alarming mix of lies, incompetence, racism and corruption.
Among them is U.S. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly sought to downplay the severity of the virus, and to obscure all the ways his administration has fumbled the federal government’s response.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a history professor at New York University who is a world-renowned expert on fascism and propaganda. She talked to HuffPost Wednesday about the grave dangers of having an authoritarian leader like Trump in charge of America’s effort to beat back the pandemic.
Not only will the president continue to put so many lives at risk, she argued, but he will seek to exploit the crisis to gain more power.
On Tuesday, you tweeted something about Trump that struck me. You wrote: “An amoral authoritarian does not care about human lives, I cannot emphasize this enough, only profit and loyalty and obedience matter to him. The politics of revenge and spite will continue.” And I was honestly just hoping you could expand on that for a minute.
For the general public, it can be hard to accept that we have a very different kind of leader. We have a leader who has an authoritarian mentality, and that kind of leader, they’re often narcissistic, they are amoral, totally immoral, only power and profit matters. It’s very much the end justifies the means. So they think in the aggregate, and they really don’t care about human life. So, this is the worst type of leader to have in a crisis because they’re incapable of acting for the public good. So that’s one part of it.
Another part is, Trump is the foe of expertise and science and any kind of fact that gets in the way of what he wants reality to be, and we’ve seen this with abundance in the way he handled the growing crisis of coronavirus. So he would rather send misinformation to the public — which he did recently recommending [drugs] that I understand put some people in the hospital — than tell the truth. And so the broader thing is that authoritarians, they fear transparency and they fear accountability, and this is another reason why they are terrible leaders to have in crises.
‘The Worst Type Of Leader To Have In A Crisis’ | HuffPost