The latest federal case against Donald Trump is putting a spotlight on the role of false and baseless claims in his presidency. The indictment alleges that the former president and his co-conspirators used lies for the criminal purpose of overturning the 2020 election. For some scholars of history, its forensic look at how speech underpinned an alleged conspiracy to illegally retain power helps to situate Trump into larger historical patterns.

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    The latest federal case against Donald Trump is putting a spotlight on the role of false and baseless claims in his presidency.

    For some scholars of history, its forensic look at how speech underpinned an alleged conspiracy to illegally retain power helps to situate Trump into larger historical patterns.

    “All authoritarian leaders have cults of personality,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history at New York University and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.

    But Ben-Ghiat said in her studies of authoritarian leaders such as Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Silvio Berlusconi and Jair Balsonaro, there was precedent for this.

    “What Trump is doing is, he’s asking for personal loyalty to him to outweigh the rule of law,” said Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

    The case will likely focus on statements that Trump and co-conspirators allegedly made in the weeks between the 2020 election and the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.

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