Donald Trump doubled down on Monday on his new claim that conservative Christians should not vote again if they help elect him in November. At a campaign event for evangelical Christians last week, the former president said, “Christians, get out and vote. Only this time. You don’t have to do it anymore. Four more years. You know what? It will be fixed. It will be good. You don’t have to choose anymore.”
We should not be surprised. Free and fair elections have been a nightmare for Trump, who lost the popular vote in 2016 and was voted out of office in 2020 after one term, then told his followers he had won and sparked a violent uprising.
No wonder the former president is all for an authoritarian alternative. Autocrats have long relied on elections to decide their political fates which is unacceptable. They have the democratic system “fixed” by ending free and fair elections so they can stay in power indefinitely, just like Trump has always done.
Many strongmen, including Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as well as more recent examples such as Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, must succeed in a democratic electoral system before they can impose authoritarian rule. Mussolini and Hitler were appointed by conservative elites who felt that giving power to extremists with criminal records was better than allowing the left to win.
Mussolini entered office quickly. He founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, or Italian combat league, in 1919 as a decentralized militia movement to stop leftist strikes and factory occupations. This group developed into the Fascist Party, and in 1922, Mussolini was appointed prime minister.
But elections were always a problem for Mussolini, whose party was initially unpopular, identified with chaos and violence. The fascists who ran independently in 1921 got only 0.4% of the vote. Therefore in 1923, musing about how to deal with the “disaffected people” who could vote one of them out of office, Mussolini wrote: “You prevent it by force” and “by using this force without mercy if necessary,” an appropriate description. many coup attempts, including January 6.
To prepare for the 1924 elections, the Fascists introduced an electoral reform, the Acerbo Law, which gave whichever party received the largest number of votes, as long as they exceeded 25% of the total, two-thirds of the seats in Parliament. The climate of intimidation ensured that the law was passed and soon the Fascists won the election.
After socialist opposition leader Giacomo Matteotti contested the election results, he was assassinated. When Mussolini’s involvement in the assassination became public and the possibility of jail time arose, he declared a dictatorship and passed a “law for the defense of the regime” that closed down opposition parties, removing the grounds for elections. Italians did not have free and fair elections for the next 18 years.
Hitler had watched Mussolini rise from Germany, and when the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, a Nazi coup attempt, failed, he changed tactics.
Hitler had learned that to overthrow a democratic system, you had to go inside. “We must hold our noses and enter the Reichstag (German parliament) against the Catholic and Marxist parties”, he said in 1925. But this did not mean that he pretended to love democracy. He and his party launched a campaign to destroy it.
The last free election in which Hitler ran was in early 1933. At a fund-raising meeting with major industrialists, he, like many Republicans today, said that the election was the last chance for German voters to reject communism. If the vote didn’t work, he warned, the Nazis would resort to violence. Hitler’s economic minister concluded the meeting by repeatedly ordering businessmen to visit their cash registers and make donations to the Nazi Party.
And like Mussolini, Hitler knew how to consolidate power. A week before the election, after a mysterious arson attack that destroyed the Reichstag, he issued a draconian. ordered which removed all individual rights and freedoms and gave the administration the ability to take over the government of the country.
The Nazis won just over 43% of the popular vote, short of a majority. But Hitler followed through on his promise of violence and arrested or killed many of his parliamentary opponents. He then intimidated most of the others into voting for Enabling Act, which gives the administration virtually unlimited power. It took him seven weeks to translate his voter displeasure into full dictatorial control.
Today, as “electoral autocracies” are practiced throughout the world, elections are not enough to classify a country as a democracy. Many elected leaders manipulate the electoral system to get the results they need to stay in office and keep elections to cover despotism with a veneer of freedom.
Trump seems to want something more radical: no vote. The GOP supports this by claiming that the election has been so corrupted by the Democrats that it has ceased to be a valid way to elect leaders. As MAGA loyalist Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama toward Newsmax in 2023, “Americans just have to stand up and say, ‘Listen, enough is enough, let’s not have another election.’ “
Strong people always tell who they are and what they are going to do. With the example of the Fascists in mind, we must take Trump and his enablers seriously. The end of the Republican election denial is not to challenge a particular election result, but to prevent a free and fair vote.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history at New York University and a publisher Lucid, a newsletter on threats to democracy. His latest book is “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” Benjamin Carter Hett is professor of history at Hunter College and Graduate Center, CUNY. His latest book is “The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War.”
