Our guest will be Dr. Gary Slutkin, Founder and Founding CEO, Cure Violence Global, which has worked on community, cartel, tribal, prison, election and political violence around the world. He is the author of the acclaimed new book The End of Violence. Eliminating the World’s Most Dangerous Epidemic, which argues that violence is a disease that can be cured. Dr. Slutkin is the former Chief of Intervention Development for the World Health Organization, where he led efforts to combat epidemics in over 20 countries.

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I have always found films to be magical creations, and among my favorite professional activities is serving as a consultant on feature and documentary films (Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, Joe Berlinger’s Hitler and the Nazis, and other productions). I also love to participate in films as an on-camera expert (including PBS’s The Dictator’s Playbook, Netflix’s How to Become a Tyrant, ESPN’s Berlusconi: Condemned to Win, and, now, How to Feed a Dictator).

Having written a book about film (Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema), I am always interested in how filmmakers choose to reconstruct the past, and the dynamic between the assessments of historians and the testimonies of people who experienced those histories first-hand.

This tension between external evaluation and lived experience stands out in the fascinating new documentary about the chefs who cooked for the dictators Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong Il. Based on the insightful book by Witold Szablowski and directed by Andrew Neel, How to Feed a Dictator is a deeply disturbing and profound film that is essential viewing.

It is premiering tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here is a link to screenings in New York City this week. I will be speaking about the film on June 13, along with Szablowski and the production team, at the Festival’s Storytelling Summit.

Chaos, Terror, and Complicity

The interviews with the former chefs convey with rare precision the particular climate of terror and chaos that mercurial strongmen create, and the legacies of trauma they leave behind, along with nostalgia for the “Great Man Bringing Law and Order to the Country” persona their personality cults and retinues of sycophants ceaselessly cultivate.

The former heritage is well represented by Amin’s former personal chef, Otonde Odera, who is pictured here with his special dish of whole roasted goat, served at state dinners. Odera, who today lives in poverty, tells of being sentenced to death when one of Amin’s children developed a stomach ache after a meal; of seeing his friend executed; and how it became impossible to ignore the violence Amin unleashed on Uganda. “I missed my low wages from before,” he says in the film. “At least my heart was in peace.”

Such pangs of conscience don’t seem to bother Italian pizza master Ermanno Ferlanis, who cooked for Kim in North Korea, and Jorge “Coco” Pacheco, Pinochet’s personal chef.

While North Koreans starved, Kim had Ferlanis fly in prized tomatoes from Italy so he could have his favorite dish made exactly the way he wanted it. Ferlanis’s rationalizations about not seeing starvation or maltreatment are undermined by his decision to stage a desperate escape from North Korea, lest he join the afflicted due to a less than perfect pizza.

Having written about Pinochet’s regime in Strongmen, I had strong words in the film for the kind of blinders-on nostalgia exhibited by Pacheco, who continues to revere Pinochet —and today has plenty of company, with fellow Pinochet fan José Antonio Kast now the country’s president.

This film illustrates the psychological and other conditions of collaborating with tyrants and how that complicity is remembered. There is a reason dictators invest so heavily in propaganda: they hope that their whitewashed versions of history will become the norm for many long after their demise.

The actual toll of working for a dictator is made concrete with the participation of “Abu Saif,” the personal chef of Hussein, who stayed with him to the end. He appears under an alias and as a blacked-out silhouette for reasons of personal safety.

One of the film’s greatest strengths is that it does not let us forget about the violence dictatorships create. The masterful editing cuts between the “I never saw any violence” testimonies of many of the chefs and the information about that violence given by me, my NYU colleague Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and journalist Riccardo Orizio, who personally interviewed many of the featured dictators.

The carnage of these regimes is channeled by the blood and bodies of the animals being cooked, and by hearing about people treated like animals and slaughtered or tortured.

There are also lessons for us today about the toll of having an unstable narcissistic and fearful leader in charge of the state and the military. As I state in the film, dictators don’t only require that we betray and corrupt others. They also entice us to betray ourselves, abandoning our moral compass to work for the powerful, spreading their lies, killing their enemies, and, yes, cooking their food.

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Their goal is to change who counts as an American, who can have leadership roles in government and society, who can vote, and who can walk the streets without fear of being imprisoned or deported.

This agenda of authoritarian transformation is the connective tissue binding the many news stories we see each day, whether it is the Trump administration deporting an estimated 17,500 immigrants to countries they have never visited, to White Christian Holy Warrior Pete Hegseth blocking promotions by female and Black Navy officers, to the wrecking of the Voting Rights Act.

Remember that Nazi salute given by Elon Musk at Trump’s Inauguration festivities, and that other Nazi salute given soon after by Steve Bannon at CPAC? They were not aberrations or provocations, but rather the opening shots of a race war now unfolding.

That war seeks to remove agency and mobility and rights and freedoms of non-Whites, while implementing schemes of population redesign, reducing the numbers of immigrants by disappearances, mass detentions, and deportations by government authorities.

MAGA is now a potent project of White race hegemony that feeds on several vectors: the long and tragic history of violence and legal and other effacements of Black people in America, the history of anti-immigrant xenophobia, and the example of authoritarian racial utopias that promoted some while cleansing society of others.

Foreign Policy, National Security Policy, and Elections

Transforming a multiracial and multifaith democracy into a White Christian ethnostate requires a holistic approach, and for months I have been tracking the attempts to achieve greater cohesion of government policy around this goal.

In a recent speech, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended “Western civilization” as the shared identity of the United States and Europe and depicted mass migration as a threat to that civilization.

I have also examined how suppressing free and fair elections fits into this scheme.

Population Engineering

Here I add the tool of population reengineering, which is embraced by White House policy advisor Stephen Miller, Musk, and many other MAGA luminaries. A throughline of the far-right from Benito Mussolini to Musk is Great Replacement Theory, the idea that Whites are being outperformed demographically by non-Whites, necessitating measures to save “civilization” from “erasure” and Whites from annihilation.

The Fascists provided the template. “Cradles are empty and cemeteries are expanding,” Mussolini declared in 1927. “The entire White race, the Western race, could be submerged by other races of color that multiply with a rhythm unknown to our own.” In a speech that year, Il Duce cast himself in the role of a “clinician” who undertook “necessary hygienic actions” to defend Italian people from criminals, leftists and other political dissidents. “We remove these individuals from circulation just like a doctor does with an infected person,” he concluded chillingly.

A vast network of penal colonies, confinement zones, and prisons appeared to “quarantine” the “abnormal.” This “therapeutic” approach to governance, as official Giuseppe Bottai called it, was later applied to Italian Jews, and in Italian Ethiopia the regime experimented with apartheid-style racial segregation to stop the wrong kinds of babies from being conceived.

This idea of state action to protect White Christian civilization and the “natural family” –one man, one woman, and both white--continues among the far right today, as does the attachment to Great Replacement theory.

“I think there is a deliberate plan to erase everything that identifies us: culture, Nation, family are under attack,” stated Giorgia Meloni, a neo-Fascist, in March 2019. As Prime Minister, Meloni champions White motherhood as an antidote to population changes caused by non-White immigration.

Having the right kinds of babies in the right numbers and keeping out undesirable races and births was a mainstay of the former Viktor Orban government. “Europe has become the continent of the empty crib,” said Hungarian Family Minister (and future President) Katalin Novak in 2019, echoing Mussolini. Novak had to resign from the presidency after she pardoned a pedophile, but she continues to advocate for “saving nations” from “a collapsing global birthrate,” this time through x-y, an organization she founded in 2024.

X-y has been supported by Musk, who shares Novak’s preoccupation about Whites being replaced and civilization ending. A Washington Post investigation found that Musk posted 850 times in recent months on the topic of population and Whites being “a rapidly dying minority,” which triples his posting rate on these subjects in the previous 2 years.

An Optics of White Supremacy

We can expect X and other MAGA-friendly social media platforms to increase their messaging about a supposed race emergency, and we’ll likely see the Trump administration become more aggressive in its attempts to create an optics of White hegemony in government spaces.

This idea of an all-White governing class was tested in Trump’s first term, as I warned in a 2018 CNN essay on White House interns.

There will also be a ramping up of removals of non-White immigrants from the public sphere, as the massive Amazon-style warehouses ICE is repurposing for people would indicate.

Our Identities Cannot Be Erased

This administration will never succeed in wrecking our multiracial and multifaith society, no matter how much damage it does to our democratic political system. It is who we are. Our identities cannot be taken away from us. And the attempts at mass disenfranchisement will backfire; a new civil rights movement is already starting.

In trying to create a homogeneous society and ban talk of diversity, this government is merely drawing attention to what makes the United States special, and the power of our roots, identities, and traditions. These will serve us well in the coming years as we pursue peaceful resistance to restore our democracy.

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I’m writing now to let you know about a few upcoming Lucid events that will explore the mechanisms of autocratic capture of the media, the courts, government agencies, and more.

The first event is tomorrow morning at 8:30amET: a Substack Live with legal commentator Joyce Vance about hope, standing up for our rights, and best practices for messaging. We’ll have our coffee on hand!

On Monday, June 8, at noon, I’ll be speaking with journalist Scott MacFarlane, who was the former CBS News justice correspondent and left the network in March 2026.

Everyone is welcome at these Substack Lives. Just download the Substack app, enable notifications, and look for the join link from Ruth Ben-Ghiat/Lucid at the appointed hour. I’ll circulate the video for those who can’t attend.

On Sunday, June 7, at 8-9pmET, we’ll have our weekly Lucid Q&A. Paying subscribers will receive a link at 5pmET that day to register for the Zoom gathering. With the news about the nomination of a new Director of National Intelligence, and a convicted January 6 perpetrator hired by the Pentagon to work in counterintelligence, I am glad we will host Frank Figliuzzi, former Assistant Director for counterintelligence at the FBI. Author of the bestselling book, The FBI Way, he hosts The Frank Figliuzzi Show on Substack and YouTube.

Lucid now reaches 195 countries, and these monthly Sunday evening meetings allow people in different time zones to participate. Those who cannot attend can find the video at lucid.substack.com, videos tab.

If you’d like to be part of these simulating conversations, and ask me and my guests questions, you can sign up as paying or upgrade to paid here:

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Until tomorrow, stay well and stay Lucid!

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Lucid now reaches 195 countries, and these monthly Sunday evening meetings allow people in different time zones to participate. You will receive a link to register for the Zoom event at 5pmET that day. As always, if you can’t attend, you can find the video at lucid.substack.com, videos tab.

This summer’s guests include former US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, Barb McQuade, former CBP official Jenn Budd, North Korea specialist Jung Pak, and anti-authoritarian social movement expert Scot Nakagawa.

If you’d like to join these informative sessions, you can upgrade to paying or join as paid here:

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The global proliferation of data centers, which require enormous amounts of water to cool the servers, is calling public attention once again to the preciousness of water as a resource and the history of its use and ruination by Big Capital and billionaires. Even a mid-sized data center can consume as much water as a small town. This redirection of water away from local communities and agriculture is the latest chapter in the fight for a life source that has often been rendered unsafe or unusable by pollution from mining and other extractive activities.

This was the case in El Salvador, where the Pacific Rim Corporation’s gold mining operations posed a threat to the country’s water supply: the extraction process would pollute the water with cyanide. And so an ultimately successful struggle shaped up. A poverty-stricken indigenous population took on a giant capitalist enterprise, in the process allying with international environmental and social policy advocates to stop the plunder and poisoning.

Lucid recently hosted two individuals who were part of that struggle and have resisted dictatorships in El Salvador, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Robin Broad and John Cavanagh are co-authors of the new graphic version of the award-winning book The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed, which tells the story.

Broad is a research professor at American University and has worked as an international economist in U.S. government and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Cavanagh is Senior Advisor and former Executive Director of the Washington, DC-based Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

During our discussion, Robin sketched out some lessons from this landmark victory that are applicable to other resistance efforts, including those in the United States today. Here, for everyone, is a seven-minute clip from that presentation. Paying subscribers can access the whole 30-minute video at lucid.substack.com, videos tab.

I took careful notes during our session, and here are some bullet points about the lessons, with my own commentary added.

• It is not enough to engage in denunciation. Resistance efforts must be framed in a positive manner as contributing to an alternate vision of the future. In the case of El Salvador, the resistance coalition were less anti-mining than pro-water. Agua es Vida was one of their slogans, and one that everyone could understand and get behind, regardless of how they felt about mining and the jobs it might bring to local communities. Jobs are no good if you cannot survive because your water is poisoned. Water is life.

• Resistance must be bottom-up, grounded in the community, and powered by grassroots action. “In the roots lie the moral compass,” Robin stated. The community is also the source of immense ancestral wisdom in opposing tyranny, survival in difficult circumstances, and bringing people together for righteous action.

• Successful resisters are pragmatic. When necessary, they take on “unlikely allies,” as Robin put it. That means working with people who are perhaps distant from you on many issues and finding common ground. in this case, religion was a bridging factor, and I would add that working with faith institutions also enacts the maxim that resistance struggles can be accelerated by involving people who are already organized (whether in unions, congregations, or civil society organizations).

• Local resistance is enhanced by having global partners who can bring international pressure to bear. This is especially important when the aggressors are multinationals or, say, billionaires whose power and investments have a global reach.

And here are some last bullet points added by me. They give an expanded definition of authoritarianism I have been working with, which seems more relevant every day. I present it here because the way we conceive of the adversary determines the methods and messaging we use in our resistance efforts.

• Authoritarianism cannot only be defined in political-legal terms, as the executive branch’s encroachment on the independence and impartiality of the other branches of government and institutions. It is also a massive operation of transferring wealth and power.

• Authoritarianism is a process of taking away the rights of the many and giving unprecedented freedoms to the very few to plunder the environment, the economy, female bodies and the labor force with impunity.

The great victory achieved in El Salvador is a rebuke of this. We are all connected on this earth, and there is much to learn from all kinds of resistance struggles that threaten communities with disenfranchisement, and loss of vital resources and rights.

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Every day, there is some new blatant violation of human rights, international and domestic rule of law, or reminders that quaint democratic ideas of conflict of interest, accountability, or public service have no place in Trump’s America. Blatant corruption, kidnapping a foreign head of state to plunder his country’s oil, killing innocents on fishing boats, turning the Department of Justice into the leader’s personal vendetta machine, disappearing people into domestic and foreign gulags, and a scheme to use potentially our tax dollars to pay off thugs who on Jan. 6, trashed the Capitol and assaulted police officers are just some of the offenses.

I want to call your attention anyway to the matter of Trump’s face on a $250 bill, because the circumstances of this proposal reveal important truths about autocratic governance.

First of all, it is illegal to feature living persons on U.S. currency. That means special legislation must be proposed, and passed, by Congress, to allow Trump’s desire to be realized. And that means enablers must play their roles.

Congressional Loyalty Tests: A Favorite Autocratic Game

A “strongman” is nothing without his accomplices and enablers, and that includes lawmakers whose status in the party is dependent on abasing themselves to satisfy the whims of the increasingly grandiose and needy leader.

Even old-school dictators such as Benito Mussolini purged their parliaments to have a cast of sycophants ready to pass their “laws,” punish their enemies, and glorify them 24/7.

Enter Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC). “Wilson Introduces Legislation to Print Trump on $250 Bill,” he proclaims proudly on his website, hoping to gain points for fidelity.

The Treasury Department: Purge the Principled so that the Corrupt May Prevail

Yet lawmakers are not enough. Autocratic projects also require backing within government agencies, in this case the Treasury Department. There’s a reason autocrats purge such agencies of civil servants who uphold ideas of ethical conduct and impartiality and replace them with individuals such as Brandon Beach (U.S. Treasurer) and Mike Brown (his senior advisor), who, as the Washington Post reports, “repeatedly urged staff at the agency’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing to prepare prototypes of the note.”

There was one problem. The director of the printing bureau, Patricia Solimene, a 24- year Army veteran and the first female director of the bureau, would not go along with the plan, telling Beach and Brown that “we’re not authorized to do this” and pointing out the numerous legal and procedural obstacles to its implementation.

So Solimene was suddenly reassigned. “The buck stops here,” she wrote in her goodbye email. But it was Solimene who was stopped so that the $250-buck project could continue.

This corruption explains the sickly smile exhibited by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent when he defended the project to reporters. Bessent has outdone himself as a sycophant, expertly spinning all of Trump’s unorthodox and destructive economic policies as productive and positive. His Treasury Department already announced that Trump’s signature would replace that of the Treasury Secretary on all new printed currency, meaning that Bessent effaced himself to satisfy the ego of his Leader.

Remaking the World in the Image of the Leader

Given that one of his main goals for the presidency is making money off of holding public office, it is appropriate that Trump put his face on U.S. money. Having his face on commemorative currency is part of a mission to reorient the 250^th anniversary of our country around himself and continue to develop his personality cult. One of the canons of personality cults, valid for a century, is that the leader must be not only omnipotent but omnipresent: his visage must be everywhere, and popular culture and commodity culture must be appropriated for the cause. Common objects, used every day, circulate the image of the leader.

Vladimir Putin understood this, and the Kremlin approved or at least tolerated all kinds of consumer objects with his image. A gold IPhone was among them, so of course, Putin’s faithful partner, Trump, has to have one too.

Putin also had a Kremlin-authorized calendar, with a Putin for every month. Such paper calendars are no longer as popular, so Trump has followed Narendra Modi in creating a personality cult app. In Orwellian fashion, Trump’s app is mandatory for all government employees, meaning it is automatically installed on government-issued phones.

So millions of civil servants will see daily content that reporters are cataloguing as “campaign-style content,” but is actually personality cult material. When you press the pre-installed “text President Trump” button, a message appears that is pre-populated with Trump praise: “Greatest President Ever!”

All of this is deeply pathetic, but it is also deeply autocratic. It is also symptomatic that the image of Trump selected for the $250 bill is very similar to Trump’s new official portrait –which closely resembles his 2023 mug shot from his indictment on racketeering and other charges. The idea of celebrating a momentous anniversary of our country with an image that celebrates Trump’s identity as a lawless individual fits the autocratic sensibility perfectly.

As Trump’s popularity continues to tank, and his failures and malfeasance become more evident, all of these developments and processes will deepen. Whether or not Trump’s face ends up appearing on a $250 bill, the corruption, political interference, and loyalty tests will continue.

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This summer’s guests include former assistant FBI director Frank Figliuzzi, former US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, Barb McQuade, former CBP official Jenn Budd, North Korea specialist Jung Pak, and anti-authoritarian social movement expert Scot Nakagawa.

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On Friday I had a great conversation with of All Rise News. You will know Adam as a recurring guest on Lucid and incisive legal commentator. Backfire against the Trump administration’s many corrupt and lawless actions was the guiding theme.

We started with his analysis of the then-breaking news about the dismissal of criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which followed the April 9-0 Supreme Court decision that the Trump administration must work for his return home from the Bukele CECOT gulag in El Salvador.

Then we discussed the (wink-wink) $1.776 billion slush fund to compensate Trump allies, including the thugs who assaulted the Capitol on behalf of Trump on Jan. 6, 2021. You can read Adam’s analysis of the 1776 symbolism.

The critical point for me, as a historian of coups and Fascist revolutions, is that the payouts are not just to reward past actions. They should instead be seen as retainers for the foot soldiers and elite backers of future violent actions. The pardons also had this double function: tying people to Trump by making their legal problems go away, and freeing them up to serve the movement and the leader.

Such retainers are common in organized crime and autocratic corruption around the world. I agree with former national security operative Steven Cash’s assessment that the “settlement” “resembles the kind of state-funded loyalty network or private militia support system often seen under rising authoritarian regimes overseas.”

The idea of MAGA as a revolution that continues the energies of 1776 was integral to the Stop the Steal movement that fueled January 6 and served as a recruiting and radicalization ground for those who assaulted the Capitol and wanted to harm Republicans and Democrats alike. 1776 rhetoric and images run through in the January 6 documentary Fight Like Hell (Jon Long, 2024) which follows the flow from Stop the Steal to the tragic events of that day (I consulted on the film).

The need for a revolution to “return government to the people” was also a theme of Kevin Robert’s book Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington To Save America, with a foreward by J.D. Vance. Roberts is President of the Heritage Foundation, sponsor of Project 2025 and a nerve center and shadow government preparing for American autocracy during the Biden years.

As Roberts famously said in 2024 on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, referring to this revolution in the making, this second American Revolution will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”

While the U.S. armed forces is to all appearances doing Trump’s bidding, and ICE is developing in the direction of being a state-funded revolutionary guards operation, there is nothing like having a private militia that is loyal to you personally. With this slush fund, Trump signals to violent extremists that their service to him has not ended.

“America could evolve into a national brand of electoral autocracy in which election subversion is backed up by grassroots violence,” I wrote in the fall of 2021. The 2026 midterms could present an opportunity for this militia in the making to serve the leader again.

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Everyone is welcome to join. Just download the Substack app, enable notifications, and watch for the join link from Ruth Ben-Ghiat/Lucid at 4pmET. I will also email all Lucid subscribers at 4pmET with a join link. If you can’t attend, I will circulate the video tomorrow.

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I want to share the great conversation with the smart and incisive Wajahat Ali, publisher of the newsletter The Left Hook. We talked about the MAGA endgame of converting our multiracial democracy into a White Christian ethnostate and autocracy; Trump’s unprecedented corruption; his fixation with his ballroom-bunker (sign he is reaching “the bunker stage” of power), and much more. As you see from the video, Waj makes me laugh even when the subject matter is grim. I highly recommend his book Go Back To Where You Came From, which blends memoir and political commentary about living amidst rising xenophobia and anti-Muslim hatred.

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We hear that Russia is failing in its war on Ukraine, and Russia is failing as a sovereign economy as a result of the war. The reality is that Russia has been an economic failure for years. A kleptocracy, meaning a state in which corruption and thievery are institutionalized, and state agencies and private businesses are plundered to enrich the rulers, can hardly be deemed a successful economic operation.

Corruption had long ravaged the Russian military. It was amazing to me that so many military and security analysts were shocked when the first months of the invasion of Ukraine revealed the true state of affairs. The world heard about the rancid rations, the antiquated and badly maintained weapons, and troop discipline and training so compromised that Russian generals had to go to the front, where several died.

We hear that Putin’s “aura of invincibility” has now been tarnished, as though he ever had any legitimacy, as though he has not always been the “thieving little man in his bunker,” as Alexei Navalny memorably defined Putin at his 2021 Moscow sentencing.

The only real areas in which Russia has had lasting success –waging information warfare that inflates perceptions of Russian competence, and creating a global network of assets and Kremlin propagandists—are the sources of the world’s overestimation of Putin’s power and its under-valuation of Ukrainian ingenuity and resilience on and off the battlefield.

“With typical strongman hubris, Putin has clearly underestimated the willingness of Ukrainians to fight against him,” I wrote in an MSNBC op-ed published on February 26, 2022, two days after the war began. “The war will create numerous Russian casualties, which even reported mobile crematoria (which could hide evidence of Russian dead) won’t be able to mask.”

Here is the situation four years later. “Russian forces have suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties, more losses than any major power in any war since World War II,” reads January 2026 CSIS report, the use of the passive voice obscuring the source of this rout: Ukrainian warriors, whose blood and sacrifice is finally halting the imperialist expansion of one of the most criminal regimes in 21^st century history.

So, here I focus on Ukraine, which has given the world lessons in combat innovation, psychological adaptation, and creativity and courage in dire circumstances.

A prompt for this essay is my recent conversation with James Verini, author of the new book, The Theater: Courage and Survival in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War, about how ordinary citizens mobilized during the 2022 siege of Mariupol. It has been nominated for a National Book Award. Verini has reported from Gaza, Afghanistan, Iraq and other combat sites. He’s a fellow in King’s College, London’s Department of War Studies.

You can view a video of our conversation here.

Ukraine: National Unity and Mobilization in the Face of Identicide

From the start, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been a war not only of territorial expansion, but Russification and identicide. Every day Russians stay in the war, killing Ukrainians, is a victory for the latter goal, and every day Russians kidnap Ukrainian children, destining them for reeducation and a Russian existence, is a victory for the former. As this Lancet article on the complicity of Russian healthcare workers in those kidnappings shows, this is a holistic effort by the regime to erase Ukrainian identity and form a new Russian-identified generation.

As Verini told me: “the reason that Putin decided to try to conquer all of Ukraine was this idea was that Ukraine does not exist, that there is no independent Ukraine outside of greater Russia, that the creation of the Republic of Ukraine was a Western cartographical conspiracy.”

“Putin couldn’t have made a worse mistake if he had wanted to fragment the nature of Ukrainian identity and nationhood. The war has cohered it in a way that many Ukrainians never thought they would see.”

We cannot understand the behavior of Ukrainians without this knowledge of the stakes of the conflict. From the early days of heroic and creative urban warfare, to a generation’s trajectory from civilians to citizen and professional soldiers, Ukrainians have responded with a new sense of patriotism and investment in their country.

Ukraine: Tactical and Technological Ingenuity and Innovation

A society arranged around protecting the man at the top of the “power vertical,” where experienced elites are regularly purged, is unlikely to have a military with the flexibility to respond quickly to an adversary who is playing a different game. As Mick Ryan has written, Ukraine has adapted far faster than Russia, whether it is the use of drones, disciplined and compact ground operations, or ground robots that perform supply and evacuation tasks or use AI-enabled weapons against Russian infantry,

“Ukraine’s battlefield learning ecosystem has matured into one of the most capable, if not the most agile, in the world,” Ryan concludes. They have changed the nature of warfare while fighting in very difficult circumstances.

Creating a Army of Resisters

“My place is here as long as the enemy is in my house,” says Olena, a 26 year old Ukrainian who returned from Prague, where she worked as a nightclub administrator, and trained to become a pilot. Like her family members, who are far from the front and often go without light and heating for a week at a time, she refuses to give up on the idea that Ukraine can have a “better future.”

Resisting means fighting for a different destiny, and that means doing things you perhaps never envisioned and realizing that individuals working together can achieve more than they ever dreamed. That was the case with Oleh, a former NGO worker, “I am not a military man, I have never seen myself like that, and I did not understand how ordinary people could stand in the way of such a powerful enemy like Russia.” Fighting in the Ukrainian army has changed that.

According to an April 2026 survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, around half of Ukrainians surveyed are willing to continue enduring the war, with just as many expecting the war to continue into 2027.

Use All the Spaces and Tools You Have: A Theater Becomes a Rescue Hub

“My last book was mainly about soldiers and jihadists. This book is entirely about ordinary people, civilians caught in the middle of this war, basically the people like you and me,” Verini tells me. He is speaking about the transformation of the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater in Mariupol into a refugee shelter that ended up housing 1,500 people a night and sometimes feeding nearly 3000 people.

What is striking about this episode, and why it has lessons for all of us, is that the people who accomplished this feat were not trained aid workers but theater professionals. They had no background in housing and feeding large groups of people, but they knew how to improvise and transform spaces and relate to people. So the administrators, directors, janitors, actors, and others created a shelter that for two weeks helped their fellow Ukrainians survive. Then, in mid-March 2022, the Russians bombed the theater and the shelter had to close.

Russia has been pursuing a war of identicide, Russification, and mortification, attacking civilian sites to kill as many Ukrainians as possible but also to demoralize the population. It isn’t working. It isn’t working because of Ukrainians. They, and not Putin, are the protagonists of this moment, the ones making history and defending democracy in Europe. Let’s have our coverage of this war reflect that.

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Joyce Vance was in Alabama. You can read her analysis of the two marches here:

Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

Selma Rejects Jim Crow 2.0

Half of the population in Dallas County, Alabama, where Selma is located, was African American in 1965. But less than 2% of the county’s registered voters were Black. That wasn’t for lack of trying. They were excluded by systematic racism. Leaders like John Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr. understood that being denied rights was intolerable, and that no…

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25 days ago · 2873 likes · 136 comments · Joyce Vance

From Multiracial Democracy to White Christian Ethnostate

Here I want to broaden the lens and see today’s attacks on the Voting Rights Act as part of a longer and broader systematic attempt by Trump and MAGA to wreck our multiracial democracy and replace it with a White Christian ethnostate.

Here is one big-picture take, by civil rights lawyer and advocate Sherrilyn Ifill, of White supremacy as an anti-democratic movement:

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White Supremacy Is an Antidemocracy Movement

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a month ago · 845 likes · 7 comments · Sherrilyn Ifill

I have always seen Donald Trump as creating a big-tent movement for all kinds of American racists, from Lost Cause apologists and those nostalgic for the Jim Crow era, to neo-Nazis, to people who hate non-Whites and non-Christians, whether these were born here or are immigrants.

This is what demagogues do: they create a home for people who feel that Others advancing in society are a threat to their well-being and prosperity. They spin convincing narratives about The End of Everything due to impending White annihilation (the Great Replacement Theory version) or Communist/radical Left takeover.

Like other far-right strongmen, Trump has brought the racial and political threats together, conjuring the nightmare of a complete “civilizational erasure,” a telling phrase used in the new White House National Security Strategy document.

Here is my February 2026 essay on how this mission of achieving White Christian hegemony is now the central plank of the Trump administration:

As a historian of Fascism, it was clear to me from the start that this would be the goal. Just after the November 2016 election, I wrote a CNN op-ed, “Why Bannon’s White Nationalism Should Scare America” to warn the public that the plan was to use the “power of racism” to build out the MAGA movement, with the goal of “turning back the clock to a time when white men supposedly ruled supreme.”

I went much deeper in my book Strongmen, which was written during the first Trump administration and situated the unfolding White Christian MAGA crusade in history. As I commented:

The intensity of the Trump administration’s efforts to undo decades of advances for women, people of color, and LGBQT+ communities recalls earlier authoritarian counter-revolutions…The administration has redefined “civil rights,” traditionally linked to the struggle of African-Americans for legal equality, as the protection of Christian “freedoms of religion and expression.” An anti-abortion rights and anti-LGBTQ+ Catholic activist lawyer, Roger Severino, runs the Office for Civil Rights, created by the Trump administration inside the Department of Health and Human Services.

The War on Blackness

During the Joe Biden years, Trump’s army of MAGA acolytes waged an informational, psychological and policy war on Blackness, as then-Congressional Black Caucus Chair Rep. Steven Horsford and I put it in an important 2023 MSNBC interview. Erasing the history of the toll of anti-Black violence and discrimination by banning the teaching of racism in schools, attacking scholars and others who documented the costs of institutionalized racism, and continuing to gerrymander and use other electoral tricks to make it harder for Black people to express themselves via elections were some of the ways this war manifested.

In short, MAGA used their time out of office efficiently to shift the culture in preparation for the triumph of the White ethnostate. So when Trump returned to office, they were ready (thanks to Project 2025) to transform the leadership of American governance to remove Blacks, women, and others from view, increase propaganda against non-Whites, and use immigration as an excuse to build a new infrastructure of repression and redefine who is a patriot and who is a criminal.

As individuals who have been subject to harassment for Driving While Black, Coming Home at Night While Black, Standing on the Street Waiting for a Friend While Black, and myriad other daily affronts know, being Black already made you a suspect, and it was this background mentality that made Black collective mobilizations, most recently during the Black Lives Matter protests, a threat sufficient to fuel additional support for MAGA.

The war on Blackness could not be complete without a top-down, federal attack on voting rights. Thanks to a Supreme Court that now acts as a group of far-right operatives working for Trump’s causes, the Voting Rights Act was weakened in ways that contribute to Black disenfranchisement.

Here is Ifill explaining the import of the Callais decision on The Daily Show:

MAGA Actions Create a Messaging Opportunity

As observed above, demagogues, Trump included, have always mobilized people around the threat of losing something: social status, male privilege, jobs, whatever is menaced by the advance of women and non-Whites.

It is our turn to make this messaging strategy our own, by pointing out that we are losing something we had, the right to express ourselves and directly influence the constitution of our government through our votes. Our vote is our voice, and we are being silenced. We are losing the power we had. The silencing of some of us affects all of us. Our identity as a multiracial democracy is threatened.

We can also support those who are eloquently speaking out, reminding the public about the history of the civil rights movement and the courage and valor of those who preceded us. Rep. Justin Jones (D-TN) has been key in these communications that locate us in a tradition as we fight for rights today.

As he wrote from the Alabama protests yesterday:

“Our ancestors have carried us too far, our martyrs sacrifice too much, our movement grown too large to stop now. We stand in a legacy of liberation, a legacy of good trouble, a legacy of elders who trained us for this moment. No Jim Crow. No New Confederacy. No Going Back.”

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I am writing from the plane back to New York to let you know that our next Q&A will take place on May 15, 1-2pm ET. Canada’s place as a democracy in a world dominated increasingly by autocracies will be among the topics to be discussed with our guest, Dr. Anoush Terjanian. She is a Fellow of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa. Dr Terjanian previously served as the founding Director of the U.S. Social Science Research Council’s Anxieties of Democracy program. She is the author of Commerce and Its Discontents (Cambridge UP). Her 2023 op-ed about Canada needing a democracy strategy is more relevant than ever. You can read it here.

If you can’t attend, you can find the video at lucid.substack.com. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone. If you’d like to join these weekly discussions, you can join as a paying subscriber or upgrade to paid here:

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I was at the Democracy Summit as part of a delegation of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, where I am now a Senior Fellow. We heard several prime ministers and government ministers speak, as well as policy experts and activists, including former political prisoners, about the challenges autocracies and AI pose to a democratic order that is changing and seemingly unraveling before our eyes.

I was on a lunchtime panel (pictured below) and engaged in lots of productive discussions with people from many countries about what it will take for democracy to prevail in this very volatile period.

Nordic and other European democracies are mobilizing in new ways to respond to a previously unthinkable double threat: not just the old nemesis Russia, but a new “rogue” actor, as one politician called Donald Trump’s America. More on that soon. As many of you know, I aim to provide big-picture analysis, and so I want to take a few days to think about all that I heard and learned.

I’ll be back this weekend with commentary on the state of the Russian war on Ukraine, and what Ukraine is teaching the world in terms of waging 21st century war, resilience, organizing at times of national emergency, and more. My post will include a video of my conversation with war reporter James Verini, author of the new book The Theater: Courage and Survival in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War.

In the meantime, here is a photo of my panel with fellow autocracy scholar Erica Frantz and policy expert Ivan Vejvoda. Frantz is a research fellow and Vejvoda a global fellow at the Kettering Foundation. I will post other pictures soon.

As always, stay well and stay Lucid.

Ruth

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We had an informative discussion today with nuclear disarmament expert Professor Annelise Riles, who has been attending the Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons at the United Nations.

Not only did the Trump administration make a grave mistake ending the nuclear deal of the United States and Iran, but foreign powers’ distrust of Trump, the increased geopolitical crises and volatility caused by the war he and Israel are waging on Iran, and the Trump administration’s seeming loyalty to Russia and renunciation of support for Ukraine have all led democracies such as France to increase their stockpiles.

Add in that almost all of the countries that hold nuclear weapons are autocracies led by erratic and impulsive leaders who care little about humanity, and we have an environment that is not exactly propitious for an investment in non-proliferation and peace. You can read Prof. Riles’s thoughts in her Everyday Ambassador newsletter here.

If you’d like to be part of these enlightening weekly conversations, you can sign up as paying or upgrade to paid here:

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I wanted to send you the video and transcript of my May 6 Substack Live conversation with Mary Trump, who publishes the essential newsletter The Good In Us.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Hi everyone. This is Ruth Ben-Ghiat here with Mary Trump. Really good to see everyone. So Mary, there is so much to talk about. You, on your amazing Substack, had recently a very sobering article about the coming food shortage. So if you could talk about that. The farmers are suffering, and of course this was the demographic that Donald originally promised to love and cherish, and they would be forgotten no longer.

Mary Trump: Yeah. And as you know, long before this, the second iteration of the Trump regime has been incredibly bad for farmers anyway. People do not necessarily know, but dismantling USAID, which was one of the most vital and important agencies this country had, did incredible work around the world and increased our soft power. It also enormously benefited American farmers because they were paid by USAID to send their produce and goods to other countries that needed food and supplies.

Also, the tariffs have been horrible for farmers, and Donald’s policies have been as well. So to add insult to injury, despite giving them money to bail them out from a problem he created, this increasingly alarming global energy crisis is having an enormous impact on the availability of affordable fertilizer, which makes it difficult for all aspects of farming and agriculture.

Mary Trump: So we are looking at disruptions. These are not short-term disruptions. Even if the strait opens tomorrow, which it is not going to, we are looking at the disruption of cycles. Farming is cyclical. Farmers need to plan ahead. If one cycle is disrupted, other cycles down the road will be disrupted. So we are looking at massive food shortages. We are looking at an increase in prices, and we are looking at the increasing risk of American farmers, and farmers across the world, facing bankruptcy and no longer being viable. This seems like something more people should be talking about because this is not just about energy. There are people who think this energy crisis might increase the possibility that we turn to alternative energy sources, which we should have done all along.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: But they are trying to defeat everything to do with clean energy.

Mary Trump: Yes. So maybe that will settle that conversation. Who knows. Probably not. But at least people are talking about that. It is the hidden costs of this illegal, unconstitutional war of choice that is not only accomplishing nothing that we were told it would accomplish, because we do not know what they wanted to accomplish in the first place. They have no clear rationale. The hidden results of this are going to start hitting us in ways most people are not prepared for.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Yeah. So there are two wars going on. One is the war on Iran, which was badly planned and has now spread to the destruction of Lebanon. The economic costs of that war are going to be felt. Then there is the war they are waging on Americans, and the costs of that. It is not unrelated.

Donald had a small business event because it is National Small Business Week. We need to talk about how bad the ICE operations are, not just a state of militarized occupation in the Twin Cities and elsewhere, but the toll of ICE activities on small businesses there and in Los Angeles and Chicago.

The disruption to everyday life and to small business owners has been far greater than we are hearing about in national media. This is something we all need to message more because many of Trump’s base are small business people.

Mary Trump: It is incredibly important. It is happening everywhere. I know it is not ICE in Washington, DC, but the presence of the National Guard has had a negative effect on small businesses. Restaurants are closing. Uber drivers and cab drivers are not making money. This is anecdotal, but I was in DC a few months ago. It was a beautiful Saturday in spring, three o’clock in the afternoon, and we were going to dinner. We were the first ride for this Uber driver, and he had been on duty since nine in the morning. So it is real.

Mary Trump: ICE, in particular, is creating all sorts of disruptions. Part of the problem is that we are not messaging this well enough. Democrats certainly are not. When most people think of ICE, they think about the violence, the suppression of civil liberties, the cruelty toward immigrants and undocumented workers, and all of that is incredibly important. But it is also the knock-on effects. By ignoring them or allowing Donald to control the narrative, something is starting to happen that I have been worried about for a long time.

Mary Trump: When Donald got back into office, I thought we would get to the point where they would raise something like Social Security and tell people that if you really love America, you would be willing to give it up. That is what we are starting to hear. A potential justification for ICE operations interfering with small businesses becomes framed as a sacrifice for patriotism. You should be willing to spend taxpayer money on things like his ballroom. I feel like we are very close to them justifying their actions by making it seem patriotic to suffer.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: The way it would be framed is that if you are a good American, you will make sacrifices. It is important to talk about how tax dollars are being used. In autocracies, people pay to be repressed. You still pay taxes in autocracies, but that money is used to pay for the infrastructure of repression that brutalizes you.

That is something to focus on.

Mary Trump: Exactly. This is a twofold project. On one hand, we need to ask people direct questions. Is it okay that Americans are being harmed on American soil. If it is okay, why. We need to ask, why is it okay that you cannot afford healthcare anymore. Why is it okay that money is being spent on things that do not benefit you. These are the questions people need to confront.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Let us talk about the ballroom and bunker. You are a clinical psychologist, and I have focused on the psychology of autocrats. People like Trump do not see a divide between public and private. Everything becomes theirs. The White House becomes a personal safe space, and the ballroom is a cover for expanding the bunker beneath it so Trump can hide out when things go south.

Mary Trump: There are a few things going on. At the most basic level, this is about his psychopathology. The best way to think about Donald is that he is both a terrified little boy and a black hole of need. That void exists because nobody ever really loved him. He desperately wants to be loved, but he never will be.

Mary Trump: Because of that, everything has to be the biggest and the best. Everything needs his name on it. But there will never be enough. There is not enough money or power to fill that void. That is why the ballroom keeps expanding in scope and cost. That is what is driving it.

Mary Trump: There is also something more troubling. There is a bunker involved. Is he planning never to leave. Possibly. But more troubling are the people around him who know better and allow it to happen anyway. They could have stopped this at any time.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: That is key. There was recently a video of Trump sleeping in the Oval Office while his officials continued talking as if nothing was happening. It is like the emperor has no clothes. He is a problem, but the people around him pretending everything is fine is equally troubling.

Mary Trump: It might be more troubling. The people who have the power to stop this are choosing not to. Anyone listening to him knows he is compromised in every way. Psychologically, emotionally, cognitively, physically. He has never been fit, and he is becoming more unfit daily. They all know it and pretend otherwise.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Exactly. All right, we have been with Mary Trump, publisher of The Good in Us, which is invaluable reading. If you are not subscribed, you should be. We will do this again, Mary. It is always great to talk with you.

Mary Trump: Thank you so much, Ruth. And thank you to everyone watching. I will see you soon. Please check out Ruth’s Substack, Lucid. Link Below!

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I am happy to tell you that the very talented cartoonist Ivan Ehlers, with whom I collaborate on occasion, was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and this piece we did together, “How Authoritarianism Creeps In,” was singled out by the Pulitzer committee. It is an honor to work with Ivan. We brainstorm ideas and story arcs and then he brings them to life visually. You can find his work in the New Yorker, LA Taco, and the Los Angeles Times, where this piece appeared in September 2025.

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Here are a few things we know about autocrats and why they don’t exactly welcome discussions of who will come after them. They are particularly paranoid people, prone to purging any government official who is amassing too much power for their tastes. They play a game of “divide and rule,” pitting subordinates against one another to prevent them from conspiring against them. Many of them got to power in an extra-legal fashion, removing other leaders; they know that the same thing could happen to them.

So much of what autocrats do is designed to keep them on top of what in Russia is called the “power vertical.” They use violence, corruption, kompromat, and other tools to bind and indebt elites to them, they transform the judiciary and other government institutions into instruments of self-protection, and they create personality cults that proclaim them to be omnipotent, infallible, and in office by divine dispensation. They alone can guide the nation to greatness. TINA (There is No Alternative) is their mantra. The most successful at manage to cling to power for decades. Voluntary exits are rare.

Autocrats also routinely rearrange things within the state as part of “coup-proofing” strategies to prevent others from amassing too much power (cue President Recep Tayyip Erdogan abolishing the post of Prime Minister) or buying themselves more time in office (see Putin amending the Russian Constitution to keep himself in power until 2036).

All of this complicates the issue of succession, a word that, in some regimes, can be dangerous even to mention.

It’s easier if you can keep it in the family. In North Korea, which is a dynastic one-party state, supreme power is seen as something you inherit from generation to generation, assuring continuity of rule.

Yet involving family in governance, such as the “kitchen cabinet” of Nicolae Ceausescu, or the many sons-in-law of dictators who have been assigned moneymaking and “corruption management” roles, does not resolve the question of direct succession.

“Dictatobrats,” as politics scholar James Loxton refers to the children of former dictators, have come to power via elections in countries such as Panama, Kenya, and South Korea. Yet many of them have to wait a long time to assume the mantle of power: thirty-six years went by between dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s exit and the entry of his son Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. in the Philippines.

The Succession Situation in the United States

Whether succession is up in the air or subject to the laws of dynastic authority, the obvious and evident deterioration of the head of state brings the question to the forefront. This is the case in the United States, where President Donald Trump is declining physically and cognitively before our eyes. So many have become versions of the amateur Kremlinologists who in the 1980s scrutinized the aged and often ailing USSR dictators for signs of decline, and gossiped about potential successors.

Vice President J.D. Vance was supposed to be the future of MAGA. Funded in business and politics by the billionaire Peter Thiel, Vance was supposed to bring Christian, technofascist, and populist far-right forces together: he was supposed to be the Hillbilly of Silicon Valley, uniting all constituencies and doing the bidding of the powerful. Too bad for MAGA that he is supremely unlikable and has unfortunate political instincts and timing: coming out as Catholic and then attacking the Pope is just one example.

Charlie Kirk was another hope, and his murder robbed MAGA of a young and charismatic hero with a superb ground game.

That leaves the Trump clan. During Trump 1.0, Trump was product-testing the smart and photogenic Ivanka, even inserting her into the leader photo of the G20 summit he attended in Japan in 2019. Yet Ivanka has said her priority is her family, even as she keeps busy assisting Syrian and other billionaires with their foreign real-estate deals.

Not everyone can be Bashar al-Assad, who had a tranquil life as an eye doctor and agreed to take power in Syria, learning the craft of mass murder and guiding the country to be a major center of production and circulation of the drug Captagon.

The mention of stimulants leads me to the most probable-improbable heir apparent, Donald Trump Jr., who would have the virtue of not falling asleep in Cabinet meetings. While Polymarket puts his odds of winning the 2028 Republican nomination at just four per cent, well behind Vance (39%) and Marco Rubio (21%), the fact that Amazon (backer of the reputation rehab film about Melania) has reportedly been in talks to revive the Trump vehicle “The Apprentice” with Don Jr. in the lead role is an indication of a desire to create a new Don Jr. product for political consumption.

“For MAGA, familiarity may matter more than experience,” states an article in The American Conservative about Don Jr.’s chances. There is truth to this. What matters most, in fact, is not governance abilities, but skill in furthering the aims of the Trump clan: generating money from public office, amassing enough power to escape accountability, and realizing the aims of autocratic allies.

With a domineering and megalomaniac individual such as President Trump, who is on a crusade to have people believe he occupies a “world-historical” place in history, no one, his son included, will be allowed to advance if it means eclipsing him. The giant arch, the desire to be everywhere (on buildings, passports, stamps), is in relation to the fear of his decline that likely gnaws at him.

Trump could legitimize his son succeeding him, or tolerate the advance of a man he has broken, such as “Little Marco” Rubio. Or he could see the rise of a current MAGA cult heretic such as Tucker Carlson. In the end, none of it will matter. What he of the Big Macs and cankles can never escape is his own mortality.

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