The Trump campaign “has made it very clear what they want to do to immigrants,” Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University and the author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” told CNN’s Jim Acosta.
She cited reported planned “mass deportations, mass detentions, likely abuses and violence in those operations” if Trump wins back the White House in 2024.
Trump’s language dehumanizes immigrants and “is a way to get Americans prepared now to accept these repressions later on,” she said. “That’s what’s so terrible and that’s also another thing that’s so fascist about this.”
Ben-Ghiat also suggested immigrants won’t be the only ones targeted.
“Anyone who thinks this isn’t going to bother them because they’re not an immigrant, they’re not going to stop with immigrants,” she said. “I’m quite concerned that he is mentioning what he calls mental institutions and prisons so often. In another speech he actually talked about the need to expand psychiatric institutions to confine people and he mentioned special prosecutor Jack Smith as someone who should end up in a ‘mental institution.’”