By Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Benjamin Carter Hett
Donald Trump late last month reiterated his recent statement that conservative Christians would not have to vote again if they helped him get elected in November. At a campaign rally for evangelical Christians, the former president said: “Christians, vote. Just this once. You don’t have to do it again. Four more years. And you know what? It will be fixed. It will be fine. You don’t have to vote again.”
This should not surprise us. Free and fair elections are a nightmare for Trump. He lost the majority of the vote in 2016 and was voted out of office in 2020 after only one term. He then told his supporters he had won and incited a violent insurrection.
It’s no wonder the former president favors the authoritarian alternative. Autocrats have long considered it unacceptable to rely on elections to decide one’s political fate. They have “fixed” democratic systems by eliminating free and fair elections so they could stay in power indefinitely, just as Trump seems to be in the habit of doing.
Many rulers, including Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, but also more recent examples such as Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, had to prevail in a democratic electoral system before they could impose authoritarian forms of rule. Both Mussolini and Hitler were appointed by conservative elites who believed that it was better to give power to extremists with criminal records than to let the left win.
Mussolini quickly rose to power. In 1919 he founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, the Italian Combat Associations, as a decentralized militia movement to violently stop left-wing strikes and factory occupations. The group developed into the Fascist Party, and in 1922 Mussolini was appointed prime minister.
But elections were always a problem for Mussolini, because his party was initially unpopular and associated with chaos and violence. The Fascists, who ran independently in 1921, received only 0.4% of the vote. So in 1923, when Mussolini was thinking about how to deal with “dissatisfied people” who might vote him out of office, he wrote: “You prevent it by force” and “by using that force mercilessly when it is necessary.” This description fits many coup attempts, including the one on January 6.
In preparation for the 1924 elections, the fascists introduced an electoral reform, the Acerbo Law, which gave two-thirds of the seats in Parliament to each party with the largest share of the vote, provided it had 25% of the total. A climate of intimidation ensured that the law was passed and, shortly afterwards, the fascists won the election.
After denouncing the election results, the socialist opposition leader Giacomo Matteotti was assassinated. When Mussolini’s involvement in the assassination became public and he faced a prison sentence, he declared a dictatorship and issued “laws for the defense of the regime” that closed opposition parties and thus eliminated any possibility of elections. There were no free and fair elections in Italy for the next 18 years.
Hitler had observed Mussolini’s rise from Germany and when his putsch failed in 1923, he changed his tactics.
Hitler had learned that to overthrow a democratic system, you have to penetrate it. “We must hold our noses and enter the Reichstag against the Catholic and Marxist parties,” he said in 1925. But that did not mean that he pretended to love democracy. He and his party openly campaigned to destroy it.
The last free election in which Hitler took part took place in early 1933. At a fundraising event with major industrialists, he said – and sounded like many Republicans today – that the election was the last chance for German voters to reject communism. If the election did not work, he warned, the Nazis would use violence. Hitler’s economics minister ended the event with a blunt call for business people to go to the cash register and transfer their donations to the NSDAP.
And like Mussolini, Hitler knew how to consolidate his power. A week before the election, after a mysterious arson attack had severely damaged the Reichstag, he issued a draconian decree that eliminated all individual rights and freedoms and gave his government the ability to take over the governments of individual countries.
The Nazis received just over 43% of the vote, far less than a majority. But Hitler followed through on his threat of violence, arresting or killing many of his parliamentary opponents. He intimidated most of the others into voting for the Enabling Act, which gave his government virtually unlimited power. It had taken him seven weeks to transform his open aversion to voting into complete dictatorial control.
With the rise of “electoral autocracies” around the world today, elections are no longer enough to classify a country as a democracy. Many elected politicians manipulate the electoral system to produce the results they need to stay in power, and arrange for elections to take place to cloak their despotism in a veneer of freedom.
Trump seems to want something even more radical: no elections at all. Republicans are backing this up by claiming that elections have been so rigged by Democrats that they are no longer a valid means of electing political leaders. As MAGA-loyal Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama told Newsmax in 2023, “The American people should just stand up and say, ‘Listen, enough is enough, let’s not have any more elections.'”
Strong men always tell us who they are and what they will do. Given the example of the fascists, we should take Trump and his supporters seriously. The end goal of Republican voter denial is not to challenge specific election results, but to suppress free and fair elections altogether.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history at New York University and editor of Cleara newsletter about threats to democracy. Her latest book is called “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” Benjamin Carter Hett is a professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at CUNY. His latest book is called “The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War.”
