Opinion: Would Trump stop free and fair elections? Hitler and Mussolini's paths could be a clue (2024)

Donald Trump doubled down Monday on his recent statement that conservative Christians won’t have to 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. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years. You know what? It’ll be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote 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, whereupon he told his followers that he had won and fomented a violent insurrection.

No wonder the former president is all in for the authoritarian alternative. Autocrats have long seen depending on elections to decide one’s political fate as unacceptable. They have “fixed” democratic systems by ending free and fair elections so they could stay in power indefinitely, just as Trump seems to wont to do.

Many strongmen, including Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as well as more recent examples such as Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, had to succeed in a democratic electoral system before they could impose authoritarian rule. Both Mussolini and Hitler were appointed by conservative elites who felt that giving power to extremists with criminal records was preferable to allowing the left to win.

Mussolini got into office quickly. He founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, or Italian fighting leagues, in 1919 as a decentralized militia movement to violently stop leftist strikes and factory occupations. The group evolved into the Fascist Party, and by 1922, Mussolini had been appointed prime minister.

But elections always posed a problem for Mussolini, whose party was initially unpopular, identified as it was with chaos and violence. Fascists who ran independently in 1921 got only 0.4% of the vote. That is why in 1923, musing about how to deal with “discontented people” who might vote one out of office, Mussolini wrote: “You prevent it by means of force” and “by employing this force without pity when it is necessary to do so,” a description that fits many coup attempts, including Jan. 6.

To prepare for the 1924 elections, the Fascists introduced an electoral reform, the Acerbo Law, that gave any party receiving the largest share of votes, as long as they surpassed 25% of the total, two-thirds of the seats in Parliament. A climate of intimidation ensured the law passed and shortly thereafter the Fascists won the election.

After the socialist opposition leader Giacomo Matteotti denounced the election results, he was assassinated. When Mussolini’s involvement in the assassination became public and the possibility of jail time loomed, he declared a dictatorship and passed “laws for the defense of the regime” that shut down opposition parties, eliminating any rationale for elections. Italians did not have free and fair elections for the next 18 years.

Hitler had watched Mussolini’s rise from Germany, and when his 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, a Nazi coup attempt, failed, he changed his tactics.

Hitler had learned that to overturn a democratic system, you have to get inside it. “We shall have to hold our noses and enter the Reichstag [Germany’s parliament] against the Catholic and Marxist” parties, he said in 1925. But that didn’t mean he pretended to love democracy. He and his party openly waged campaigns to destroy it.

The last free election in which Hitler ran came in early 1933. At a fundraising meeting with major industrialists, sounding like many of today’s Republicans, he said the election was German voters’ last chance to reject communism. If voting didn’t work, he warned, the Nazis would use violence. Hitler’s economics minister concluded the meeting by bluntly ordering the businessmen to visit the cashier and make their contributions to the Nazi Party.

And like Mussolini, Hitler knew how to consolidate power. A week before the election, after a mysterious arson attack heavily damaged the Reichstag, he issued a draconian decree that obliterated all individual rights and freedoms and gave his administration the ability to take over state governments.

The Nazis won just over 43% of the popular vote, well 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 rest into voting for the Enabling Act, which gave his administration virtually unlimited power. It had taken him seven weeks to translate his open dislike of voting into full dictatorial control.

Today, as “electoral autocracies” take hold around the world, elections are no longer enough to classify a country as a democracy. Many elected leaders manipulate electoral systems to get the results they need to stay in office and keep elections going to cover their despotism with a veneer of freedom.

Trump seems to want something even more radical: no voting at all. The GOP supports this with claims that elections have been so corrupted by Democrats that they have ceased to be a valid way to choose leaders. As the MAGA loyalist Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama told Newsmax in 2023, “The American people should just stand up and say, ‘Listen, enough’s enough, let’s don’t have elections anymore.’ ”

Strongmen always tell us who they are and what they are going to do. With the example of the Fascists in mind, we should take Trump and his enablers seriously. The endgame of Republican election denial is not to challenge particular election results but to suppress free and fair voting altogether.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a history professor at New York University and the publisher of Lucid, a newsletter about threats to democracy. Her latest book is “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” Benjamin Carter Hett is a professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. His latest book is “The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War.”