Before the election, Rolling Stone asked a number of experts on authoritarianism about what to do if Trump won. They all had good advice but, for me, this is at the top of the list: Seeing the Threat Clearly Experts in authoritarianism insist that Trump’s dictatorial threats need to be taken with gravity because he’s already done “things that autocrats do,” says Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University who is an expert in Italian fascism and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. “He has been able to domesticate a very old, storied party, and truly make it his personal tool,” she tells Rolling Stone. “He instigated a violent coup attempt,” and — instead of “having to go into exile or going to prison, like in Peru” — he “managed to paint it as a positive thing” or to make “a lot of Americans shrug their shoulders at it.” These are “preconditions for autocracy,” she insists. Trump may have a “highly problematic, decompensating personality,” Ben-Ghiat adds, “but the guy is a master propagandist,” who has used those skills in a campaign against the American system of checks and balances. “He’s taken people step by step … for almost a decade now to view democracy as an inferior system — a system of crime and anarchy, weak government … and to see versions of authoritarian rule, with him at the head, as preferable.” Ben-Ghiat warns that Project 2025, the conservative policy and personnel program, is the road map “to finish…