• An expert on fascism and authoritarianism said Trump needed to be at the Capitol to pull off a coup.
  • Ruth Ben-Ghiat said it explains why he wanted to march with his supporters last year on January 6.
  • She said coups require their leader to be present to anoint them under a "new order."

Former President Donald Trump's presence at the Capitol during the January 6 attack would have been a critical factor in accomplishing a successful coup that day, said historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders.

Ben-Ghiat told CNN's Jim Acosta on Saturday that it was "interesting" how recent reports said Trump had wanted to march with his supporters to the Capitol but was stopped by the Secret Service.

That revelation was first published in an April interview that the former president gave to The Washington Post.

Last week, The Post also reported that the Secret Service had initially formed a quick plan to transport Trump from the White House to the Capitol following his speech at the Ellipse on the day of the attack. Despite pressure from the then-president, the effort did not come to fruition, and Trump was taken back to the White House instead.

"This is consistent with if you're having a coup, and you've summoned everybody, and you expect to be anointed as the head of illegitimate government. You have to be there," Ben-Ghiat said, referring to Trump.

"There's a phase in coups — they're violent, they're quick, and then you have your pronouncement of the new order," she continued. "And so that's why he was trying to get there."

Ben-Ghiat said she agreed with the assessment made by Bennie Thompson, chair of the January 6 House Committee, that the Capitol attack was an attempted coup.

"I was really pleased to see Chairman Thompson use that word because it's the right word for something that's the result of a process that started, in a sense, it started before November 2020 because Trump had been trying to discredit elections for several years," Ben-Ghiat said.

"Coups can take months or years to plan, and this was a multi-pronged attempt to overthrow our democracy," she added.

During a public hearing on Thursday, the January 6 Committee outlined a seven-point plan that it claimed Trump and his most powerful loyalists wanted to use to overturn the 2020 election. Summoning a violent mob and directing them to the Capitol, then failing to speak against the violence, were two of the points in the alleged plan. 

Several of the other points involved pressuring high-ranking officials and leaders to discount or discredit the election results.

Ben-Ghiat told CNN on Saturday that Trump went "nuclear" when many of these officials refused his demands, and that he then did "what autocrats have done in the past," which involved using violence and calling on his supporters to "right this 'monstrous wrong' on his behalf."

Her latest book, "Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present," covers Trump's deeds alongside those of authoritarian leaders such as Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Putin, Muammar Gaddafi, and Augusto Pinochet.

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