A historian stoked fears that Donald Trump will turn the nation into a dictatorship by insinuating the current president-elect may forbid his term from being documented.
"In the future, historians are going to look back on this day and say, 'This is the day that America made a choice between freedom and democracy on one side and authoritarianism and dictatorship on the other,'" presidential historian Michael Beschloss said during an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Tuesday.
He followed up his comment by saying it is unclear whether Trump will even allow historians to record his term, per a clip shared by Fox News.
"If historians in the future are allowed to write books—and by the way that question is open this morning. And if people are allowed to go on television and say what they think in the future—which again that question is open this morning," Beschloss added before co-host Joe Scarborough interjected to clarify what the historian meant.
"It's not that historians won't be able to write those books, it may be that the billionaires and the corporations that own the publishing houses will refuse to print those books," Scarborough said.
They pointed to the billionaire owners of the L.A. Times and Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong and Jeff Bezos, respectively, who both chose not to endorse Kamala Harris despite encouragement from their staffs.
Soon-Shiong's daughter later clarified they did not endorse Harris because of the ongoing conflict in Gaza while Bezos claimed he wanted to maintain the paper's credibility.
The historian brought his claim to a point by comparing Trump's trajectory to other dictators.
"And that's what happens when strongmen come to power," Beschloss said. "That happened in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. Germany in the 1930s—certainly has happened in Hungary. And Viktor Orbán, of course, is one of Donald Trump's most notorious heroes. He said, we should follow that model, and so it may be.
"And this is what happens when America begins to go toward dictatorship," he added.
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