To many, it felt like a threshold had been passed on Wednesday night at Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina. When the president brought up Minnesota Democratic representative Ilhan Omar, the crowd chanted, “Send Her Back! Send Her Back!” It was an echo of Trump’s twitter comments a few days prior that four American congresswomen—which also included the U.S.-born Massachusetts’s Ayanna Pressley, New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib—should “go back” to their own countries.

While Trump supporters and critics alike have grown used to hearing such collective rage directed at former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, this was the first time that a person of color and an immigrant had been targeted at a rally by name. The hostile energy emitted by the majority-white crowd was notable, as was the satisfaction Trump radiated as he stood still, his signature smirk on his face, for a full 13 seconds as the chants washed over him.

I have seen this expression before. In fact, I’d seen it that afternoon, as I watched a newsreel of Benito Mussolini standing before a crowd of cheering Italian Fascists in Rome. That same rush of ego-gratification, that same pause before the return to aggression, in this case it was Trump “joking” yet again that he’ll stay in office for more years than is allowed by the American constitution—just like Mussolini used to do as Prime Minister, before he declared dictatorship in 1925.

The leader-follower relationship is the core of authoritarian regimes—and rallies are its distillation. They stage the leader's hold over the people as he demonstrates that his enemies have become their own. Fascist rallies were volatile mixes of hatred and joy, of strong emotions guided by the leader. “Women and girls, Jews are your ruin,” huge banners proclaimed at a Nazi rally in 1935 Berlin, matching Hitler’s anti-Semitic diatribes as the crowds cheered. The North Carolina rally projected that same dominance of the crowd by the head of state and the collective excitement at being able to express hatred sanctioned by him.

The leader-follower relationship is the core of authoritarian regimes—and rallies are its distillation.

From the leader’s perspective, rallies are essential to maintaining his personality cult, and a reminder that his hard work indoctrinating people and securing their loyalty has not been in vain. Mussolini used to get turned on sexually by the adulation; he’d ask his lover Clara Petacci to watch the spectacle, hiding behind him, and then take her violently (as was his habit). Adolf Hitler, too, craved adoration. Years before he came to power, his propaganda wizard Joseph Goebbels saw that he was a wooden and boring speaker in the studio: he needed an audience to come alive. Trump is in this tradition: he’d be nothing without the public attention he colonizes 24/7 by his outrageous tweets, comments, and actions, and he’s sensitive about crowd size. Whether in Rome, Berlin, or Greenville, the strongman needs those crowds more than they need him.

Omar is an ideal target for Trump. She’s a Muslim and a woman who came to America as a refugee, making her a member of the category of people of color on the move who have been targets of authoritarian regimes for one hundred years. Trump is just the latest right-wing leader—after Mussolini, Chile’s dictator Augusto Pinochet, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and more—to try and stoke anxieties in the public about floods of dark and primitive people breaching the nation’s borders or already here, spreading anarchy and polluting bloodlines and the culture. It has become the GOP’s latest talking point. Attempting to justify the imprisonment and killing of thousands after the September 1973 coup in Chile, the junta’s foreign minister Ismael Huerta told the United Nations that the country had faced an onslaught: “By September 11 this year more than 13,000 known foreigners, most of them extremists, were known to be in the country illegally.”