“The View” co-hosts likened former President Donald Trump to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and hinted that the dictator was hanged during a panel discussion on Wednesday.

Co-organizers accused President Trump, twice impeached by Congress, of being a dictator who believed the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Co-moderator Alyssa Farrar Griffin accused the former president of trying to expand the size of the federal government by eliminating checks and balances, while co-moderator Sunny Hostin compared Trump to Mussolini.

“To get back to that, Mussolini had a similar idea to take these kinds of individual institutions and put them under his power, and he did it very successfully,” said Hostin.

“Do you know what the Italians did to Mussolini? (Related: ‘The View’ co-host calls for constitutional change to prevent Trump from jailing)

Behar also said that while Trump’s so-called “brand of fascism and bigotry” works in Florida, it doesn’t work in blue states like New York. Co-host Whoopi Goldberg said he never thought the day would come when the United States would be so close to a dictatorship.

“I never imagined in my lifetime that this country would come closer to dictatorship than it has ever seen,” Goldberg said.

This isn’t the first time liberal pundits have compared Trump to Mussolini. Former CNN host Jim Acosta called the former president “Mussolini of Mar-a-Lago” during his May 2021 corner on CNN. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough has likened Trump to an Italian dictator, and in 2017 he claimed he had become “total Mussolini” by calling the press “enemies of the people.”