In Conversation with Timothy Snyder: On Tyranny, Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu

I'm very glad to be with you. I'm pretty sure I'm your guest but just in case let's both be very hospitable towards the other.

I'll start with a little bit of context. I was invited to the Council on Foreign Relations, which is of course a very serious place to have a very serious discussion about American foreign relations. And I realized that the conventional terms that we use, I think, are inherently a bit specious because when we talk about states or interests or even calculations, I think we're failing to grasp the essence of what's going on with the Trump regime. And so I wanted to use a term which would actually get to the heart of things. And so that's why I said superpower suicide in that forum and then wrote about it a bit later and talked about it on TV. What I mean by superpower suicide is that we are reducing our own power dramatically both in the short term and the long term by carrying out foreign policy which destroys alliances, by fighting wars that make no sense and then losing them. But then also in the long term by destroying the actual economic and even more fundamentally research and intellectual bases of power, by messing up the economy but also by removing the possibility of social mobility and most fundamentally by wrecking public education, wrecking public universities and wrecking research. I use the term which might seem dramatic because as a historian I can't actually think of any examples where a leader has deflated the power of his own country so quickly. It's not the only thing happening under Trump but it's a way of talking about what's happening under Trump which gets to power rather than to ethics, which of course is another very important subject.

Well, I guess my sense, look, as I see these guys, they do not accept something that you and I would accept, which is that the United States of America is a meaningful entity. And I think we have to start from that because any sense of surprise I believe that you and I or people listening to us might have would start from the assumption that the United States of America are real, that they have a constitution, that they're sovereign, they have interests. I just don't think that Trump and the people around him see the world that way. I think for him the United States of America is just one more grift. It's just one more stickup. He's going to be around in the world for a few more years. And the American grift is the one which has proven very effective for him. So he dresses up like the American flag. He literally wraps himself in it. But I don't think he has any notion of or any empathy for patriotism or respect for sovereignty or living inside the law. And so I'm not surprised because Trump is surrounding himself by the kind of person who would make him feel comfortable being the kind of person that he is. And those people also don't see the United States as a country. And so the fact that our interests are no longer being taken into account, I think follows logically from the kind of person that he is and from the kinds of things that he's doing. What essentially they're doing is acting as clans who have personal interests and who are using the apparatus of the United States, the kind of thing which was built up by people like you and other good public servants. They're using tools which they never could have built themselves, but they're using them for their own private purposes and thereby diminishing those tools very quickly.

I think, Bob, we have to start with the fact that he was reelected. I mean, he was reelected despite the fact that he tried to carry out a coup to overthrow constitutional order in the United States of America. He was reelected despite that. And the fact that he was reelected even though he attempted a coup after losing the second time he ran, I think that's the key because that tells him that no one really cares about the law. And related to that, he committed many crimes of which he and every single other person in America was aware while he was president and especially at the end of his term. And we had a number of investigations going, federal and state. And somehow, you know, every which way we managed not to actually prosecute him. And again, that teaches him that he's above the law and that he can do whatever he wants. And then we have this kind of nursery school level Supreme Court ruling about immunity which however one, you know, whatever the literal reading of that ruling is, naturally further gives him the impression that he can do whatever he wants. Though I would start with those things and then I would move to something that you said. I agree, it's the Republicans, the Republicans who have been purged, right? So in the multiple two-year electoral cycles in the House of Representatives we've gone from, you know, something which was bad to something which is much worse. And we now have, I don't remember the numbers offhand, but an awful lot of the people in the House are folks who don't really have any political life pre-Trump at all. And they depend upon him and they regard this situation as being essentially normal. And then if you want to put it constitutionally, it's the total and utter failure of that chamber of government, of the legislative branch of government to serve its basic function which is to pass laws. They don't, they're not doing that. They're treating themselves essentially as a kind of public affairs branch of the executive. And that's something, you know, the founders built the system the way it was so that congress would not just balance, I mean congress is supposed to be more important than the president and we just have people in power who don't see it that way. And then underlying all this is a factor which you know very well, which is the role of money in politics and the way that money accelerates everything and makes everything more vulgar.

Yeah, I think it will. There's one way that it will definitely make a difference and there's one way that it might make a difference depending on how they behave. Trump is a, I mean giving credit where credit is due. He's a charismatic politician whose success in politics depends upon the cultivation of an image of strength. Now that image of strength is entirely an American cultural product. It only works within the minds of Americans and within the borders of the United States. There are very very few people outside the United States who think that Trump is strong. And this is, I mean, a point worth making in and of itself because they're right and we're wrong. Beyond the United States he's seen as a pushover who just happens to be in charge of a country which has a great deal of resources and power and he is a pushover. Like you resist him at all and he folds. But that charismatic image of power, it can resist a lot of reality but I don't think it can resist an infinite amount of reality. So, you know, it can resist losing a war in Iran but can it resist losing a war in Iran and getting absolutely mauled in the midterm elections which I think they're going to do? I don't think so. And I think that plus his kind of increasingly evident loss of control over himself. I think those things will eventually combine to undermine his political gift which is to convey this image of strength. I think if you fall down enough times, you no longer look strong. And I think that's the thing that will happen. I think honestly that's what he's afraid of. He's palpably afraid at a very human level. He's really sweating about these midterms and I think this is why I don't think he thinks through the institutional part of it. I think he thinks through the psychological part of it. The second thing is after the Democrats win, which I believe they will, what do they do? And in my view, it's very important, you know, starting November 4th to announce and then starting in January to actually execute legislative projects which have to do with anti-corruption and redistribution even if Trump vetoes them to get the Democrats on the side to be the political party which is against corruption and which is for redistribution, which is for social mobility, which is for the American dream. I think they have a unique chance to do that given what public opinion is like right now. But I also think if they don't do it, they're giving a gift to Trump. Because if they don't do something dramatic, you know, if they don't announce something dramatic in November and do something dramatic in January, we tilt very quickly back into a world where people are saying, well, you know, he's corrupt, but kind of everybody's sort of corrupt. The Democrats haven't really done anything. So the second part depends on what the Democrats actually choose to do if they do have a majority.