Professor Timothy Snyder: What Is Next For America?

Let's just imagine that this was just incompetence, right? We just had random appointees at defense. We just had some guy who was president and he didn't know anything. That would be bad enough, but that we have something worse than that, which is that Trump just doesn't care about the interest of the United States. So, you can't educate him about how this is or isn't in the interest of the US because he just doesn't care. So, it's something like it's incompetence, but it's also this just incredibly insipid self-absorption and narcissism and inability actually to think about what might be good for the country.

Glad to be with you. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a great question. So, it's really important to know what's going on and to follow reliable news sources. At the same time, it's also really important not to have that be the only thing you're doing and not to doom scroll because all of the stuff that comes in, we need some time, you know, to use your words, we need some time to analyze it or to put it into historical perspective. So for me, it's pretty clear that what has happened in the United States or what is happening is an authoritarian regime change. We have people in power who are doing things which are unprecedented on a national scale. I mean, various kinds of oppressions, of course, have happened in the US. We've had, you know, in parts of cities inhabited by African Americans or in, you know, whole states in the American South and so on. We've had long-term authoritarian practices, but never on the scale of the entire country, never directed against political opposition as such. So this is a change and you have to react to the change by changing yourself and by thinking of politics, by thinking of electoral politics as only being part of politics. And so as I process it, I'm not depressed or worried or hurt or anxious or any of these things. I just see it as further evidence that we're in a historical moment where different kinds of action will be needed, where not only does an election have to be won, but people have to recognize that the stakes of the election are the republic itself and that around the election, the November election, I mean, of course, around the election, there have to be big coalitions and big expectations and then pretty dramatic action afterward. So I mean, I see it as a turning point for the history of the United States and I see it, if we don't see it that way, then we're taking part in a turn away from anything like the rule of law and perhaps a turn away from the existence of the US.

Well, I would start with that a different way because the question assumes that people care and that they're against it. So one has to start by recognizing that there are a fair number of Americans who would be very happy to live under an authoritarian regime. And I think one has to start from that because if we start from, I mean, first of all, it's true, but secondly, if we go along with the kind of normal cliche that Americans love freedom and so on, then we end up convincing ourselves that whatever happens, it must be freedom. It's the same problem with democracy. You know, if we convince ourselves that the US is a democracy, then whatever happens, we kind of convince ourselves that somehow this is within the overall framework of a democracy somehow. But a lot of Americans don't want democracy and a lot of Americans don't like freedom. A lot of Americans would like to be told what to do. I mean, maybe a quarter or so. And that's, you know, that's Trump's hardcore, like that's the line below which his support will never go. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is that there are a lot of people who are indifferent to the political system, you know, so long as they believe they're going to make lots of money from whatever the transition is. And that's the problem we have with radical wealth inequality and with oligarchy. We have a lot of people towards the top of our current system who just don't care. I mean, they would be fine with democracy if democracy allowed them to do whatever they want. But it turns out that having a kind of, you know, half-dead henchmen in the White House is better for them in terms of getting what they want. And so they're in favor of that, right? So we have to recognize that there are, you know, very difficult is a very simple way, but there are forces on the other side. It's not just that people don't realize it. It's that some people do realize it and they're perfectly happy with it. And then there is that big middle chunk that you're referring to of people who just kind of like to think that so long as we have elections, or, you know, even if we win an election, that means that everything is okay. And I guess what I would say is that my experience is that there are people who are angry and the question is can that anger be politicized in the right way? Like people who are aware that Trump is corrupt. Can we make the connection between that corruption and not voting for the political party he represents? There are people who understand that the deck is stacked. Can we translate that very correct sense of things into political action? Right? So I think like it's not that people don't know something is wrong. They do. It's that people don't necessarily connect that feeling that something is wrong with the idea that we need democracy because a lot of people think democracy is what we have now, right? And that's kind of the problem. What we have now isn't really democracy. There's too much money in politics, there's too much wealth inequality, there are too many voices of special interests, etc., etc. People are right about that. And so they don't necessarily think, oh, what we need to do is more democracy, right? And sometimes the Democratic Party doesn't help when some of its leaders suggest that all we have to do is go back to something that was called democracy because no one wants to go back. And what we had, you know, four years ago or eight years ago or 12 years ago or whatever also had to be deeply flawed because it got us to where we are today. So I think the question is whether you can connect the deep unease and anxiety that people feel with the present situation to the idea that we have to create a more just and a more democratic society.

Yeah, I mean, we certainly have to try because it's the only possible thing, right? It's really the only way forward. And there is reason to think that it can work because there are examples, right? I mean, Obama did something pretty similar in 2008, but it's also pretty similar to things that happened more recently, right? Like the Hungary election, which is very important. I mean, in the US, we tend to focus on US news, but our Republican party, our MAGA people, the elites around Trump, they care much more about Hungary than they care about, you know, South Dakota or Minneapolis or Minnesota or whatever. They care much more about it than they care about Alabama, Alaska. They care much more about it than they care about any part of America. Because for them, Hungary under Viktor Orban was the bastion of a kind of international far right. Hungary was the protocol of what you do. You know, you blame the immigrants. You steal the money, you support your friends. That's basically it, right? And they were personal friends with Viktor Orban, and they personally supported him. The vice president went so far as to fly to Budapest, the Hungarian capital, and tell Hungarians how to vote. The president, his immediate family all told Hungarians how to vote, and nevertheless, their guy, Orban, got absolutely clobbered, just got absolutely destroyed. And one of the secrets was precisely that the opposition candidate, who you know, the prime minister of Hungary now, Magyar, was able to connect the issue of, you see that it's corrupt, to we have to use the government to make things less corrupt. Now to do that, the secret is you have to come off as radical. I mean, my view is that for these elections, the pragmatic is the radical and the radical is the pragmatic. If you're in the opposition party, that is the Democrats in the US, you can't be saying, 'Oh, it's time to go back to where we were two years ago or four years ago or six years ago,' because no, literally nobody wants that. Nobody wants that in the US. You have to be able to say, 'When we come back, we're going to get the money out of politics. When we come back, we're going to investigate all these examples of corruption. When we come back, we're going to take whatever steps we can take to give you the sense that things are no longer rigged.' Right? Because people thought things were rigged. And Trump worked that. And now people understand that Trump has just rigged things much worse, which is correct. I mean, I don't think it's sunk in just how much worse, but that's correct, right? People think that things were corrupt. True. People now think things are more corrupt. Also true. And so, you have to be the party who comes in and says, 'We are going to get the money out of politics. Maybe the Republicans won't, but we will. We're going to investigate the people around Trump who have made huge amounts of money from war, who made huge amounts of money from being close to him. We're going to target those people. We're going to set an example.' And by the way, I think that is a very important part of your question. You know, the legal part, because if you can't promise people justice, they're not going to take you seriously. And this is actually part of our problem is that we're not really sure that the law applies to these very wealthy people or to people around the president anymore. And I think it's very important to say, look, we're going to prosecute corruption. And by the way, if people try to rig the November 26 elections, that is, we are going to prosecute them as well. Like you have to be the party which says actually there are laws and the laws aren't just these like tired, pallid, annoying things. We are going to use these laws to go after people who are corrupt and we're going to use those laws to go after anyone who tries to rig the election.

I have to say that I haven't really noticed that. I mean, it seems that there are two levels to what they're trying to do. On the one hand, they are trying, you know, they've gerrymandered even more severely than things are gerrymandered before. They've gutted the very historically legitimate gains that we had in equal rights at the voting booth. They will try to intimidate people in November however they can. That's one level of it. I think they've kind of gone as far as they can at that level because the Republican party itself is divided on this between, I mean, the people I think of as the gamers and the breakers. The breakers are people like Trump who just don't care about democracy and procedures at all, just want personal power for one person, but there are also the gamers, the people who are in this for the long game, who, you know, don't mind losing an election every so often because it's basically rigged in their favor, so they'll come back. And that is a bunch of the Republican party, especially at the state level, and you need the states if you're going to rig the elections, right? So a Trump who's so obviously concerned only about personal power and a Trump who is embarrassingly losing a major war may not be the kind of character that people on the gamer side of things are going to rally around. The second level is something that Hungary can't do but which isn't going to work for Trump, I don't think, and that is fighting a war. So, he's fighting a war and that's what people do to win elections. It's done all the time, but it's a stupid war and it's a war that he's losing. And it's also a vaguely embarrassing war, which, I mean, when I say embarrassing, I don't mean to set aside the fact that it's criminal and that it's very disruptive to the international system and that it's reduced American power tremendously and also that it's killed hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of innocent people, and also that it's killed American service members. I don't mean to put any of that aside. When I say that it's embarrassing though, in the setting, what I mean is that it just day after day after day, it makes him look more like the thing he actually is, which is a profoundly weak person. All of whose strength comes from people's belief in the fact that he might somehow be strong. So like people use wars to win elections, but I don't think Trump can use this one to win an election because it's so unpopular and there's no way he can win it. The only scenario they have connected to the war is something that Hungary did try and I'm just going to mention it because it's important that people think about in advance so it doesn't work.

Yeah, exactly. So the Hungarians right before the election, Orban's people said, 'Oh, look, there's a terrorist attack that's coming.' And everybody laughed at him. And like that's kind of what we have to be ready for, whether there's some kind of incident, right? Or that the intelligence agencies around Trump claim that there's some kind of incident or whatever there is. There isn't, you know, if it is, it's their fault. It's the Trump people's fault. It's the government's fault. The government should be preventing these things. But regardless, it's never an excuse not to have an election. And it's a reason to vote against Trump, not a reason to vote for him. But above all, what we're not allowed to do if they claim that Iran does some kind of terrorist attack in the United States, we're not allowed to run around in circles and say, you know, like we did in 2001, we're not allowed to run around and say, 'Oh, this means that our leader gets to stay in power,' because he's not a leader. He shouldn't stay in power. Right? And basically a terrorist attack is something he's hoping for rather than something he's trying to prevent.

Well, I mean, if you don't appreciate how bad things can get, then it's also hard to have the imagination for how good things can get, I guess, is how I think about that, right? Like we all kind of occupy this middle ground which says like, oh, nothing really bad can happen, then also nothing really good can happen, and you have to appreciate just how awful the people in power are in order to have the imagination to think about how great things could be when they leave power, right? So these kinds of things happen all the time, whether it's a real terrorist attack, whether it's a fake terrorist attack, whether it's a false flag, you organize yourself. This is a totally normal mainstream part of politics. It's how Putin came to power. And Putin is Trump's basically favorite person. Putin came to power in connection with a fake terrorist attack organized by the Russian secret services on Russian territory. They blew up their own apartment buildings and then blamed Muslims for it. Right? So how did Hitler come to power, right? Who set fire to the Reichstag is still not entirely clear almost 100 years later. But nevertheless, when it happened, it was the pretext that he used to declare a state of emergency and basically get permanent hold on power. These things happen over and over and over and over again, right? So, if something like this, so there have been major terrorist attacks in the United States, right? That's not something that hasn't happened. So, let's say that Iran does actually carry one out. What do we think Trump is going to do? I mean, it's 100% likely that he would use it to then say, 'Hey, I need to stay in power. There can't be elections.' Some variant of that, but I think what's really happening is that he's hoping for it and the Iranians know he's hoping for it and are therefore unlikely to deliver it, right? Because the Iranians' purpose right now, the Iranian government, I mean, their purpose is to humiliate, not just to defeat, but to humiliate Trump, right? So, they're not going to give him something that he wants. They're not going to give him something like that, at least not before November. They might give it to him after November. But so I think that leaves us with the Hungarian scenario, which again, just to remind everybody, like it actually happened in Hungary, which is a comparably, you know, non-democratic country to ours led by somebody who after Putin is the most important model for Donald Trump, right? That is exactly what the Hungarian government did. They pretended there was a terrorist attack, right? They pretended that there was a terrorist attack. And so, yeah, I think it's the kind of thing where instead of gearing ourselves up to say, 'Oh, this would be really surprising if it happened,' it should be more like, 'Hm, this is the kind of thing that people like Trump do. It's just the kind of thing they do.' And so, if we have ourselves in that mindset when they do it, then we can turn it against them rather than being surprised.

Mhm.

Yeah. I mean, our difficulty in trying to explain things like this is that there are just many angles to his limits. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to explain one of the most idiotic strategic decisions made by a modern power in history. And so you have to accept, I think, from the beginning that we're dealing with somebody who has multiple limitations and so there are probably multiple overlapping explanations. So to start, the man is completely ignorant. I mean, he's something worse than ignorant about military power because ignorant would mean you don't know anything. But he knows things that aren't true. So he's something which is worse than ignorant when it comes to military power. He thinks things like if you got the biggest X then you're going to win. And he thinks things like if you hit the other side hard and you hurt them, that's the same thing as military victory. Like those are his convictions which he readily shared with us and those are simply not true. War is about politics. It's about whether you can get other people to do what you want them to do by way of violence. And the fact that you have the bigger army or the bigger navy or the bigger guns or the bigger missiles does not necessarily mean that you can apply them in such a way that you can get people to do what you want. That's the basic thing he doesn't understand. And then related to that is the idea that weapons that you think are big and pretty are going to be weapons that will necessarily make people do what they want. You just, there just aren't really examples of people winning wars just by launching missiles from a great distance. And that was all they had, right? That's their idea. We're going to launch missiles from a great distance. We're going to enjoy watching them fly. We're going to enjoy watching them blow things up and kill people. But that's all they got, right? And

Yeah, I mean, with Hegseth, it's the same as Trump in that he's something worse than ignorant. He believes lots of things about war which just aren't true. There's this bizarre mismatch with Hegseth where he's concerned with things like how much testosterone we have in our bloodstream. But the way that we're going to fight a war is by launching missiles from hundreds or thousands of miles away. Like there's just a complete mismatch of stuff. You know, like whether you're physically strong might be relevant in some very, very different kind of combat. But if all you're willing to do is hold press conferences and push buttons, right, which is all he's willing to do, you know, these things, the rest of it all just becomes symbolic and ridiculous. Like there's this big confusion in the US between posing as a tough guy and actually imposing your will on other people. So in the US, people might be impressed by your television personality. They might be, you know, they might be. But no, like no foreigner believes that Hegseth or Trump has any kind of military sophistication or any kind of military wisdom, right? Zero foreigners. No one thinks that. Everyone thinks that these are people who inherited enormous military power but are essentially children in their application of it. I mean, that's actually, that's not fair to children because there are plenty of children who are not convinced of things that are wrong. Whereas these guys are convinced of things that are wrong. So with the stockpiles, they have not, I mean, so you have to start with a very basic thing which is that Trump and Hegseth don't understand that other people are people. So just because you hurt them in some way doesn't mean they immediately do what you want them to do. Naturally Trump and Hegseth think this because it's true of them and it's true of everybody they know, right? Like they can't imagine a situation where if they were exposed to any kind of inconvenience, let alone pain, that they wouldn't immediately yield. So they imagine everybody's like that and that everybody will immediately yield if they're exposed to inconvenience and pain. But that's actually not true of everybody, whether they're good people, bad people, people we like, people we don't like, like the people, like the rulers of Iran, right? Nevertheless, they're not necessarily going to yield just because you inconvenience them or hurt them. And that was just beyond their imagination, right? And so because that was beyond their imagination, they had to keep doing over and over again the thing they did at the beginning, which was launch missiles. Like their idea was we launch some missiles and then the other guys are just going to, to use Trump's term, cry uncle, which sort of reveals, you know, the completely puerile character of all this. And then the other problem is that they repeat over and over again that the United States has the strongest military, most advanced, yada yada. And of course, what we can build is very, very impressive. And some of our weapon systems are incredibly, incredibly desired all around the world. That's all very true. But they haven't really been keeping up with how war is fought. And this has a lot to do with Ukraine. Both Trump and Hegseth have this tremendous arrogance factor about Ukraine. They won't look at it. They won't acknowledge that Ukraine is winning a war. They won't acknowledge that Ukraine has been innovating. They just basically won't acknowledge Ukraine as a reality. And so if you won't acknowledge Ukraine as a reality, then what you won't acknowledge is that you can't win wars just by firing missiles, which is something Russia's been doing in addition to a land invasion for five years. That you also realize looking at Ukraine that times have changed and that drones and drone defense are the main issue now and the Americans are not on that page at all, which means that the Iranians can threaten and do things with drones for which we're not really prepared. Right? I mean, we're now in a situation where Ukrainian coal miners are in the Middle East trying to make sure that Iranian drones don't hit American forces or the forces of American allies in the Middle East because we were just not up to date. We hadn't been following the way wars are actually fought. So there's a fundamental mistake, which is the enemy always gets a move, and then there's the mistake of being so arrogant that you haven't been following the last five years in the history of war.

I mean, Iran is one of those places where you can't really go, and so one should be really hesitant about making strong affirmations about this. But it's certainly my impression, and this is just something that I get secondhand from listening to Iranians abroad, but it's certainly my impression that he helped them in two ways. The first way he helped them was by giving them the rally around the flag factor. And then the second way that, so people in Iran who weren't necessarily politically committed one way or the other, if there's an essentially random barrage of missiles that comes down in your country, you're going to tend to rally around your government, right? Good, bad, or indifferent. But the second thing is that the opposition, much of which was in fact hopeful about this war, they're just treated so callously and with such indifference, right? The way that Trump and Hegseth talk about them is so insulting. And Trump and Hegseth are not like, they're not characterologically, they're not capable of alliances. They're not capable of the long-term iterative relationship, the back and forth where you remember people's names and you keep your promises and so on. They just can't do that sort of thing. And so the second thing which he's helped them with is that he's basically let down the opposition in Iran. So again, I'm not an expert on this and I don't have firsthand information and there are plenty of people who would be better to ask about this, but my sense is that yeah, I mean, Trump is basically someone who has propped up dictatorship around the world and Iran sadly is one more example of that.