Americans tend to think that everybody is corrupt. Okay, I get it. But a character like Trump thrives in that environment because he says, "Yeah, everybody's corrupt, but look at me. I'm better at being corrupt than everyone else. It's more fun to be corrupt with me than with others. I admit it. They don't. They're hypocrites." Right now, that particular approach has now worn itself out.
From the Guardian, this is Stateside with Kaien Carter. I'm Kai Wright, and today, Timothy Snyder on Trump's maybe inflection point.
I won't be the first to say this, but let me say it plain. Donald Trump feels kind of out of control lately. And yes, yes, I know that is a cliché at this point, but still, even by the standards we've come to expect from our showman president, the last few weeks have been wild. I mean, just take stock for a second. There is obviously the moment he suggested to a campaign rally that it'd be okay if Iran takes out Los Angeles or San Diego. So, millions of lives lost, just collateral damage in an important war. There was that odd GOP midterm convention he held in Dallas. That was basically a self-tribute. There was him arguing with a reporter he banned from the White House.
Here, I'm surprised that CNN is here covering me. You should... You should not be here covering me.
It goes on and on. And as always, it's easy to laugh at this stuff, but truthfully, it scares me because it makes me feel like this moment is even more volatile. Like more than ever, I'm not sure what's coming. Maybe especially if Republicans do lose badly in the midterms and Trump feels threatened. So, I wanted to talk to somebody who has been very clear-eyed from the very start about what is at stake when Trump rose to power. Timothy Snyder was among the first scholars to see Trump's movement and say, "Warning, y'all, that looks like fascism to me." He's a historian who studies the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, among other things. And his 2017 book On Tyranny is, of course, considered by many to be required reading for understanding the past decade of our lives. I want him to help me understand what is both the promise and the peril of this moment for those of us who believe in liberal democracy. Timothy Snyder, welcome to Stateside.
So let's start with my premise here that Trump feels especially out of control right now. Exhibit A is that rally in Nebraska. He appeared to joke about San Diego and Los Angeles being expendable collateral damage if Iran bombs them. Truly unhinged commentary from a commander-in-chief. But on the basic premise, does Trump feel more manic to you lately?
I think Trump is an essentially weak character, and that's where I would start. I mean, he's the kind of character who can only function in an American environment. He's the kind of character who can only function in the age of social media. He hit his historical conjuncture perfectly, but now the way he operates is that he's essentially like the revolving door for more powerful men than he to try to seek wealth very quickly. That's where we are. So I start with Trump is a weak character, and then we can move on to he's maybe physically and mentally a bit weaker than he was before. But my overall framing of this, or the way I think about it, is that you have to see this as an opportunity. We're in a very strange moment, and we have to try to think how to turn this strange moment into something a lot better.
What did you... you said it can only function in an American environment. What do you mean by that?
So I mean, I guess in the decade or so that Trump's been prominent in US politics, I've been abroad much of the time and probably in about a dozen different countries and living in two or three. And the magic doesn't work anywhere else. It just doesn't work. Nobody understands the appeal. So he's like an American television character where the movie doesn't sell abroad, basically.
And so now like Americans are understanding that Trump is weak in US domestic politics and that he's spectacularly self-destructive in international politics. That's just obvious elementary stuff pretty much anywhere outside of the United States. But I also mean that he rides a certain kind of American crisis, right? The American crisis in social mobility where our whole story was that everybody can make it if they try. And then when that stopped being true, a character like him with his particular story of, hey, look, I have no visible talents whatsoever except scamming you and nevertheless, look at me, I've succeeded. I think that story only works at a perfect moment where the American dream is seen to be broken, which is Trump's moment. I think he understood that. I think he exploited it. That's his talent.
Right. I want to talk about a couple of things that have come up lately that, you know, maybe speak to this point about him being uniquely weak and starting to look out. So, I don't know. I'm curious what you made of his taxpayer-funded campaign ad recently. Let's play this.
Together we will defeat communism, socialism, and Marxism in America. America will never be a communist country.
So that's from one of two ads Trump has run at the cost of more than 10 million taxpayer dollars. He has said his super PAC will pay for the ads moving forward, but at least as of this recording, it's not clear whether he's going to repay the money that has already been spent. But still, some have noted that it is a rare example of him kind of sort of backing down from something. What do you make of this whole ordeal, Timothy?
There are sort of two levels of desperation going on. One level of desperation is Republicans are polling very badly and they're probably going to lose the House by a lot and they should lose the Senate by two or three seats, too. That's one level. But the other level of desperation is that Trump doesn't help anymore. His presence doesn't help. And I think it's the inability to recognize that which is kind of forcing him to force himself on other people all the time. So he's traveling now to spaces and races like Ohio and Nebraska where he's not going to help. His presence actually doesn't help. Nobody actually wants him around on the Republican side, but of course they can't stop him from showing up. And then these ads, it's like he's trying to remind people that he's indispensable. Like, you know, the beat of that ad was like, "Love me, love me, love me, love me." Like, literally love me.
Yeah. That may be a sign that they're not feeling loved, right? Which I think is where Trump is right now. There's something about the ad that, you know, maybe it's silly to still be trying to make the case of his authoritarianism, but it's such a classic example it feels like of things that happen in places that we look at as Americans and say, "Boy, look how weird that state-run media thing is over there."
Yeah. Except our production values aren't as high as other people's. But yeah, that's totally true. I mean, and I like to think about the production values, I like to think it's not going to work because people are exposed to higher quality stuff on the internet all the time. But so people ask me all the time what fascism is. And it's a hard thing to define because fascism is about being against reason. It's about giving way to will and it's about accepting impulse and so on. Like fascism is itself anti-rational. And so scholars agree on one thing about fascism, which is hard to define. But that ad is flat-out fascist with its, you know, grouping everything under communism, making communism the enemy. Although there is no communism to be afraid of in the United States and Trump's best friends are in fact communists, right? I mean, the people that he really likes to be around are Putin and Xi, right? North Korea is his model. But so that plus the appeal directly to the emotions, all the subliminal stuff, all the us-and-them stuff. The idea of a single strongman, you're not a country, you're not a democracy, you're not a rule-of-law state, that you're just a strongman and that he's there to defend all of us, that's fascism. That's what fascism looks like. So yeah, it's obviously an authoritarian strongman-type ad. But it's also you could use it if you're trying to teach like an intro course on what fascism looks like. That would be that ad.
Especially the love me, love me, love me. I don't know. It's so weird. It's just...
Yeah, but we should find it weird, man, because like we don't think that politics is about love, right? Like love is about love, right? Love's a good thing, but politics... and that is fascist because the whole idea is that the leader has a direct connection to your body, heart, and soul and therefore all the institutions and the laws and the structures and the voting and the civil society, all that stuff doesn't matter. It's all fake. It's all inauthentic because the only thing that really matters is that love, right? So that is an authoritarian message and it's also a fascist message.
What do you think of him? Do you feel like this was an example of him backing down and do you think that's relevant? The fact that he now has said, "Well, maybe I'll pay for it myself" — an unusual moment of him domestically backing down from something that he's been pushed on.
Yeah. I mean, that's a good point about the domestic because when you look at it from abroad, he backs down all the time, right? Like he lost the trade war to China. He's lost to Iran. You know, they're going to be dictating terms sooner rather than later. He backs down when faced with opposition. It's just in the US he's not faced with very much opposition, sadly.
I see it slightly differently. I mean, he did back down and that's interesting. But I think the real... the funding of it is a kind of comfortable American framing because we like to reduce morality to did the right person pay for it or not, which is of course important, but the fact that it was aired nationally in a campaign which isn't even about him and that it's obviously fascist, like for me those are the real issues. And so when we frame it in terms of who paid for it, it's true we shouldn't be using taxpayer money for it, that's terrible, but that's kind of like checking off one box and the other box would be, well, hey, it's kind of absurd that this exists in our culture in the first place.
It's kind of like you don't get credit for brushing your teeth, as Melissa Harris-Perry used to say.
Well, if you're like, yeah, I mean, if you've been decapitated, you know, like the teeth-brushing thing seems secondary. Yeah.
I'm also thinking about the way the media has dealt with these stories recently. And, you know, of course, a few weeks ago, Trump barred three news organizations from the White House. The TV networks responded collectively by not covering him. You said somewhere that you wish they had spent that time rethinking how they cover the president. What do you think the media is still having trouble figuring out about covering Donald Trump?
Okay. I mean, obviously I'm in a luxurious position here because I'm not an assignment editor having to make difficult calls, but here's what I think. I think one should question the desirability of pool reporting of Trump at all, or maybe a little deeper. Reporting what the man says I think has always been a mistake, or reporting it within the usual conventions that what he says is news because it bears on the truth in some way. I think that has been a mistake. I think the way to cover him from the beginning would have been with transcripts of what he says and then literally let people read for themselves and decide and then try to cover the news separately from what he says because he is talented. He is charismatic. He does draw attention to himself very effectively. And in a certain way, even as he tailspins and collapses, we can't take our eyes off him.
And I think the thing like the outrageous stuff like destroying San Diego and Los Angeles, if we just printed the transcript, that would be more outrageous than the way we actually cover it, which is to say, I mean, not the Guardian necessarily, but often in US press, it would be like, "It's unclear what he meant, and, you know, the context was unclear. And perhaps he was also talking..." you know, right? I think like transcript him, put him in a separate section and then try to do the front page entirely without, you know, stuff that Trump says.
