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Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Tim Snyder in Minneapolis for a wide-ranging conversation about Trumpism, why Trump 2.0 is so much worse than the original, how Democrats can effectively message on corruption and their broader policy priorities, MAGA’s similarity to Putinism, the incoherence at the core of the Iran war, and more.
But before we got to all that, I asked him why he make the trek to Minnesota in the first place.
“I think of the Minneapolis/St. Paul area as being of world historical importance,” said Snyder, who was in town for an event at a local church and also visited the Renee Good and Alex Pretti memorials. “The people of this area showed that horizontal self-organization works, that courage is necessary.”
Professor Snyder probably needs no introduction, but if you’re not familiar, he’s one of the world’s foremost scholars on authoritarianism and the author of acclaimed books like “On Tyranny” and “On Freedom.” These days, he both writes and podcasts in his highly recommended “Thinking About…” newsletter.
We got together a few days before the midterms. I was struck by Tim’s ultimately well-founded confidence that they would be a resounding success for Democrats.
“If they lose — which they won’t — but if they do, this opportunity won’t come around again,” he told me. “If they don’t come out in November and January and do serious things — have ostentatious investigations, pass laws to get money out of politics — then by next spring, we’ll be back in a country where people say, ‘Everybody is corrupt.’ In that environment, Trump can survive. His whole thing is, ‘Yeah, everybody lies, everybody’s corrupt, but look at me — I’m better at it. I’m more charming about it.’”
A transcript of my conversation with Professor Snyder, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows. Most of it is free, but if you want to read the part below the paywall, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription if you haven’t signed up already. Readers like you make this newsletter possible.
Aaron Rupar
What brings you to Minneapolis, and how do you interpret the broader significance of the resistance against Operation Metro Surge?
Tim Snyder
I think of the Minneapolis/St. Paul area as being of world historical importance, so I’ve been wanting to get here for a couple of years, if not longer.
I wanted to be able to listen to folks who organized that resistance. I don’t think we as a country would be where we are if it weren’t for the resistance to Metro Surge. Although ICE continues to arrest people at a terrifying pace, there was an overall plan of invading US cities that had to be put on hold as a result of what happened here. The people of this area showed that horizontal self-organization works, that courage is necessary.
Aaron Rupar
We’ll get to contemporary matters, but first let’s talk about the big picture. I’ve heard you discuss in other interviews how America’s situation is unique because we elected an authoritarian for a second time. How do you explain the 2024 result with the benefit of two years of hindsight, and what conclusions about the American electorate can we draw from it?
Tim Snyder
The second election matters a lot because it taught Trump that he was immune.
The Supreme Court has also done some terrible work here, but the fact that we brought Trump back after he openly attempted a coup d’etat taught him that there was nothing we wouldn’t tolerate. So it’s not just that he was elected a second time, it’s that he was elected a second time after he tried to break the Constitution. That has meant an awful lot for the character of his second term.
As for what it says about us, before we get there, I just want to pause for a minute on our institutions. We uniquely in the world have this bizarre system in which money counts in ways that it shouldn’t. I don’t take the responsibility away from us, but it really does matter that all of these races need a lot of money and it really does matter that Republicans have a certain kind of edge there. If that weren’t true, it’s hard to imagine a Donald Trump.
As for being self-critical, I would say the fact that we’re so ahistorical and forget everything that happened before last Thursday doesn’t serve us well. In order to move forward generally in democracy, you have to learn from your mistakes — your mistakes 100 years ago, your mistakes 200 years ago, but also your mistakes last week. We are not good at that as a people. It certainly says that about us.
Then there’s also clearly the race and gender aspect of it, that when push comes to shove, there just are a lot of folks in this country who have trouble voting for somebody who’s not a white guy. Intersectionality is generally meant to be an analysis of how people are discriminated against, but you can also use it to say that only a white guy could run that kind of campaign and get away with it. If Trump was a Black guy, no way. If he was a white woman, no way. So there’s that. Many of us will not only let somebody who looks like him get away with a lot, but will have a certain kind of appreciation for being exploited by somebody like him.
There’s also the fact that the Democrats obviously blew it. Biden should have gotten out of the race earlier. There should have been some kind of mini competition. People should have had more of a chance to think about it. Not that Kamala Harris was a bad candidate — I thought she was a fine one. But there should have been some kind of process.
One final thing that was rough on Biden and that we have to think about is that the Republicans don’t have policy at this point. They don’t pass laws. They have attitudes and they have grifts and they have personality cults. If you want to have policy, that’s good, but it has to happen fast enough for people to recognize it. And that is a problem with the Biden crew, but it is also just a problem with the way our federal government works.
It really is true that it takes too long for initiatives to actually affect people’s lives. And that ended up hurting Harris because a lot of the good stuff that Biden did in the earlier part of his term, it wasn’t visible to people even four years in.
Aaron Rupar
As a scholar of authoritarianism, what do you make of the fact that so many of the actions Trump has taken over the past couple years seem to be self-sabotaging — tariffs and the Iran war foremost among them. Wouldn’t he have had a better chance of consolidating autocracy had he basically just gone golfing for two years?
Tim Snyder
I’m going to pause on the counterfactual for a second and just point out that Mr. Trump is not physically fit enough to go golfing for two years. He can only do it in quick bursts.
But seriously, the counterfactual is tough because then he wouldn’t have been Trump. The guy that got elected was the self-indulgent guy, the guy who just has to have another donut. That’s the guy people liked or wanted. And if he wasn’t that person, he wouldn’t have been elected. He’s this impulsive, incredibly self-centered person.
The main reason we have this war in Iran is that he really enjoyed Venezuela. I’m sure you saw it because you see everything, but when he called into Fox & Friends, it was just really clear that he got an essentially erotic pleasure out of Venezuela and he was just itching to do it again.
Iran was pitched to him as something that would go just as quickly. And because he’s an absolute child — actually, that’s insulting to children, so I’ll just say he’s an idiot — he doesn’t know anything about power, ironically.
It’s the same with tariffs. He does not understand anything about economics at all. He can’t think ahead about economic war any more than he can with normal war in terms of second order or third order effects. He just thinks, “If I do this, they’re going to have to do what I want,” which isn’t true.
Too many of us have trained him to think that we’re all pushovers. He’s been trained to think that everybody’s a coward, because so many people around him are cowards, and so many people who vote for him are cowards. He thinks everyone wants nothing less than to just be taught a lesson by him. But that doesn’t work on foreigners at all.
It doesn’t work on Canadians. It doesn’t work on Iranians. It doesn’t work on Ukrainians. It doesn’t work on Russians. Regardless of which nation we’re talking about or what kind of government they have, nobody respects him. Nobody. And so as soon as he ventures outside of the United States and tries his Trump shtick, it’s going to end up having effects that are counterproductive.
Aaron Rupar
One of the things that strikes me about the Iran war is the incoherence at the core of it. We’re fighting a war of choice against Iran, but at the same time you have the president cozying up to two countries that are helping Iran — Russia and China — including helping them target US troops. How do you make sense of Trump being on both sides of his own war?
Tim Snyder
Although some of our media heroically try, and I understand the impulse, there is simply no way to understand Trump’s actions in terms of any framework of US national interests. The reason for that is that he does not care about the United States of America at all.
So we would be comfortable if we were in a game where we could say, “Well, Trump has this international relations paradigm and other people have other differing notions, and it’s all about realism versus idealism.” We would like that, and many of our analysts would like that, but it’s all hogwash. He has no notion of US interests.
He does not believe in the United States of America. He does not understand sovereignty. He does not identify with the United States as a sovereign country.
Coming at this a different way, Ukrainians often ask me, “Why doesn’t Trump understand that Ukraine is fighting for its interests?” The answer is he doesn’t understand that anybody would fight for their interests, because he has no notion of any interest that goes beyond the individual human being.
It’s not surprising, therefore, that his entire “foreign policy” — and I think it has to be in quotations — is just overlapping impulses and grifts. It’s not surprising that it’s incoherent because there is no notion of US interests behind it. So he doesn’t care that it makes no sense.
The war in Iran doesn’t make any sense for a lot of reasons. We blew out a bunch of munitions that could have been used in other ways. We showed how easy it is to defeat us in a war. And that’s before we even get to the very valid point that you’re making, which is that our foreign policy is now to pay Russia to support Iran to kill us. It’s totally incoherent. You’re right. But the reason why we can’t expect coherence is that there’s no identification with the United States at the bottom of it.
Aaron Rupar
You live in Canada now, though obviously you still spend a lot of time in the US. From your vantage point in Toronto, were you at all surprised after the 2024 election that Canada was among Trump’s first targets? The “51st state” talk started pretty much right after his win despite playing no role in his campaign.
Tim Snyder
Trump and his people see other countries as opportunities for grifts. For them, the United States is a junkyard with some shiny objects and the whole point of politics is to point everybody else’s eyes away from the shiny objects so they can take them. It’s the same in foreign affairs.
The Alberta referendum happily went the way that it went, and we — Americans, the Republican Party, and also the Department of State and people in Trump’s cabinet —were all shamefully involved. It’s none of our business. Canada is a sovereign state. But why were we involved? Because there are minerals, there are things in Alberta which could be profitable for individual Americans.
The attacks on Canada arise from the idea that you want to break state institutions so you can plunder stuff. The interesting result of it is that Canada is more consolidated as a nation. There’s this propaganda idea that Canada’s not real, which is unfortunately very similar to the Russian idea that Ukraine is not real. That’s just complete nonsense.
None of this strengthens American patriotism at all. Americans don’t like this stuff. They don’t really understand it. So the result of having a “foreign policy,” which is just about breaking down other countries and stealing their resources, is that you alienate allies, you make whole populations distrustful of you, and the only possible gain is, “Oh, my son-in-law got richer and some friends got richer.” That’s it.
So I wasn’t really surprised by it, and the reason I wasn’t is because of Ukraine and Russia. I watch a lot of Russian television — not as much as you watch American television, but a fair amount. And on Russian television, Trump is a character. He is basically a second-tier Russian politician.
If you start from that framework, then think, “Okay, Trump is somebody who’s kind of doing what Russian oligarchs did in the ‘90s, he’s just not quite as good at it,” it gets you pretty far, because at that time the Soviet Union was breaking up and the oligarchs achieved things by taking advantage of a weak state and seizing stuff. If you think of Trump and his coterie as being like that, then America’s a junkyard, it’s nothing. We’re just going to seize what we can.
So with Canada, when they starting talking about the 51st state, I was like, “Yeah, this is like Donbas, this is the way that the Russians do things.” It’s familiar.
Aaron Rupar
One of the reasons the midterms that are coming up are so important is because it gives Americans an opportunity to register their dissatisfaction with things like the trade war with Canada. I sometimes think about this election as being possibly our last chance to pull the emergency brake on the GOP’s drive toward authoritarianism. Do you agree with that characterization, and how are you thinking about the stakes?
Tim Snyder
My general view about this is the opposition party, the Democrats, has a once in a lifetime chance to claim both houses of Congress and to begin transformative systemic change. If they lose — which they won’t — but if they do, this opportunity won’t come around again.
Right now we’re in this unusual situation where corruption is very salient and also people think Trump is more corrupt than other presidents. And that’s really important because we’re in a country where basically everybody thinks the system is broken, but now people think, “Yeah, it’s broken, but Trump is worse.” That means the Democrats, when they win, have an opportunity to get on the right side of that issue.
They have to make the most of that opportunity because if they don’t come out in November and January and do serious things — have ostentatious investigations, pass laws to get money out of politics — then by next spring, we’ll be back in a country where people say, “Everybody is corrupt.” In that environment, Trump can survive. His whole thing is, “Yeah, everybody lies, everybody’s corrupt, but look at me — I’m better at it. I’m more charming about it.”
As far as an emergency brake, I agree with you. I would just say you pull the emergency brake and then you jump out of the car and you get another one because the task is not fixing what we have at this point. The task is building something different.
Aaron Rupar
You mentioned corruption becoming a more salient issue, but it’s proven difficult to persuade low information voters to care about threats to democracy as much as they probably should. What are your thoughts about the affordability-centric messaging Democrats have used this campaign cycle, and do you think it’s sufficient to the threats we face?
