Loading summary
Transcript17 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:05]
B
I would like to welcome Timothy David Snyder. He is a historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and studies tyranny closely. He is the author of On Tyranny, On Freedom and more. Timothy, welcome. Before we get started, I want to put up some reporting that came out today from the Daily Beast. Kylie, will you pop this up? Trump ally shocked at President's Psychological State and private Meeting A key an ally of Donald Trump said he was traumatized by a meeting where the US President's psychological state came across as dangerous, according to diplomats with knowledge of the conversations. And this is the Prime Minister of Slovakia, Robert Fico. Have you seen this or with your relationships with people in Europe? What do you have to say about this?
- [00:57]
A
I hadn't seen it, but it's an interesting thing for Fico to be saying because FO is a right wing populist and is very much aligned with Mr. Trump on pretty much every issue. So it's not somebody who would be out to get Mr. Trump. On the contrary. So that's, I haven't seen it and I have no personal knowledge, but that's a very striking bit of reporting for that reason.
- [01:22]
B
Really interesting. I said he thought the president was out of his mind. Okay, I, I follow you on Twitter and I'm on Instagram and I really liked you had a post about I, I am assuming you're referencing there was an in the Atlantic recently where the journalist was like, after a long time I finally come to the conclusion that this is fascism. And you said, okay, listen, instead of wasting the time acknowledging the obvious, let's fight it. Can you please elaborate on that?
- [01:54]
A
I'm happy to, but I'm going to do it from the position where I've always been, which is that whatever you think this evil is, once you recognize it as an evil, you're responsible to be doing something about it. And any discussion that we're having about this nature of the evil is important insofar as it instructs then the tactics that we choose and the strategy that we have. That's the point. That's the whole point. Right. So what I worry, what I'm worried about here is that there have been a number of folks who have essentially made the claim that everybody who says that this is a radical evil, for example, fascism, those people are just off their rocker. We don't have to pay attention to them. And therefore, and here comes the dangerous part, we can do nothing and we've lost a ton of time. And I think we've disempowered some otherwise very capable people by, by telling that story that like all the people who are warning that Trump would someday use violence, et cetera, those people are crazy. We shouldn't, we should ignore them. We've lost 10 years. I mean, I don't want to overdramatize this, but we've lost 10 years where a lot of good organizing could have been done because people used an ideological debate as a reason to set aside. And so now what I'm worried about, and I hope I'm wrong, Jennifer, what I'm worri worried about now is that now that it's just so transparent that there was something to worry about, whatever you want to name it, and there was a reason to use serious terms in describing that danger, that now those very same people are going to say, okay, I accept that it's a very serious danger. I accept that it's fascism. And then that this is. I hope I'm wrong. But then that becomes their form of action. Okay, but that's not action. You know, that's. If you recognize now that it's fascism, that means that for the last 10 years, you probably weren't doing enough, and that means you had a lot of time to. Lost time to make up for. So what I would urge is that, because there was that article in Atlantic, but there have been a bunch of statements like this, and they're going to be, there's about to be a bunch more. What I would urge people to do is to, is to first get involved in their communities first, join some kind of organization. And then rather than counting on confessing and seeming like a good person because you're confessing a mistake, rather than doing that, tell your followers how you are engaged in your community. Give them an idea of what they can do, because just owning up to your mistake is not actually action. It's nice, it's good, it's fine. But what's really important is if you have that analysis that you show where that analysis has led you, what actions you're now taking, spread that.
- [04:28]
B
So what I'm hearing is a sense of urgency. And I, like you, have felt this for the last 10 years. I felt it even before then because I lived in Oklahoma City in all of the incubation for MAGA was in red States. So his ascension didn't surprise me. I'm familiar with this breed of conservative politics and I use conservatives in quotes, but we, we live in a time now where it's a. Because everybody's monitoring everybody online. I said it at this state. You're saying it at this point. And there's all of this kind of one upsmanship, and this is something that I kind of struggle with. And, like, I'm really upset with Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer because I feel like they're not meeting this moment. I feel like they play patty cake with them and vote with them sometimes, and they're not understanding how vulnerable we all are. And yesterday, the Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumers, did this video, and I thought it was AI at first, because he's like, kristi Noem and Stephen Miller are fucking liars and we're not going to vote for it. And I was like, oh, my God, yes, Chuck, yes, this is what we need. And I'm like, please, I don't want that to be AI because at my age, you know, fall for AI all the time, right? But it was real. And so in that I told our followers on the podcast this morning, if he, if he has this energy and he sustains this energy instead of. Because I feel the urgency that you're describing instead of me going back and go, well, check, you voted for him at this point. And that point, that's not helpful either. Like, when every. When anybody arrives to resist, we must, must unite, regardless of past statements, past denials, past inactions, past appeasements. What are your thoughts on that?
- [06:15]
A
I. So, yeah, I'm with you. I mean, the. The thing I'm going to add is that what we should be doing is circling in glory the people we admire. Right? So, like, I like this person's podcast. This was the local organizer of the protest. I went to, like, naming and praising the people who do good things. Because on the left, this is a problem that, like, we have this sort of, like, if the person isn't, you know, a perfect, beautiful, virgin messiah, then like. Or whatever, you know, like, if they're not all these things, if they're not flawless, then we pick at the flaws, you know, or we look for hypocrisy. And then when we imagine that we find a little bit of hypocrisy or imperfection, that somehow we've done something, but we haven't done anything. We've just spent time. So what we have to do is prop up the people who are, who are doing good things, and that's how we're going to get to 26 and 28, by the way. Like, it is fine to keep prodding the elected officials that we have. We should be doing that. But we should also recognize that 26 and 28 are probably going to involve people we haven't even heard of yet, who are emerging from the struggle, who then take on a new role in electoral politics. So I agree with you. Like, practically, the only way to get there is a coalition. There has to be a coalition, which means that your job is to get along with the person who's to your right and the person who's to your left, because they're wrong about some stuff, and so are you, right? We're all wrong about something. So you can only win with a coalition. But you can't. You have the coalition because you recognize what the danger is, and you recognize that, like, by acting together, you can do stuff together. When you just use words, then you can't do anything. But, like, when you act together, then it's actually possible to disagree about stuff and still like people and still think, okay, we're doing something together, we're moving forward.
- [08:03]
B
You said something that I thought was really interesting because I love diving into, like, the psychology behind these people. And you had a reel on your Instagram where you said that the people in this regime don't feel any loyalty to America. Like, it's arbitrary to them. And what's so fascinating, and I think you're spot on with that, and I want you to elaborate for my listeners. But what's so fascinating about that is how their grift is, especially where I come from, is here's the cross, and we're wrapped up in patriotism. But my mother, who's a lifelong atheist, when Trump first came on, she goes, well, thank God somebody's finally exposing these evangelicals for the hypocrites I always knew they were. And though the reveal that's been coming with all of the hypocrisy in this movement is really stunning. But you really tap into this patriotism or this sense of feeling national identity, which is their big selling point. But you say it means nothing to them, being an American?
- [09:04]
A
Yeah, no, I'm baffled. I mean, honestly, I'm baffled that anybody would see these guys as, in any way at all caring about the United States of America. They obviously don't. I mean, and I think it's one of the most important. It may be the central truth about Mr. Trump in particular. He doesn't understand what a country is. It's just not in his mind. He doesn't know what it means to be a sovereign state. He doesn't know what the American Revolution was about. He has no idea why anybody would take part in it. He has no idea why anybody would have fought in the Civil War. He has no idea why anybody would fight in any war. This is how. He doesn't understand Ukraine because he has no like. For him, it's just a real estate deal. And this is why. He doesn't understand why they won't just sell us Greenland, because he doesn't. He literally doesn't understand the basic political reality of, or political and moral reality that most people live within, which is that there are sovereign states and that you care about your country by trying to make it better. He does not accept that the world is made of sovereign states. The world is just made of wealthy people who are trying to scam each other. That is the entirety of his world. And so for him, it is. It is. I mean, it's sad, but it is. It's sad. And I wish I weren't true, but it is all a scam. It is all a grift, it is all a television show. There is nothing in Mr. Trump's career, from beginning to end, whether when he was in. In business or whether he's been a politician, there's literally nothing which suggests that he understands or would take a risk for or identifies with the United States of America. There's absolutely nothing. I mean, the fact that he wears, you know, that he wears just one outfit, and it's red, white and blue, like, that's as far as it goes. There's literally nothing beyond that. And I. I wish. I wish. I'm glad you asked about this, because I wish more folks would consider this, because it really is something that should unite more people. He doesn't care whether the US Exists or not. He simply doesn't. He. What he cares about is himself and maybe his. Maybe his family, possibly. He doesn't care if the United States exists or not, and there's no evidence that he cares about that. You know, I challenge anybody to assemble any evidence that Mr. Trump cares about whether the United States of America exists or not, because, you know, there isn't. There's a ton of evidence which suggests that he would finally like to be a very wealthy person. There's a lot of evidence for that, and there's a lot of evidence that being in power has allowed him to finally become that thing he always wanted to become, which is a wealthy person with the money to put his bad taste, you know, into reality. But beyond that, there's just not a whole lot.
- [11:23]
B
Do you think that's the through line to the oligarchs? Because when you get that wealthy you, you really don't live within borders anymore. Laws don't apply to you. You don't fly commercially. You, you know, go from your plane to your boat. You know, Elon Musk acts like he cares so much about America, but clearly he cares about dismantling it. Now he set his sights on, on Europe, on the European Union. And I wonder, is that the through line? It seems psychologically like you just get so wealthy that it, you don't really belong anywhere.
- [11:56]
A
I would, I mean, I agree, but I would distinguish between somebody like Trump and somebody like Musk. So Trump is an old fashioned, like, rich guy. Like for him being rich is, I've got gold decorations in my house, you know, or like for him being riches, look, I can tear down my house and add a wing to it, right? Like, he's a very unimaginative rich guy. His, like his, his fan, like, no, his plutocrat fantasies just extend to, you know, hey, look, I've got a house in Florida, right? Like, that's it, you know, and so I've got, you know, I've got well tailored suits, I got people around me and I'm going to die, you know, in Egyptian cotton sheets in the White House. That's it. It doesn't go any further than that because he's not, he's not really a very rich person. And for most of his life he hasn't been. And he actually, I think, does have some idea of what. He's never been poor, obviously, but he has been, he's been mathematically poor, he's been in debt. He's been able to imagine what it would be like not to have any money. Whereas somebody like Musk, that is a completely different world. I mean, I think when you cross 10 million, sorry, 10 billion, you get into a different zone, or may maybe it's 20 billion. But then you're in that, when you're in that, you're in a Putin Musk sort of zone. You are in a different world where your sense of what's meaningful touches on the fantastic. So I'm going to live forever. I'm going to invade Mars, I'm going to invade Ukraine, right? Ukraine doesn't really exist. And those fantasies are what become important to you because those fantasies are what make you, in some way, you imagine, immortal. In fact, they make you ridiculous and murderous because they're incredibly damaging. But you're living then in world of fantasy. I think one has to see Trump as a servant or an instrument of somebody like Musk in that sense, right? Because Trump has never really been a rich guy. Americans look at him and think, oh, that's a rich guy. But he's never really been a rich guy. And so therefore, the Putins and the Musks of the universe have some leverage on him because he knows the difference. He can see, okay, Those guys have 100 times more money than I do, even though I'm President of the United States.
- [13:59]
B
It's fascinating. Okay, so his foreign policy has been such a disaster. And I think that your understanding of him not understanding sovereign states was the first step where people just bristled at Americans. If you think about Canada and initially, in the first month or two, how arrogant his policy was, that we're gonna, it's gonna be the 51st state and how dismissive they were of their sovereignty. And now you see our former, like, rock solid allies looking for more stable economic partners. And where I come from, you have a lot of people, country club Republicans, the unimaginative rich people that you were describing. Trump, that type of American man that says, well, I'm fiscally conservative and socially liberal. This foreign policy that he is prompting, where you have Canada, that's looking to China and European Union looking to other more stable partners. What is the underlying. It's not going to happen immediately, but the underlying economic breakage of that into the future.
- [15:08]
A
Well, first of all, a lot of it actually goes back to our oligarchs. If you're Musk or if you're Peter Thiel, you have an active interest in breaking up the European Union, because the European Union is the only entity in the world which has effective regulation of what you do. And so a lot of our policy, especially the parts that JD Vance is very outspoken about, is about breaking up the European Union basically just so we can break up their digital security so Musk and Thiel and others can make a ton of money. And in that, it's not clear which comes first, is it the oligarchy or the fascism? That comes first? Because what they want to do is they want to make the European information sphere much more like ours, where right wing Nazi stuff just runs completely rampant, where there's no fact checking, there's no verifiability, there's no transparency, where the guy at the top gets to set the whole framework for the conversation. That's what they want. And that does push your whole politics towards fascism, but it's also a model in which those guys make a ton of money. So it's a little bit hard to say what comes first. What's sad is that the interests of the United States come last. It's not in our interest as a country to make the Europeans hostile, to break up the European Union. That's our biggest trade partner. That's our big set of allies. Those are the people who for the last 80 years have helped us to become the most rich and powerful country in the history of the world. It doesn't make any sense from the point of view of any American except for like two or three South Africans. It doesn't make any sense at all for us to break these relations.
- [16:48]
B
And do you think that he, when he did the meeting with Putin in Alaska, I saw recently online that he, in one of a vestibule in the White House, he had a picture of himself and Putin from that Alaska summit. And I'm not a foreign policy expert, you are. But it appears that since that meeting, his foreign policy has been very much aligned with Putin. And I have a friend, Professor Ruth Ben Guy, and she explains that Putin, for us to bend the knee to Putin right now, it's a failed state. They, you know, have a lot of debt, a lot of inflation. And so just the optics of the United States bending the knee to Putin like this. What is your take? This is your area of expertise. And my listeners are always interested in hearing an experts so that we're armed with more information.
- [17:40]
A
Yeah, well, the, the Russo Ukraine war is, I mean, I think central historical conflict of our time. And it's about a dictatorship Russia trying to quash a democratic neighbor, Ukraine, basically because democracy could be contagious. It's an oligarchical war. It's a war of one of the richest people in the world. Either Putin or Musk is the richest person in the world. It's the richest person in the world who is in charge of a country which is entirely dependent on natural gas and oil sales, using incredibly bad ideas like Ukraine doesn't exist or whatever in order to try to destroy a sovereign state next to them. And this is a war which could easily be brought to an end. Trump talks about how he wants the peace prize. All we would have to do is supply the Ukrainians with the weapons they need, seriously have and enforce sanctions on Russia, especially on natural gas and oil. And this war would end. It is within our power to end this war probably within months. But instead of that, we've been repeating the demands of the Russians towards the Ukrainians. We've basically put our leverage on the side of the aggressor. When I say the aggressor, I don't just mean the country that started the war, Russia didn't just start the this war. They've been kidnapping children by the tens of thousands to be assimilated. They've been murdering local civic leaders. They've been torturing prisoners of war. They've been committing essentially every war crime you can imagine, right down to stealing national treasures and burning books. Basically, every, every war crime that's on the books, they have committed it. And that's why Putin is an indicted war criminal. So, and, but, but you're right. Like, they, the only reason they're still in this war is because of soft, flabby American policy. They really wanted Trump to win this election. Biden's policy wasn't enough, but it was in the right direction. They really wanted Trump to win, and they made no secret of that whatsoever. And the reason is this, that Trump and the people around him are unable to mount any kind of consistent policy vis a vis Russia. They say they want the war to an end, come to an end, but they try to do it by supporting the aggressor rather than doing the things. It's not, it's not just a moral thing. You can't end a war by supporting the aggressor because the aggressor will then just continue the war or start a different war. It's, it's just completely elementary logic, and it's not reflected in our foreign policy at all. This goes back to your earlier question, though. Trump doesn't. It's not that he just under. It's not just that he doesn't understand Ukrainian sovereignty or why Ukrainians would fight this incredibly difficult and painful war for four years. He doesn't understand that at all. Right. He just can't get it, because he does. He would never do it himself, and he doesn't know anybody who would. What, what he fundamentally doesn't get, though, is that this is in the interest of the United States of America. It is in our interest to support our allies. It's in our interest to support Europe. It's in our interest to make sure that international law is not violated by invasions, because all those things keep us prosperous and all those things help us to be free. But he doesn't get that because, again, it's not that he doesn't care about the U.S. it's not even a factor for him. Him, he doesn't have the concept of what would be good for the U.S. for him, Putin is a richer guy than he is, and you can. When he has a conversation with Putin, then for the next several days, what comes out of Trump's mouth are just Russian talking points. And it's sad. Like, it's pathetic. It's, it's just, it's actually a little bit humiliating. Like, if you are an American and you care about our country, it's humiliating to have our head of state, our president, our commander in chief, be such a mental, like such a mental puppet, like such a remote control mental puppet of someone who is by every conceivable measure of power, so much weaker.
- [21:21]
B
Yeah, that's. It's fascinating to me that to a lot of Americans, he is the idealized version of masculinity, yet he is so submissive to his core. He is submissive to Putin and his own worst impulses. This is fascinating. I could talk to you forever. I'd love to have you back on again. Thank you so much. Thanks for the work that you put on your Instagram and I hope you have a good week.
- [21:44]
A
Thank you very much. Very glad to talk.