← Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov
Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov
Is Trump Rewriting “America First” Into Forever War? (ft. Tim Snyder)
00:36:38
Loading summary
Transcript46 lines
- [00:01]
Tim Snyder
When you think of someone with adhd,
- [00:03]
Jessica Tarlov
who comes to mind?
- [00:04]
Tim Snyder
Is it a woman in her 30s?
- [00:06]
Jessica Tarlov
Just this constant feeling of being too much, you know, too kinetic, too loud, all of the too anything and just really feeling like people got some kind of social rulebook that I never got.
- [00:19]
Tim Snyder
The Changing Face of adhd. That's this week on Explain It To
- [00:23]
Jessica Tarlov
Me New Episodes Sundays Wherever you get
- [00:26]
Tim Snyder
your podcasts AI can Fix Healthcare. I'm Henry Blodgett and this week on my show Solutions, I had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Bob Wachter, author of A Giant How AI is Transforming Healthcare and what It Means for our future. Dr. Wachter was not expecting to be an AI optimist. What convinced him? Follow Solutions with Henry Blodgett wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:54]
Jessica Tarlov
To hear more this week on Net Worth and Chill, I'm taking you inside my sold out New York City book tour stop for my brand new book, well Endowed. I sat down with the hilarious Heather McMahon for a night of laughs, real money talk, and honest financial truths. We're getting into everything the book covers from how to actually build wealth, how to protect it, and how to stop leaving money on the table. Whether you've already grabbed your copy of well Endowed or you're still on the fence, this episode will show you exactly why everyone's talking about it. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com YourRichBFF. Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Jessica Tarlov and I'm so excited to be joined today by historian Tim Snyder, leading scholar of European history and authoritarianism and author of On 20 Lessons from the 20th Century. Tim, it's so nice to have you.
- [01:45]
Tim Snyder
Very glad to be with you.
- [01:46]
Jessica Tarlov
It's perfect timing. I want to talk about present stuff, but there's so much of what's going on these days that I feel like if you're not grounded in the history of it, you're going to totally miss the real realities, which I feel like the administration is trying to hide from. So in today's episode of Raging Moderates, we're going to talk about what history can teach us about Trump's war in Iran and what the Texas primary might be signaling for the midterms ahead. Before we get started, if you aren't already subscribed to The Raging Moderates YouTube channel, please do that. We're five days a week now. It's very exciting. Let's get right into it. Trump built his brand opposing these regime change wars. Very proud of the fact that he opposed The Iraq War, actually, though I think he liked it before he opposed it. But either way, he's been mocking democracy building and promising America first. And yet now, after US Strikes in Iran and open calls for Iranians to overthrow their government, he is the fourth American president in the past century to frame military force as a mission of liberation. I want to start off by just asking you, what does history tell us about what happens next?
- [02:47]
Tim Snyder
Yeah, I mean, before I get to that, I just want to say it's very hard when talking about this, not to make it more coherent than it is. So you've just presented a fairly coherent description of what Trump thinks that he's doing. Right. And sometimes he says that, and then sometimes he says other things. Right. Sometimes he says, like, yeah, we're here to liberate. And sometimes he says, well, actually, we just wanted to put the next bad guy in power. And so I can tell you what history says, but I think the lessons of history, in a way, are deeper in this case, because there's just much less coherence in the present. Right. So the first thing that history tells you is that wars are always unpredictable. If you want to make life more unpredictable, start a war. The second thing that history tells you is that war changes politics, but it doesn't necessarily change politics in the way you expect. So Iran will be different, but probably not the way that people would like for it to be different. And the third thing that history tells you is that the other side has a vote. So you may have a story about how you were expecting this is going to go, and you may tell that story to yourself and to your people. But once you start a war, the enemy has a vote, and. And they will do things that you don't like, they will do things that you don't expect, and you can't stop them from doing all of those things. So those are the basics.
- [04:04]
Jessica Tarlov
I like it. And I guess for the purposes of having to write an intro, you always do kind of make Trump more coherent than he has been. So I appreciate you snapping us back to reality. There are a few things that you mentioned that I want to touch on, but the enemy part I want to go to first, because something that I've been talking about with Scott and also my work on Fox, is that Iran is not reacting in the way that it seems like we expected them to. Maybe Israel thought that they would do this, but at Beast from the US perspective, reporting is that we have been trying to get back to the negotiating table to some degree, and that Iran is Dug in. And looking at this, as you know, we could go 60 to 90 days. Will we win this quote, unquote, win this war? No, but we're going to make you spend a lot of money and we're going to totally deplete your munitions. How do you think about Iran's reaction to what we've done?
- [05:03]
Tim Snyder
Gosh, that's a great question, because one of the things which has struck me most is that our people, the people who run our country, don't really seem to understand that other people, the people who run other countries who are in other countries but aren't always going to do what they say. And I think this is just like a basic foreign policy problem for Trump in general is that he's used to intimidating people. He's used to intimidating his own people. He's used to intimidating Republicans. He's used to primarying them. He's used to the stochastic terrorism. He's used to people. He's used to cabinet meetings when people who otherwise might be powerful just kowtow to him. And I don't think he really understands, and I'm afraid that Hegseth also doesn't really understand that other people have their own ideas of what's right and wrong and other people can have a sense of dignity. And even if we don't like these other people and we oppose what they're doing, and even if we're right to oppose what they're doing, they still have their own sense of how the world works. So there's this basic difference between the foreign and the domestic that I think is catching up to them. I think that, you know, with, with Venezuela, after Venezuela, he was on a visible high, and now, you know, he's trying to, like, basically feed the addiction by. By doing something else. And then supposed to happen was that this was supposed to already be over. Right. Like, I can't help but think of Russia and Ukraine. I really think that our guys also thought this was going to be over in three days. And now, you know, they were so going to negotiations. They were confused during the negotiations that Iran just didn't give us everything we asked for, which is a mistake about what negotiations are. And now they're confused that Iran doesn't negotiate when we want them to negotiate. And it's not really humanly that surprising, whatever you think about the Iranian regime. And I think the absolute worst of it, you can't expect people, when you kill their leader, when you humiliate them to do then the thing that you want them to do. That's just an unreasonable expectation, and it's just completely discrediting that this is the only plan that they had.
- [07:08]
Jessica Tarlov
Yes, to all of that. And it leads me to what I think has become the central question about the motivation to do this and that it. This is our relationship with Israel and how the timing of this all unfolded. So clearly we were going to do something. We've been building up our military presence in the region for a couple of months now. Donald Trump said help is on the way to the Iranian protesters right before, I think, 30,000 of them were murdered by the regime. But there's a lot of reporting about the timeline, you know, coming to light of what Israel's plan was and what our plan was and how, in my estimation, and what Secretary Rubio said on Take one, not since he's kind of been trying to cover that up, that basically we were going to do this, but Israel said we have to do it now. And so we had to go along with their timeline. Is that your understanding of this and how do you see the different motivations of the US Versus Israel?
- [08:09]
Tim Snyder
I mean, as a historian, I would want to be really cautious about that. For example, I mean, sorry to sound like the pedant that I probably am, but we're still debating why the First World War started at this point. Right. And so what we have now is like a smattering of sources, and it'll be a long time, I think, before anyone actually has any certainty about this. I mean, my gut feeling is that there were several powerful forces at once. One would be that Prime Minister Netanyahu has always wanted precisely this war. He's wanted a war to humiliate and to disempower Iran for a long time and has made no secret of it. Another force, which is there in the background, and I think perhaps hasn't been played up enough, is the tremendous financial connections between the Gulf Arab states and Mr. Trump personally and his family, but also our negotiators, Witkoff and Kushner. It is very strange to be in negotiations, negotiations before a war, and to send people out who are deeply financially connected to essentially the other side. Right. Because there's a deep structural rivalry between Iran and the Gulf Arab states. And we essentially are on one side of that rivalry, but we're also being paid by one side of that rivalry. And I'm not saying that's the immediate cause, but I am saying that it would be weird to overlook that factor. And then for me, the third part of it is most likely American domestic politics. And Again, this just comes from Trump. I mean, insofar as he has been coherent about this, been with these gestures, that now we're in some kind of exceptional situation and therefore you can't vote against DHS funding, and therefore we have to consider the Iranians a threat to our future elections, et cetera. I think that's what he's going for. And then in his mind, I think also is the desire, as I said before, to have some kind of quick victory. I can't really join people in imagining that there's some notion of US national interest here, because they haven't actually expressed any kind of US national interest. So I'm not going to, like, I'm not going to supply something which they haven't themselves supplied.
- [10:16]
Jessica Tarlov
Yeah, it's definitely the talking point du jour that Iran has been the, an imminent threat for 47 years and they're obviously super bad guys. But you're going to have to do better to justify something like this, especially when there are going to be boots. There are already boots on the ground, but there are going to be more.
- [10:35]
Tim Snyder
Sorry to interrupt, but like that 47 years thing, I mean, we were delivering birthday cakes to the Iranian leadership in order to help them deliver arms to the contras within those 47 years. The idea that we were at war with them while we were delivering the birthday cake so they could help us fund the Contras, it's just kind of absurd. And if we were at war with them the entire time, that means all the Republican presidents who are engaging with them, including our recent negotiations, then that would all be treason if we were war with. So it's like the whole thing is just, it's absurd to the point where you don't know whether you should just dignify it by mentioning it or whether you should go to the effort to point out how absurd it is.
- [11:15]
Jessica Tarlov
I always like to go to the effort, but I'm a cable news beast, so I understand it's important. And that's where they've been running to make this case. I mean, there hasn't been a cogent foreign policy speech or any attempt really to make the case to the American people, which we have seen before in regime change wars. Do you feel like we are heading towards another regime change episode or they understand enough about American and frankly, Western appetite for that to try to hold it back?
- [11:49]
Tim Snyder
Yeah, that's a, that's a really interesting question. I mean, I think I was having a good conversation with Janice Stein yesterday, who's a political scientist and a specialist on the Middle East. And the point that she made was that the regime has already changed. Not that it's been a regime change, not the type of regime, but the regime itself will in some way adapt to the war. Right. So in that sense, it's already happening. But whether that means that we end up with an even more hardline fundamentalist government than we had before. Right. We don't know. What we have done basically, is break stuff. And when you break stuff, it's going to change a regime in the sense that something's going to happen, but you don't know what it's going to be. And the point I would make here is that if you actually are serious about making a country a different sort of country, then you can't just use missiles for that. That's the wrong premise. It's never happened that people have just, with missiles, changed a political system. You have to invade. And just be clear. I don't think we should, but you have to invade. You have to occupy the country. You have to oversee institutional changes like elections, and you have to have a robust set of policies to support the economic development of that country. And the Trump people, A, are not thinking of this, B, couldn't think of this, C, lacked the attention span, and D, spent the first few weeks of this administration defunding and eliminating all of the American institutions which would have been appropriate for that kind of task. So for all these reasons, it's not a war of regime change in the sense that we're going to see it through or have some idea or care about democracy, because obviously these people don't care about democracy. It is a war of regime change in the sense that by throwing a lot of essentially random violence at Tehran, we're going to get something different. It's just that we don't know what that's going to be, and it's not even necessarily going to be better.
- [13:46]
Jessica Tarlov
What do you think happens to the people of Iran? There's a lot of talk about, you know, rise up and take control of your government. You know, these are people in the streets in flipflops. I'm. I'm not sure how that's supposed to happen without the aid that you talk about. But what. How are you thinking about the future of the everyday Iranian?
- [14:07]
Tim Snyder
This is the kind of question where there's a variety of views, even among the Iranians that I know, you know, here in Toronto or in la, and it's hard to know how they're experiencing this. But what I would say is that we haven't broken the control of this regime over public space. On that first night, there were some public displays of hostility to the regime or rejoicing that the Supreme Leader had been killed. But that was all note, that was all quickly put down. And the guys on motorcycles with the guns are still the ones who are controlling the streets in Tehran. The other thing that I want to make is a point I want to make has to do with sequence. And you pointed out this chronology earlier. I just want to draw attention to what it means. The right sequence of events would have been you put the boats in the Persian Gulf and then you say, don't harm the protesters. But we did it the other way around. We said, don't harm the protesters. And then Khamenei killed whatever it was, thousands, tens of thousands of them, and then we assembled the flotilla. So I'm not saying that that makes it our fault. It's obviously the responsibility of the Iranian government. But if you were trying to protect protesters, you would have done it the other way around. And now, whatever our intentions were, we're left with a situation in which we know that thousands or maybe tens of thousands of the most active, courageous Iranians are now dead. They were killed by the regime. And this indiscriminate, the kind of war that we're now waging, it's not clear to me that this is in any way protective of perhaps the more democratic or civil minded or pluralistic parts of the. It's not clear to me that it's protecting them personally in any way. And it's not clear to me. I just don't know whether it improves their position politically that I don't know. That's a question for Iranians.
- [15:54]
Jessica Tarlov
Yeah, no, it's a really good point. And you do see those mixed responses. And everyone has a friend who's texting them how they're feeling about it. And there seems to be a lot of internal conflict. Not that anyone misses the Ayatollah, but that they're not sure, frankly, what American intervention in this case means because they've seen this movie before. Right. What do you make of the internal divisions here in the United States within the Republican Party over this move by the President? Some of the loudest MAGA or America first representatives are calling this disgusting and vile. We didn't sign up for this, et cetera, the neocons, you know, falling in line. But it does feel like a moment of real disruption to the traditional MAGA coalition.
- [16:46]
Tim Snyder
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because, I mean, I see it as A kind of ritual humiliation, right. Like you endorse Trump and whatever you do, he finds a way to humiliate you. Like, even if you endorse him on the most basic thing, which is no more wars, no more wars in the Middle east, no more forever wars. And then, you know, one fine day he explains to you how in fact, yes, wars, yes wars in the Middle east. And very precisely, yes, forever wars. And forever wars are not only they're good, they're possible and they're, and they're winnable. And it's like I see it as a kind of humiliation. And so there's a point, there's a point beyond which psychologically I can't really say I understand it because I don't understand the politics of humiliation, right? Like, I don't, I don't understand why it is that people like, for the president or their leader to humiliate them. I just don't personally get that. So I can't judge to what extent this is going to break people off. I think it may if it goes on for much longer. And I think the President, for the reason we were talking about before, is stuck in a situation where this will go on for longer. Right. I think that Venezuela is in some sense something he got away with. Right. It wasn't actually popular except in Florida maybe, but he got away with it because nothing went terribly wrong. It was kind of all over. And so Americans being who we are, we forgot about it pretty quickly. I mean, not you, not me, but you know what I mean, We're a nation that moves on very quickly, whereas with Iran, I don't think he's going to have the freedom to move on. I don't think he's going to have the freedom to tell the story or end the story the way he wants. I also want to mark here the thing that I'm really worried about. I'm worried about many things, but one of them is the risks of anti Semitism connected to all of this. Because when you're the administration and you yourself float the idea, as the Secretary of State did, that we had to do this because Israel is going to do it and then Iran was going to retaliate. And so therefore we had to go first, but we did it because of Israel. Like when you float that idea, and in fairness, the secretary did walk it back to a great extent, but when you float these kinds of ideas, you're, I mean, willy nilly, whether you want to or not, you're, you're, you're feeding the part of the MAGA base which says, you know, Israel's in charge of everything. So this is the thing that worries me about, like, about maga is that, yeah, some people are splitting off, but the guy that some of the, some of the guys, and it is mostly guys who are, who are the most articulate about this, are articulate about it in what seems to me to be an anti Semitic way. It's also clear that this, that this war, I mean, people have to take responsibility for their own views and their own expressions, but it's clear that this war is making it easier for people also on the left to express that or people who think they're on the left anyway to express anti Semitic views.
- [19:27]
Jessica Tarlov
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because this is something that I've been struggling with myself and I've been talking about Secretary Rubio's comments and reading the reporting and know about the relationship obviously between Steve Woodcoff, Jared Kushner and Netanyahu. And I really worry that we are heading kind of towards the end of the Jewish American left as we know it because of the way this relationship exists at this point with Trump at the, at the top of the tip of the spear. I guess basically this is the first time, right, that we've seen that most on the left sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis, for instance. And when Secretary Rubio makes those comments, yes, it inflames the Tucker Carlson's of the world, but it also inflames the left on it and just says, this is Israel's war and we're fighting it for them. And I'm curious as to what you think, I guess, of the future of a pro Israel American. We're watching all these Democratic candidates, like the Seth Moltens of the world have to say, you know, I'm not going to take any AIPAC dollars. A lot of people saying, you know, there was a genocide committed in Gaza, et cetera. And it's a very tense moment for American Israeli relations.
- [20:44]
Tim Snyder
Yeah, it's not. And it's not. And it's not. It's not. And it's not the first one and it won't be the last one. I don't feel that I myself, like, am the person who's going to, you know, judge all of this for American Jews. But I do have a couple of thoughts and I think you actually mentioned something which was really important, which is Donald Trump being in charge, so to speak. So I'm thinking of there was a mayor of Vienna who was essentially the inventor or one of the inventors of modern antisemitism. He was called Karl Lueger. And he said, I decide who's a Jew. And that, like, Trump reminds me of that. I mean, not just because he does it like he actually does it. Like he says, like, Schumer's not a Jew, Schumer's a Palestinian. Right. But not just in that literal sense, but in the sense that Trump has been allowed to decide what anti Semitism is. And I think that, like, for me, that's kind of the original sin in all of this. That because it's hard enough, you know, if you're. It's hard enough for Jews in the US to decide when they're going to call anti Semitism, when they're not. It's hard enough to say when the criticism of Israel goes over the line so that it's actually a general condemnation of Jews. All that's hard enough. And my view is, since you ask, that the president makes this much harder by himself saying, this is anti Semitism, this is anti Semitism, this is anti Semitism. I think that's made things much harder and much worse. And I guess my second point would be about Gaza, which I think was a horrible crime. But my point is, though, I think we blew it on free expression there. And that whether you think the students are right or whether you think the students are wrong, you gotta let the students protest. It almost always turns out, incidentally, historians point, the students almost always turn out to be right. If not after five months, after 50 years, pretty much the students always turn out to be right. But whether you think they're right or wrong, we blew it on free expression. We should have let them protest. We should have let them. Them do what they wanted to do because, by, because by allowing the president to define all of that as anti Semitism and as a reason to close down campuses and freedom of assembly. We went down a route which is then hard to come back from. So those are my thoughts. I mean, in general, what I think is that America and Israel are very similar. The main political figure in both is somebody who is, in the case of the United States, somebody who's been convicted of a bunch of crimes. In the case of Israel, somebody who would be convicted of a bunch of crimes if he weren't prime minister. They're both in situations where their democracies are in peril. They're both in situations where politics is highly polarized. And I think it's not an easy way out. But maybe one simple approach would be to say these are both countries that you can love, but you need to love them in a way which means you have to improve them a lot because they have both done things which are devastatingly horrible in the very recent past. And loving one of them, loving the other one, I think involves acknowledging that and then starting from the premise that we're not just going to apologize for things, we're going to make them better. I'm glad you're raising this, though, because it is incredibly hard. And I have a feeling. And it's going to come up in the next presidentials. I have a feeling, definitely.
- [23:57]
Jessica Tarlov
I know that many campaigns are already thinking about it. I'm going to say all eyes, but a lot of eyes, obviously on Josh Shapiro, who is a devout practicing Jew and how he's talking about anti Semitism and the relationship with Israel. I think that's the case. I think will also show up in the midterms, too. I mean, we've already seen primary races affected by the APAC factor, like in Tom Malinowski's race in New Jersey Congressional primary. Let's take a quick break. Stay with us.
- [24:29]
Kara Swisher
Hey, Kara Swisher here. I want to let you know that Vox Media is returning to south by Southwest in Austin for live tapings of your favorite podcast. Join us from March 13th through the 15th for live tapings of Today Explained Teffy Talks, Prof. G Markets, and of course, your two favorite podcasts, Pivot and On with Kara Swisher. The stage will also feature sessions from Brene Brown and Adam Grant, Marques Brownlee, Keith Lee, Vivian Tu and Robin Arzon. It's all part of the Vox Media Podcast stage at south by Southwest, presenting by Odoo. Visit voxmedia.comsxsw to pre register and get your special discount on your innovation badge. That's voxmedia.comsxsw to register. Really, you should register. We sell out and we hope to see you there. Hi, this is Kara Swisher. And this week on my podcast on with Kara Swisher, I talk to California Governor Gavin Newsom. While he hasn't officially announced or run for president yet, he he's telegraphing it all the time. It's exhausting. He's also got a new book out, which is what you do when you're running for president. It's called Young man in a Hurry. I recently interviewed him live in San Francisco. Have a listen.
- [25:46]
Tim Snyder
The problem with the Democratic Party so often is we appear weak and we've got to be stronger and we've got to be more assertive and so that's, you know, it's the spirit, I think, that is required of this moment.
- [25:57]
Kara Swisher
I've known Gavin Newsom since he was mayor of San Francisco a million years years ago, a million hair gels ago. And he's a really interesting and compelling politician. He's done a lot of things in his career and this one, this run for presidency, which is going to happen, is among the most interesting. You can find a full conversation wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube, obviously. Be sure to follow and subscribe to on with Kara Swisher for more.
- [26:25]
Tim Snyder
So everyone knows our politics are divided. There's left versus right and dividing lines on age, gender or race. But maybe our biggest divide in our politics isn't about identity at all. It's insiders versus outsiders. At least that's what Congressman Ro Khanna would say. The real issue is two tiers of justice in America. The real issue is people with power and wealth using it to be above the law and escape even investigation or prosecution. And it's only gotten more noticeable in recent months as issues like the Epstein files and artificial intelligence have seemed to pit the elites against everybody else. California Congressman Ro Khanna takes on the Epstein class today, explained in your feed every weekday and now on Saturdays, too.
- [27:17]
Jessica Tarlov
And welcome back. Yesterday was a big election day, especially in Texas. James Tallarico prevailed in the Democratic Senate primary over Jasmine Crockett, who has conceded. It was a huge turnout day in Texas, North Carolina as well, smashing records. Latino voters very much back in the fold, young voters. I'm curious as to how you are thinking about the midterms, both from how Democrats are going to do perspective, but also putting on your student of authoritarianism cap, how worried should we be about having free and fair elections here?
- [28:01]
Tim Snyder
The thing that I found interesting was the Arkansas state House election where like
- [28:05]
Jessica Tarlov
you know, did not expect that to be your answer.
- [28:07]
Tim Snyder
No, no. Where. I mean, well, just because it was state level Arkansas and, and it was a flip, a Republican seat was flipped to a Democrat. And that for me was just, I mean, it was just one notable moment in a, in a general trend. So I think the Democrats are going to do extremely well in November. I think by their nature it is difficult for Democrats to say we're about to have, you know, we're about to enjoy a crushing victory. That's not really, maybe it shouldn't be, but like that's, that's not the way Democrats usually talk. But I think that all the trends are in their favor and the polling is in their favor. And the by elections tend to show this. I mean, not just winning, but winning and not just like blue wave. I think, like the blue wave thing is probably inadequate to describe this. I mean, it's more like, you know, Tsunami. Yeah, like blue. I don't know. Yeah, like something different. Right. Cause it's not just the normal midterm, we're disappointed kind of thing, which is about to happen. And that leads me to your second question, which is how worried should we be? I don't think we should be worried. I think we should just be active. And it does connect back to the Iran, the Iran question. I really think that for Trump, you know, this is a trial balloon and it's all like, can he make it stick that somehow Iran is going to interfere in our elections and therefore we have to federalize them. And there's a way to make that not stick, which is to ridicule it from whatever angle and to make sure that judges and journalists are aware of how fatuous and embarrassing all of this stuff is. But I do think that, like, whether it's Iran or whether it's Cuba or whether it's something else, by the time we get to the fall, he's gonna make some sort of play like that, that. And the important thing is like, to be able to eye roll it, to be able to laugh at it, to make sure that no one is going to accept that we have to have armed people at polling stations because of some country in some other hemisphere. Right. Like, that just has to be laughed out of school so it doesn't happen. So I don't think we should be worried. We should be engaged in a campaign to make sure it doesn't happen. Because he's telegraphed that this is what he's trying to do. And so it's not about worry, it's not about, like, watching it. And this is regardless of what party you're going to vote. And I mean, if you're in a Republican state and you're a Republican politician, it's actually not in your interest for elections to be federalized. It's not in your interest for this stuff to be taken out of your hands forever. It's not in your interest for everybody to regard your electoral victories as illegitimate. You know, that's just not in your interest either. I mean, and that's even before I speak to like, patriotism and citizenship. It's not really in anyone's interest for any of this stuff to happen. But I want to hear what you think, the, what you think we learned
- [30:49]
Jessica Tarlov
yesterday I think we learned that 2024 was a bit of an aberration and that Democratic enthusiasm means what it's supposed to this time, because we actually did have an enthusiasm advantage in 2024 and got lucky that a lot of casual people stayed home because Donald Trump would have won by even bigger margins. So I think we saw a rebuilding of the coalition with Latino voters and young voters. I think we saw, which is a very important lesson for the future of democracy, that the GOP's gerrymander play failed in four seats in Texas. And I think that that's very important. To your point about Democrats are not interested in boasting. And I'm that way, too. I'm very cautious, cautiously optimistic, but cautious about it. You know, we took a very big swing on redistricting with Prop 50 and Gavin Newsom's campaign, and now that's happening all over the country. And I think that the results last night bear out actually what the people have been clamoring for. Democratic approval is down. Because people want us to fight harder.
- [32:00]
Tim Snyder
Yeah.
- [32:01]
Jessica Tarlov
Not because they necessarily hate our set of policies. And I think that last night's results were very indicative of that sentiment. And also candidates coming through who are those kinds of. Of fighters. I think it was all to the good. I'm curious to see, you know, what Trump does about John Cornyn versus Ken Paxton, because Ken Paxton race would be very messy. Good for cable news coverage. But those were kind of my big takeaways. And I just as a last question for you, so you are no longer here in the US you live in Toronto now. What does the world outside of here think about what's going on here from your vantage point?
- [32:47]
Tim Snyder
Yeah, that's a really good question. And it's one of the reasons why I like living abroad is because it helps you get a little bit of distance on the everyday American stuff. And you hear from people who have sometimes more of a distance. But I have to say, I guess, two things. The first is that we have a lot. There are a lot of people who care about us and who worry about us. I put it that way. There's a tendency from the president downward to define everybody as our enemy. At the moment, the Canadians are our enemy. And the Mexican, everybody's our enemy. But that's not how the Canadians see it. The Canadians, in my day to day interactions with them, and it varies a little bit from conservatives to liberals up here, but not much, honestly, the thing that they express is concern, like sympathy and concern. Right, like that. Like that's the thing. And I don't. That's maybe something that doesn't come through, and that's true of our European friends. I've spent much of this year so far in Europe, and it's true in Europe, too. Like, people get angry, and people have to react to things that Trump does, but. But mostly it's like, sympathetic concern. We wish this wasn't happening to you. And that, I think, is a thing which is it never rises to the level of newsworthy, that people actually are worried about you and they care about you as opposed to just that they're angry or they have to react to something. But I think there's much more of that out there in the world than we recognize. There are a lot of people who, for whatever reason in their lives, have become sympathetic to the United States or care about the United States or believe that. That cooperation with the United States has been good for everyone. So that's the first thing I wanted to say. I mean, the second thing I wanted to say is that the charismatic politics of Donald Trump doesn't work past American borders. So there are people, you know, in the European far right or in Russia or whatever who like Trump, but nobody, only Americans experience his charisma. Like, no one else really gets it. So there are people who are afraid of what he might do or. But no one, no one is caught up in his charisma the way that we are. Like, that's. Like, that's an American TV program that only works in America. And so I realize it's kind of a hard thought experiment, but, like, imagine that you, you know, you cross a line and then suddenly, like, Trump is just this guy, you know? And, like. And. And it's not that people are harder on him in other countries. It's just that they don't feel the appeal. Right? Like, his stagecraft, his magic, whatever it is, it just doesn't apply. And so you're kind of. So. So the people are just more puzzled more of the time, and they're puzzled by how the charisma works, like, why it works on us, like, why anybody believes any of this stuff. That's mainly. I mean, those are the. Those are the. Those are the main things that I experience. And then, of course, there's, like, the fundamental concern that they're like, people don't want America to be strong generally, the way that Trump is talking about, I. E. We fight wars against small countries and then claim we won. They want America to be strong in the sense rules and making the world more rather than less. Predictable. And that's not, I mean, that's a reasonable aspiration for us. And a lot of people around the world, not everybody, a lot of people in Latin America have never experienced anything like that, but it's a reasonable expectation from us that we could do something like that. And so in general, in the rest of, let's call it the west, there's a concern that because we are choosing to be unpredictable, the world has become much more unpredictable. Something like that.
- [36:35]
Jessica Tarlov
Yeah, those are very interesting points and resonant with me. I did my PhD in England and a lot of those sentiments. We are talking about an ivory tower, you know, group of people. But Trump not translating, I think is something we don't talk about enough because foreign leaders have figured out how to behave with him, how to kowtow to him. I think Mark Carney is one of the best, frankly, having figured that out. But you can tell that they're thinking like, I'm not going to pay 19.99amonth, right to subscribe to the streaming service to watch this guy. Tim Snyder, it was such a pleasure to have you. Thank you for joining me.
- [37:17]
Tim Snyder
Really glad I could. Thanks for the conversation. Lifelock, how can I help?
- [37:40]
Jessica Tarlov
The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't.
- [37:43]
Tim Snyder
One in four tax paying Americans has paid the price of identity fraud.
- [37:46]
Jessica Tarlov
What do I do?
- [37:47]
Tim Snyder
My refund though. I'm freaking out. Don't worry, I can fix this. LifeLock fixes identity theft guaranteed and gets your money back with up to $3 million in coverage.
- [37:55]
Jessica Tarlov
I'm so relieved.
- [37:56]
Tim Snyder
No problem. Problem. I'll be with you every step of the way. One in four was a fraud paying American. Not anymore. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply.