Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the J.S. Dorton Arena in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Nov. 4.RYAN M. KELLY/AFP/Getty Images
Rolling into the most consequential U.S. election of our lifetime, the pins and needles of this moment feel particularly sharp.
Stressed and looking for wisdom, I heard that Timothy Snyder was going to be at the Vancouver Writers Fest, so I reached out to get his thoughts about this critical election.
Mr. Snyder is one of the great American thinkers of this age. A prolific author and internationally respected professor of history and global affairs at Yale University, he has written extensively about Russia and Eastern Europe. He has a lot to say about what has happened – and what could happen – in his own country as well, informed by totalitarian catastrophes of recent history.
His 2017 book On Tyranny was inspired by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win, as was his follow-up, The Road to Unfreedom. After publishing those warnings, he writes, he was asked what a better America would look like. On Freedom, his new book, is his answer.
Mr. Snyder has great contempt for Mr. Trump, calling him at various points in the book a liar and coup-stager who declared victory in 2020 “with Hitlerian boldness”; “Putin’s submissive client” who is “comfortable denying everything”; a business fraud and con artist who is concerned about preserving his own money and staying out of prison; a vengeful sadopopulist. You get the picture: not a fan.
Mr. Snyder predicted both the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. “I just listened to what he said,” he writes, of how he forecast what he calls the attempted coup.
So, how was Mr. Snyder feeling, I wanted to know. “I feel terrible that we could be at a place where this election is even close, and I feel terrible that … given that we all know what we know, there’s so many Americans who are willing to just throw the entire Republic into chaos,” he told me. “There’s so many Americans who actually want to have strongman rule. I find that disturbing.”
Mr. Snyder, wisely, declined to predict an electoral outcome – it’s too close – but believes no matter what happens, Mr. Trump will say he won. And violence could erupt if Kamala Harris is declared the winner.
As he writes in his book, “Why are we, so predictably, setting ourselves up for another scenario in which a presidential candidate loses the vote and then claims the office? We are being led leaderless into a calamity.”
A win for the Republican ticket, Mr. Snyder warns, would throw the U.S. into turmoil and change the global atmosphere. The consequences for the country, the planet and for democracy would be dire.
He noted in our conversation that we’re already seeing people “obeying in advance” – as he described the decisions by the L.A. Times not to endorse a presidential candidate, and by Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, to block his paper’s endorsement of Ms. Harris.
“They’re doing the single thing that the whole history of authoritarianism tells you that you shouldn’t do. You shouldn’t accommodate the leader before you have to. Because when you do that, you hand over power that they didn’t already have.”
Democracy, as the Washington Post likes to declare, dies in darkness.
A Trump win would be a huge victory for the regimes of Russia and China. “Because their view is that democracy’s a joke. And Trump really supports that view,” Mr. Snyder said.
“Anyone who’s looking to the United States as an example of democracy cannot do so while Trump is president because … whether he succeeds in being a dictator or not, he’s going to be talking about how he wants to be a dictator.”
Globally, he is deeply concerned about the consequences for Ukraine. “Trump lacks the moral compass that makes it obvious that Ukrainian democracy [is] better than a Russian regime of deportation and torture.”
Running mate JD Vance, he says, is younger, more radical, more intelligent and more capable than Mr. Trump. He calls Mr. Vance an “impotence” politician. “His whole shtick is government can’t do anything. And all people can do” – senators, the president – “is point the finger and blame somebody else.” And bully people.
On a note of hope: Mr. Snyder says that if Mr. Trump loses, even if he discredits himself with violence, “I do think we could turn a corner. I really do believe that. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s going to require some rethinking.” He hopes his book can be a contribution to that. “But yeah, I think that things can get much better than they are now.”
They can also get much, much worse.