cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17866028
Timothy Snyder: “I think the throughline for Trump, going all the way back to the 1980s and his visit to the Soviet Union, through his first presidential campaign and up to the present, has always been submissiveness towards the power in the Kremlin. I would be very happy for him to break with that. I don’t see any evidence of it yet.
“The scenario is that Trump is made to understand that Vladimir Putin is bullying him and that Trump should therefore do the right thing. But so far in his entire career, Trump has seemed to enjoy being bullied by Putin. And so far [Trump’s] negotiating strategy for Ukraine, so far as they’ve revealed it, has not been to make Russia weaker, it’s been to make Ukraine weaker.”
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Snyder has said Trump is Russia’s “only chance of winning the war”. He said so “because the Russians say it”.
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“A lot of the stuff where I’ve been right about Russia in the past has just been because I’ve been channeling what they say. And they’ve been saying for a year in their [Russian propaganda] media that they need Trump to win [the war in Ukraine]. And I think the existence of Trump and the possibility that he would be president is itself a cause of this war, because [it] was something Russia could factor in the whole time. They could tell themselves: ‘We just need to stay on the battlefield to January 25 and then the floodgates will open for us, because we’re going to have our guy.’
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"If Trump had retired from politics, I think the whole Russian attitude towards this war would have been different. This war is strategically idiotic for them, as they must know. But the fact that Trump was there meant … they could always rationalize it. Just by existing, he’s extended this war.”
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[Regarding Trump’s comeback as US President], Snyder says that "Trump is now screening candidates for cabinet positions on the basis of whether they’re willing to repeat the big lie that he won the election in 2020 and a lot of his voters believe it, and therefore despise others who don’t.”
Again, Snyder sees parallels with Russia: “It verges on being … a kind of Stalinist-style purging device. The thing is entirely imagined. But nevertheless, you’re gonna go after people on the basis of something that’s entirely made up. It’s reorganized all of American politics. And that was something I expected. If you look at South Korea a couple of weeks ago … both parties resisted the [president’s] martial law declaration. But we didn’t get [resistance to Trump] out of our American Republicans. We got it out of them for about two days [after January 6]. And because of that, Trump was able to come back.”
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“I think we overestimate Trump and we underestimate Musk,” he says. “People can’t help but think that Trump has money, but he doesn’t. He’s never really had money. He’s never even really claimed to have money. His whole notion is that you have to believe that he has money. But he’s never been able to pay his own debts. He’s never been able to finance his own campaigns.
“Musk, with an amount of money that was meaningless to him, was able to finance Trump’s campaign, essentially. And all the threats that Trump is now going to issue – ‘I’m going to primary people, I’m going to sue people’ – Musk is going to pay for that, not Trump. And when Trump needs money for anything, he’s going to be asking Musk.
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