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Aaron Rupar interviewed Timothy Snyder a few days ago. I found these observations particularly useful:
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.
An LGM commenter — I’m not sure exactly which of you unfortunately — made the same point very concisely not long ago:
It’s a marker of many, many things that Very Serious People can’t even begin to bring themselves to say things like, “The Trump Organization is mainly a real estate scam/money laundering operation, and the guy and his spawn care mainly about politics as a vehicle for further self-enrichment and empowerment.” Instead, they insist on talking about What the President’s Strategy for Iran Might Entail.
A potentially useful analogy here would be if the sports media in the US felt compelled to cover Wrestlemania as if it were indistinguishable from the Super Bowl or the World Series.
The post Timothy Snyder on the fundamental attribution error of the Trump era appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.
