Trump, and the alarm bells of fascism

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Shortly after Donald Trump was elected for a second time in November of last year, historian Timothy Snyder wrote this in The New Yorker. Trump's skills and talents go unrecognized when we see him as a conventional candidate. Yet this is our shortcoming, more than his. Trump has always been a presence, not an absence, the presence of fascism. Snyder made the case, including on our podcast that Trump's lie about winning the 2020 election, the January 6th attack on the Capitol, were clear examples of undermining democracy, a key tenet of fascism, that Trump's focus on declaring an enemy, whether they be Democrats or immigrants, another key tenet of fascism. Snyder's warning about fascism feels particularly relevant at this juncture in Trump's second administration. We've seen and talked about on this show, masked and armed ice agents snatching people off the streets and unmarked cars, the escalation of political violence, the deployment of federal law enforcement to deal with so-called epidemics of crime in places like Washington, D.C. And we wanted to have him back on to really help us pull a bunch of these threads together. Timothy Snyder now teaches at the University of Toronto's Monk School of Global Affairs. He is the author of books like On Tyranny and on Freedom. Professor Snyder, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for making the time. I'm very glad I can do it. I'm hoping today we can go through a bunch of recent examples with you to get a sense of how someone like you is thinking about them. And let's start with earlier this week. Defense Secretary P. Pete Hegseth and President Trump summoned an unprecedented number of top U.S. military officials from around the world for a meeting in Virginia. The goal seemed to be a kind of talk about priorities, including ferreting out the so-called woke agenda in the military. Foolish and reckless political leaders set the wrong compass heading. And we lost our way. We became the woke department. But not anymore. But also Trump talked about how U.S. cities should be used as training grounds for the military. Ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. They're very unsafe places. And I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for... Our military, national guard, but military. He spoke about an enemy within. Only in recent decades did politicians somehow come to believe that our job is to police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia while America is under invasion from within. We're under invasion from within. Of course, he has already ordered troops to L.A., Portland, D.C. And what did you make of that event, of the speeches that you heard?

Could you tell me more about why what you hear there is a plan for regime change? Well, the first... Our constitutional order and longstanding legal and constitutional precedent is based upon the notion that the armed forces are meant to be used for discrete purposes, which have to do with the defense of the country. It's a longstanding tradition in law and generally in practice, although they're having a couple exceptions, that the armed forces are not to be used for domestic law enforcement. So the president of the United States... I'm repeatedly saying that the purpose of the armed forces is, in fact, domestic law enforcement is a very substantial change in principle. And then in practice, what I have in mind is this. When you do have the armed forces present in your cities, in the hundreds, then the thousands, then the tens of thousands, people react to that one way or another, but the way that they react is also an element of regime change. You either get used to a certain kind of military dictatorship in which it's been established that laws and what matters, but direct orders from the commander-in-chief or what matter, or you don't. But either way, it's going to be some kind of a change. And when you talk about the fracturing of the military itself, could you just tell me more about what you think that could practically look like? I mean, I hesitate to predict exactly, and I think it'd be a wonderful show if you brought on some U.S. veterans from various backgrounds to talk about this. I do it from a certain distance, but I'll just point out that the United States Armed Forces are a meritocratic institution in general. They bring in people from all walks of life, all backgrounds. A lot of people in the armed forces are first-generation citizens. And that's the first issue, that Pete Hegseth and Trump are imagining America of us and them, where it's clear who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. And, of course, the United States Armed Forces represent in many ways some good things about America. They represent variety. They represent diversity. They represent social mobility. They don't represent. whatever heck, Seth and Trump might think, where all of the soldiers are naturally going to think, oh, yes, our fellow Americans are the enemy because our leaders say so. So that's one tension. Another tension is the command structure. the people who are the officers in the United States Armed Forces have been trained from the beginning that their loyalty is to the Constitution, to which they swore an oath, not to any particular person. So the president's the commander in chief, but the orders that he gives must be legal orders or constitutional orders. And if this kind of, if this kind of

practice is pushed much further, you're going to have consciences that are stretched. I imagine some already stretched and consciences that are broken and people who are going to have to make very difficult decisions, letting themselves be fired, resigning, or, you know, God forbid, following orders to actually invade American cities and kill Americans. I'm putting it very simply now, but if there are, so to speak, natural demographic tensions among the soldiers. and natural, legal, and moral tensions among the officer class, if you press this entire institution to do a thing that it wasn't designed to do, what you can expect are fractures. of some kind. And this is, so that's precisely the thing that I worry about. Not so much that they would, you know, they'll give the order and nothing will happen, or not so much that they'll give the order and that America will immediately switch like changing the channels to fascism, but rather that the attempt to move this enormous organization to a completely different purpose, which is in contrast to what both the officers and the soldiers believe that they are meant to be doing, that that's going to lead to fractures. unpredictable instability. And I fear a level of instability, which is inconsistent with the kind of predictability that Americans take for granted. But also, and here's the rub, that the leadership, that Trump and Pete Hegseth take for granted. I think they're, you know, people are very cynical to the point where they become naive. And Trump and Pete Hegseth are very cynical. But at the end of cynicism is naivete. And I think their naivete is the idea that essentially they can just push a button and the armed services will be able to do a completely different kind of mission without all kinds of unaccompetitive. expected instability.

A history of the United States in 100 Objects is a brand new podcast from 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. Each week, we're looking at a different object from across American history with a unique story to tell about who we've been, what we've built, and what we've allowed ourselves to forget. Some of these objects are well known. Many are not, but all of them carry the story of how we got to this moment. Find a history of the United States and 100 objects on the 99% of visible feed wherever you get your podcasts. I was struck, well, by many things, but at one point Trump talked about how American history is filled with military heroes. Took on all enemies, foreign and domestic. You know that phrase? Very well. That's what the oath says, foreign and domestic. Well, we also have domestic. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Grover, Cleveland, George Bush, and others all use the armed forces to keep domestic order in peace. And what does that conjure for you? I mean, that's an interesting thought. The basic point, of course, would be that in U.S. history, it's always been the kind of Cincinnaticus idea that, you know, you serve for a time and then you go back. And Washington was the preeminent example of that. He won the Revolutionary War. He served his terms as president. And then he declined to be a dictator or a tyrant. And he left behind a legacy of political thought to the effect that... You know the boundaries. You know the limits. You respect them. You shift roles. As for Lincoln, that's a very interesting example because Lincoln, of course, was the commander-in-chief of the President of the United States during our most horrible war, which we call a civil war between North and South. And that's a very interesting example to dwell on, of course, because that was a conflict among people. who were seceding from the United States and others. It's a relevant example, but I think not for the reasons that Trump imagined. It's a relevant example because it shows that our system is fragile. The civil war ought not to be remembered. There are many reasons to remember it, but it ought not to be remembered as an example of the robustness of the system. It's rather to be remembered as an example of the... flaws in the United States, the historical moral flaws having to do with slavery, the things that we ought to be remembering about ourselves. So I don't quite understand those examples the way that Mr. Trump brings them up. It seems to me that what the history of the United States shows is that we have survived as a republic thanks to a tradition of a clear identification of what the purpose of the military is. And thanks to the Civil War in which the ideas of the side that won don't seem at all to be the ideas that Mr. Trump and Mr. Pete Hegseth are in favor of. I want to put another example to you. Trump signed this presidential memo that is meant to reign in what he has called a radical left-wing domestic terror network. You know, when you see the signs and they're all beautiful signs made professionally.

These aren't your protesters that make the sign in their basement late of the evening because they really believe it. These are anarchists and agitators, professional anarchists and agitators, and they get hired by wealthy people. Some of whom I know, I guess, you know, probably know them. This is a very historic and significant day. This is the first time in American history that there is an old government effort to dismantle left-wing terrorism, to dismantle Antifa, to dismantle the organizations that have been carrying out. acts of political violence and terrorism. What we have seen... It followed a deadly attack on an ICE facility in Dallas that killed one detainee and injured two others. According to the FBI, one of the bullets using the attack was inscribed with the message anti-ice. The memo also comes on the heels, of course, of Charlie Kirk's assassination, which Trump and his supporters have blamed on an organized left-wing network without evidence. The memo says some of the common threads of the violence... Conduct includes anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, and, quote, extremism on migration, race, and gender. And what strikes you about the rhetoric used in that memo itself? Well, many things strike me, of course, and they're suggested quite beautifully in the way you put the question. The first is that it's a direct assault on freedom of expression. And we can pause momentarily on the irony of this, since the people around Mr. Trump claim to be champions of freedom of expression. But the irony is not so important as the frontal reality, which is that. Americans by tradition and also by the very simple terms of the First Amendment to the Constitution have the right to think and speak as they like. They have the right to assemble on behalf of whatever causes they like, whether those causes are freedom for immigrants or what have you. That is the moral core of our republic, that and nothing else. The second thing that strikes me, and this is as a historian of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, is the summoning up of these wraiths, the summoning up of invisible conspiracies that are responsible for everything. There are no invisible, all-powerful, left-wing conspiracies that determine everything, let alone political murder. Most political murder in the United States, if we have to talk about it in these terms, is right-wing rather than left-wing. Among the incidents that you mentioned, as I'm sure you know, there was also right-wing political murder at the same time. Murder is murder. It's individual. It's a crime. People should be prosecuted. They have to take individual responsibility. What Trump is doing, as Hitler did before, as Stalin did before, as countless other tyrants have done before, he's using an individual fact to conjure up something that doesn't exist, a conspiracy. And the problem with that is that when you conjure up... a conspiracy that doesn't exist, you can use it to prosecute anybody. You can use it to prosecute thought crime. You can use it to prosecute people who haven't done anything yet on the logic that somehow their deeds or their words or their thoughts are connected to this conspiracy. That's very troubling. And the third thing I wanted to mention is provocation.

When you tell everyone that they can't say anything and they can't do anything, you're, of course, provoking them. And when you use force in a massive way like ICE is doing now, you're provoking people. And you know you're provoking people. The provocation is part of the intention. And I just make this point because whatever happens as a result of ICE or as the result of military occupation of cities, that's all the responsibility of the government. They're trying to play this in this very passive-aggressive way. They're trying to say that even though we're the government and we have the power and we're ordering the military and we're ordering ICE, if anything happens, that is the responsibility of this invisible left-wing conspiracy, right? And it's important, I think, to just stress that whatever happens, the responsibility is directly that of the people who are in charge. I'd love to get a few more of your thoughts on what we're seeing with ICE right now in general, the images and videos that we're seeing of them at work. We've seen ICE agents snatch people up off the streets in these roving patrols. There was this really upsetting video from last week where a woman was shoved to the floor by an ICE officer at a New York immigration court. This happened in front of her children.

It's a moment Monica Elizabeth Moreta Calarza says she never thought would unfold at a federal courthouse in the U.S. I was left in shock. She says the agent pulled her hair and yelled at her and her two children in a separate room before this all unfolded. He pushed me inside and he told me to calm down, to shut up, shut up and because my kids were crying, he told them to shut up and he closed the door. There's been clashes between ICE agents and protesters in Southern California and Chicago even just a couple of days ago. You're not in fear. You will be arrested. Federal agents making it clear to protesters that they must clear the roads or they will be detained. Throughout the day, agents chased down some protesters and detained them while also coming out to take any... What do you make of this level of really impunity and intimidation that we seem to be seeing right now? Reporters have been doing great work and we should respect them and especially respect the reporters who've been taking risks around these events. I see it as a historian and there are two points that jump out at me. The first is the celebration of cruelty. So if we want to preserve a democracy or preserve a rule of law state, we have to begin from the notion of equality, of dignity, of respect, and move away from taking pleasure in the pain of other people, move away from the politics of cruelty. And these public displays are advertisements for a politics of cruelty. They're not just bringing out the worst and the people who are carrying these things out. They're also promoting, promulgating. propagandizing a certain kind of politics a politics of cruelty that's that's one thing another thing that I that I noticed historically is that using people who are not citizens as a kind of preparation for larger scale violence is a known practice. And again, I'm not saying that everything is alike in this comparison. I'm pointing to one thing. This is what the SS did first. The first major violent SS action in Germany in the 1930s was precisely rounding up people who were not documented and forcing them across. the border and these kinds of actions when directed against non-citizens are a certain sort of preparation for for citizens citizens get used to seeing it and then the people who are doing it against non-citizens are being trained up to do it against citizens now of course it's bad they're doing it against non-citizens i'm just trying to point out that there's a there's a political logic to this as well How are you thinking about the masks, right? So the Department of Homeland Security insists that these officers need to be masked in order to protect them from violence. Yeah, the assault on ICE officers are high. The doxing of ICE officers at an all-time high. And people always complain. Some of you hear us say, why they're wearing masks? They're probably protecting themselves and their families. They've got a dangerous job to do.

They're citing like a 500% increase in assaults critics say there is no evidence of that. When you see the mass, what does someone like you think? It's a wonderful question because it gets right to the heart of something very important, which is responsibility. It should be an extremely exceptional practice for agents of the government, people who are taking a salary from the government to wear masks. I mean, so unusual that I think an ordinary person should go through their lives without ever having witnessed it, which sadly is not the case for many people in the U.S. now. I do not believe that the reason they're doing this is for their own safety. I believe that the reason they're doing this is to give themselves permission to do things. If there's no camera or if the camera just captures somebody wearing a mask, then it's very hard for that person to bear individual responsibility. And if they're not going to bear individual responsibility, then they're being permitted. Indeed, they're being given permission to do things. And that's how I understand the masks. I don't think that people who truly believed in their mission would be wearing masks.

There's one last example I wanted to go through with you today, and that is James Comey. So Trump has, of course, long vowed to prosecute his political enemies last week. The former FBI director who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election and the connections to the Trump campaign was indicted on charges of obstruction and making a false statement to Congress. He insists that he's not guilty in many legal experts, including people in... The Justice Department say that this will be a hard case to prosecute. James Comey's a bad person. He's a sick person. I think he's a sick guy, actually. He did terrible things at the FBI. Trump publicly pressured his attorney general to speed up investigations into his opponents. In this now deleted post on social media, Trump complained about no action against James Comey and others. They're all guilty as hell, he wrote. Fear is the tool of a tyrant. In a video posted to social media, James Comey says he's ready to defend himself. My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system, and I'm innocent. So let's have a trial. What was your reaction to this announcement? I guess I take a couple of really big steps back. The first big step back is the notion of prosecuting your political opponents. Before we get to the details of Mr. James Comey's situation, which I think are actually tertiary or not really very significant at all, the fundamental issue is what the rule of law is. The rule of law, I mean, of course, it's not perfect anywhere. It's not perfect in Canada. It's not perfect in Ontario. It can't be perfect. But there's a fundamental question as to whether we state. and whether we aspire to a situation in which the rule of law is about recognizing people as equal. And the moment you say that the rule of law is for an executive to prosecute personal enemies, then you were saying that the rule of law shouldn't really exist. That way you prefer to have is a kind of personalistic dictatorship. And when Mr. Trump, it gives a list of people that he's going to pursue, and when he instructs the Department of Justice to pursue those individuals, regardless of the facts of law or the facts of the matter, he is opening up little bits of personalistic dictatorship. And insofar as people go along with him, they are taking part in spreading a personalistic dictatorship. The second thing, which is worth noticing, again, taking a step back, is the significance of big lies. that the Trump has to tell big lies. And then, and this is a point that Hana Arendt made a long time ago, and it's a very valid point, the moment you tell the big lies, you also have to make an effort to make them true. Trump has a few big lies at this point. One of them is that he won the 2020 election, and so people who disagree with that claim are going to be prosecuted or persecuted. And then another one is that Russia didn't help him in the 2016 election. And James Comey is tied up in the first one. And it's an ironic situation because actually...

Mr. James Comey, as director of the FBI, in a very ill-considered way, in my view, actually helped Trump get elected quite a lot by paying much more attention to minor matters involving Senator Clinton and ignoring rather major matters involving Russia and Trump. He chose to speak about irrelevancies regarding Clinton and chose not to speak about really some really major issues regarding Trump. This investigation began as a referral from the intelligence community inspector general. in connection with Secretary Clinton's use of a personal email server during her time as Secretary of State. The referral focused on whether classified information was transmitted on that personal system. But regardless, James Comey is tied up in that. Trump needs for there to be clarity about things about which he's lying. Obviously, to make the easy points, Mr. James Comey shouldn't be prosecuted. It's pretty clear that he didn't actually commit any crimes. The point that this is defining is that we have a Department of Justice which has largely been tamed. And that is sad. And that is significant. But we don't have a court system. which has been tamed. It's not easy yet to get a verdict from courts, and it's even harder to get a verdict from juries. American citizens, when put in juries, tend to find this sort of thing to be nonsensical. So the point we are at is not great, but the James Comey case helps us to see just how far the corruption of the judicial process and the rule of law has gone, but also the points at which it hasn't been completely overturned. Finally, Professor Snyder. I know you've been sounding alarm bells for quite some time now. Is this happening faster than you thought it would? Is it happening like you thought it would? Yeah, I mean, people who sound alarm bells do so for different reasons. They see things from different angles. The basic angle that I saw in 2016 was that we have an unprecedented sort of elected official at the level of president who believes in certain things that are fascistic, like a politics of violence, a politics of threat, stochastic. He believes in things like insanely ambitious propaganda, big lies. By the time we got to 2024, I was still, you know, those things are still significant, but I was worried more about the system itself fracturing. And so what I wrote in November mostly had to do with the appointments that people like Kash Patel or Pete Hegseth were not just untraditional, unqualified, but embodied as Mr. Trump embodies, a certain striving to make the system break. We're pretty much on pace for that. It's not just something one rings alarm bells about or worries about. I'm afraid it's something one observes. The combination of, you know, absurd gatherings of generals with weird coup-like messages being delivered to them. A government shut down the prosecution of personal enemies. Probably bad economic news coming as well. All of these things taken together are pushing us to some kind of breaking point.

But I would stress this, it's not something which is entirely under the control of the Trump administration. Mr. Trump's appointees are ambitious, but they have different ways of trying to wreck things, which don't all come into alignment. Mr. Trump is unpopular, and everyone around him is even less popular than he is. There are... quite a few signs of organized resistance, including, you know, recent symbolic victories like Jimmy Kimball coming back onto the air. There is not just a sense that things are breaking. There's also a sense in the U.S. in late summer as we move into fall that new coalitions and resistance might be possible. So it's impossible to predict. And it's like, it's not like we're on a timeline where things just happen automatically. We're in a zone where a lot of things are unpredictable. And the most important unpredictable thing is how many people choose to coalesce how quickly. Damage has already been done. It can't all be undone. But we could make a turn for the better. But ultimately, the turn for the better is going to depend upon things that we haven't talked about that much, which is the society beyond the Trump administration. If you don't mind, I would love to have you back on another day to talk more about that. I would look forward to that very much. Thank you so much, Professor Seiner. Thank you. My pleasure.

All right, that is all for today. Front burner was produced this week by Joyita Shen Gupta, Matthew Amha, Matt Mews, Lauren Donnelly, Sammy Bassi, Sam McNulty, and Mackenzie Cameron. Our YouTube producer is John Lee. Music is by Joseph Shabbison. Our senior producer is Elaine Chow. Our executive producer is Nick McKay Blokos, and I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you on Monday. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.