Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, who is an expert on authoritarianism, this weekend argued that all of former President Donald Trump’s recent “fascist display,” “dark language” and “attempts of intimidation” is aimed at just one thing, making people afraid.
“Once you see through that trick, once you recognize that that’s all they have got, then you see, ‘OK, Trump is a bully I can knock over with my little finger, or just a bully I can knock over with the hand I use to cast my vote,’” Snyder, the author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi.
Velshi had asked Snyder what he was telling people about “feeling overwhelmed, scared and anxious” ahead of the 2024 election, which polling still says is remarkably close between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic rival.
“That is the perfect question because the people who want to bring the system down, the people that want to make America into a different kind of order, authoritarian, they want us to be frightened, they want us to be anxious,” Snyder replied.
“That is exactly the thing that they are aiming for, and it’s their strongest weapon,” he added. “And so when you feel that, you should recognize, ‘Aha, this is part of the regime change, this is their trick, and I’m not gonna fall for it. What I’m going to do is I’m gonna make sure that I am not only thinking the right things, that I am doing the right things, and that I’m doing them with other people.’”
Snyder has repeatedly expressed his fears as to what will happen if Trump wins back the White House.
“Unless Trump loses,” he warned in July, “America ends.”
Watch Snyder’s conversation with Ali here:
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