Trump’s 'incompetent' leadership is not 'functional against actual threats in the world': historian
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President Donald Trump holds a Cabinet meeting, Wednesday, April 30, 2025, in the Cabinet Room. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley)
In a conversation with The Bulwark's Bill Kristol, historian Timothy Snyder discussed some glaring similarities between President Donald Trump, Stalinism and fascism.
Snyder, author of "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin," "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century" and "On Freedom," talks about some of the "features of the Trumpist authoritarian project," pointing to the assault on Trump's enemies and on the truth by administration officials like Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
"I mean, you can see the resonances of this with Stalinism if you want, or with fascism if you want. But certainly it is a kind of totalitarian politics where you imagine this enemy that has no face and is invisible, and therefore you are allowed to go after them with whatever means necessary," Snyder says.
Trump's takeover of institutions, Snyder says, is an attempt to establish "a party state." And it's all happening very quickly.
"So it’s not that the state is going away, it’s that the state is becoming secondary to some other project, which is what of course the fascists and the communists had in common," Snyder explains.
Synder worries that Trumpism has made the United States weaker with unqualified administration officials willing to bend a knee to the president.
"The Trumpist version of strength isn’t very functional against the actual threats in the world," he says. "And so I worry a lot that an FBI with a completely incompetent director, where 50 percent of the agents are directed towards border control, is not an FBI that stops a terrorist attack."