Top historian exposes dangerous new phase of Trump's dystopian 'cult'

President Donald Trump gestures during a press conference at a NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands June 25, 2025. REUTERS/Yves Herman

On Wednesday, one of the world’s leading researchers on authoritarianism warned that a “cult” has developed among President Donald Trump and his allies, in which the world’s wealthiest figures conspire to build their fortunes at the expense of essential constitutional freedoms. This is according to historian Timothy Snyder – a top expert on tyrannical regimes – who writes that Trumpworld oligarchs brought their illiberal project to a new phase in recent weeks, and laid out their plot in detail.

“Freedom to speak. Freedom to vote. Freedom to live. These basic liberties were blatantly violated by irresponsible and self-centered tech billionaires this month,” writes Snyder. The intentions of these billionaires and their allies in government – like Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin – argues Snyder, were just laid bare by their actions regarding Ukraine, U.S. elections, and more. He points to the Starlink scandal as a prime example. “As the Trump regime has executed an open turn towards the Russian aggressor,” writes Snyder, “Elon Musk chose to deprive Ukraine of access to a system that they needed for their own defense.” As a result, innocent Ukrainians were killed by Russian attacks while Trump and Musk ramped up claims that the blame fell not on themselves or Putin, but on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Then an attack on the freedom to vote came from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. “On October 17th,” writes Snyder, “Americans gathered at about three thousand sites in all fifty states to encourage early voting and celebrate their right to vote. Millions of people joined together in the largest such action in American history, which was organized by a number of civil society organizations working together as the No Kings Coalition.” But suddenly in the middle of the event, Meta suspended the Instagram account of the No Kings Coalition, causing the page to vanish and locking out its administrators. As Snyder notes, “The forum that was being used to organize support for the American right to vote was suspended by a private company – for no reason, or for no plausible reason that Meta was able to provide.”

Finally, Snyder points to a string of social media platforms that refused to air content relating to a documentary criticizing Musk. For example, writes Snyder, “Tiktok suspended the account which advertised it, and kept it down the whole following weekend, thereby suppressing the movie during what was to be its first big weekend. Tiktok is partly owned by Musk’s friend Larry Ellison, who in the film offers Musk billions to help Musk buy Twitter. A few days later, Musk invested a billion dollars in Ellison’s massive entertainment conglomerate. The film makes a good case, now borne out even more strongly by these events, that the point of these media monopolies is to suppress freedom and control the political sphere. It is worth noticing that these two oligarchs were helping one another at exactly the same time as Musk was helping Putin.”

According to Snyder, a key aspect of their plot involves the denial of responsibility. “In each case the wealthy and powerful relevant denied that they had done anything, that they could have done anything, that anything could have possibly been their fault,” writes Snyder. “Even Putin, who is waging the largest war since 1945 [said] that the Ukrainians made him do it by existing. As Trump ever more openly allies with Putin, he claims that Zelenskyy made him do it by not surrendering. When Musk enabled Putin to strike Ukraine, thereby taking charge of US foreign policy, Trump and Musk each made mumbly remarks to the effect that perhaps the other had done something. When TikTok suppressed viewership of a movie that would have helped make sense of it all, its spokespeople said that it was just following mysterious standards which it could not explain. Meta went so far as to blame its own AI. Great power with such extravagant irresponsibility is inconsistent with any freedom – including the rights to live, to speak, to vote.”

“The more powerful these men become, the more they embrace a cult of irresponsibility, making it our fault when they take our rights to speak, to vote, to live,” warns Snyder. “Something is emerging which can, should, and indeed must be stopped. It is a world in which one oligarch’s drones kill you because another oligarch helps, and in which a third oligarch then suppresses the discussion. This has all been incipient for some time; what is special about this last month, about the coincidence in time of these three assaults on freedom, is that they make our new Matrix or Skynet impossible to miss.”

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