US at 'turning point' in Trump’s imperial project: top historian

A leading historian says the United States has reached a “turning point” due to President Donald Trump’s authoritarian project, and that it could determine the future integrity of the country, both in terms of its reputation and its existence as a state.

This is according to renowned historian Timothy Snyder, whose scholarly work has focused on authoritarian regimes in Russia and Germany. While appearing on the podcast of researcher Robinson Erhardt, Snyder discussed how democracies collapse and historical parallels to the U.S. under Trump. His assessment was not optimistic.

“The fact that the U.S. exists and is celebrating 250 years doesn't mean that it'll exist in 5 years or 10 years or 15 years — states have a beginning and they have an end,” he said. “I think that the Trump people are much more likely to wreck the U.S. as an entity than they are to succeed in generating some kind of homogeneous tyranny from the Pacific to the Atlantic.”

While he ultimately thinks it will fail to materialize, Snyder said one corollary came to mind in terms of the type of state the U.S. is moving toward under Trump, explaining, “Many of the things that have happened in the United States happened first in Russia. And many of the clues of what post-modern tyranny or fascism will look like, you can get first from observing Russia.” He provided several examples of these “clues,” from Russia’s reliance on hydrocarbons for fuel and economic generation, the centralization of media and the destruction of local reporting, and how social media can be wielded to promote “authoritarian politics” — all trends he suggests are being repeated in the U.S.

Rather than transforming into a stable autocracy, however, Snyder thinks the U.S. is headed toward outright decline.

“As far as general historical moments,” he said, “I think we're at an imperial turning point.” He nodded to past examples when people took the existing “imperial order for granted,” saying, “The question is, how do you react when it breaks up? How do we deal with it when we no longer exercise the same kind of power that we used to? Are we able to exercise power in new ways? Or do we choose to fall upon one another?”

Snyder suggests that the future of the country may be less a matter of resisting tyranny than a “rebuilding paradigm” in which the country must recover from the damage done by Trump, both domestically and in terms of its international relations as well. As the U.S. deals with the negative aspects of its heritage, Snyder questions, “Do we choose to focus on how we were always right…and thereby lose any sort of possibility for building a post-imperial kind of state? Or do we instead continue a conversation inside the United States which allows us to present ourselves as a credible power outside the United States?”