Transcript: Timothy Snyder on Orbán’s Defeat, Christian Nationalism, and What Trump Is Really Planning

So that by the time you get to that crucial election day, when people vote, it’s not cynical, it’s not just me on my own. People have a feeling, “I’m taking part today in something which could be transformative.” And it should be transformative. But that transformation began not with the vote, but with all of that work which came before it.

Do Protests Actually Work?

KATIE COURIC: It’s interesting you mentioned the protests because one of my followers on social media asked — and this was going to be later, but it’s very relevant to what you just said — “What more can we do? These protests don’t seem to be working.” And I think perhaps people have an unrealistic expectation of what is accomplished by, say, these No Kings rallies. But tell us why they’re important in aggregate, and if they’re done consistently?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah, that’s a wonderful question. So if you start from Hungary in 2026 or Poland in 2023, which is a similar situation, we have clear recent examples of how protest movements work. So even if you don’t buy my explanation as to why they work, which I’m about to give, the examples are actually there. And you can’t — to put it a different way — you can’t think of any transformation from authoritarianism back towards democracy which did not involve a protest movement, right? So whatever the reasons might be, the examples are all on one side of the ledger.

But here’s what the reasons are. The first is that when you protest, you’re teaching the people around you that there are some people — maybe a large number — who don’t think this is normal, and are willing actually to go out and take a little bit of a risk to say so.

The second thing is that you’re priming yourself for other kinds of organization. So when you’re in a protest, you meet people who organize and you go on and do everyday work. And that’s where things get transformed.

And the third thing is that protests give a sense of hope. They give a sense that, “Ah, things could be different. Today was different than other days.”

KATIE COURIC: And solidarity, like you said.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. And also — the final technical thing, which goes back to your Hungary question — you win big historical elections with unexpected coalitions. You don’t just win them with the opposition party. You win them with the opposition party plus X, Y, and Z. And you don’t build coalitions just by saying, “You know what, guys, we need to have a coalition.” You build coalitions by everyday experience where you realize, “Okay, I may not agree with you — you’re on my left on this, I may not agree with you — you’re on my right about this, but we agree about enough things that we can get together for this purpose.” But you can’t do that theoretically. You can only do it in practice. And protests are the first step towards that kind of practice.

What Can Ordinary People Do Every Day?

KATIE COURIC: I think the most frequently asked question I get, bar none, on all my social media platforms is: what can we do? And you mentioned protests, but then you mentioned quickly everyday activities.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah.

KATIE COURIC: And I’m curious what you mean by everyday activities and what you can tell people about what they can do in that category.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah, I mean, I think Americans have this habit of thinking, “Well, it’ll all turn around with the election.” Someone said to me at lunch today after a public event, “Well, we just got to get through to November.” No, you don’t have to get through to November. You have to get us to November. So if you start with, “Okay, there’s an election that has to be won,” then you can go from there to “people have to be registered,” and you can go from there to get out the vote, but you can also go from there to any kind of local organizing which keeps people active and hopeful.

It doesn’t even have to be directly about politics, because the deep way authoritarian regime changes work is they teach people that you’re on your own. You can’t really do anything — maybe pursue your own private interests — but there’s no point doing anything together. If you do things together, even at the most local level — literally your block, your street, a park — you’re learning that it matters to act together. And that is the crucial lesson.

So when people ask that question, what I often think is people are not asking “what can I do?” They’re asking “what can I do where I alone can change the whole equation?” And the answer of course is nothing. You alone can’t change the whole equation. But if we all just do any little thing, that’s going to be enough.

So the way I generally turn that question around is: tell me about the little thing that you’re doing. And if there isn’t a little tiny thing, do a little tiny thing and then build forward from that. Now, there are some specific answers — join your local Indivisible chapter, find out who the local organizers are around you, make sure that you are protesting, pay for the news that you read. There are some very specific things that I listed in On Tyranny, but the main thing is make sure that you’re already active at a local level and then go from there.

Lessons from Magyar: Connecting Corruption to Everyday Life

KATIE COURIC: Let’s get back to Hungary. Just a few questions because I’m assuming you do feel it’s an abject lesson for the United States in many ways. I know that Peter Magyar was part of Orbán’s party, right? How do you say it? Fidesz?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Fidesz.

KATIE COURIC: Fidesz Party. I’ve got to brush up on my Hungarian.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Don’t we all?

KATIE COURIC: Yeah. Until a few years ago. And someone asked me to ask you: why didn’t that association hurt him in this election? And do you think something similar would need to happen within the GOP to challenge Donald Trump’s grip on the party?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: It’s such an interesting story because Magyar’s — it’s almost Hollywood scripted in a way, how similar the story is. There’s a scandal a little bit more than 2 years ago now, where it turned out that there had been a presidential pardon for someone who had carried out acts of sexual abuse of minors. And that presidential pardon is what triggered this whole thing. Isn’t that odd?

And Magyar’s former wife was involved in that pardon and the cover-up around it, and he took the occasion to give a media interview — like we’re doing here, basically — where he said, “Okay, I’m now going to explain how this is just one example of the broader pattern of corruption inside the way Orbán and Fidesz run things.” And then from there, he went on to build this movement. So there was a scandal, there was independent media, and then he took the opportunity to turn the scandal into an argument about how “in order for things to go better for everybody in Hungary, we have to break up this essentially corrupt regime.”

So obviously we can’t imitate that completely. I don’t think at this point we can imagine somebody coming out of the Trump inner circle who would somehow say, “Oh yes, as a matter of fact, sexual abuse of minors is a terrible thing.” It’s not going to happen at this point. And we can’t expect that there’s going to be any one breakthrough like that because we’ve had so many moments like that, and sadly we’ve become inured to them.

I think the lesson from Hungary is more like: you need to be able to make that argument about the connection between abuse of power and everyday life. Because American Democrats, they talk about affordability and they think they can coast to victory on affordability, and maybe they’re right. But if they do, that would be a poisoned chalice because there’s so much we have to do which goes beyond that kind of narrow affordability.

And some of the people that I organize with who are on the left, they talk about democracy and freedom, and that’s great, that’s good. But to win an election and build a coalition for change, you have to be able to explain how these two things are the same thing — that the end of democracy means abuse of power means you’re poor.

Making the Case on the Campaign Trail

KATIE COURIC: Well, I’d love for you to elaborate on that. Give me what you would say on the campaign trail. How would you connect those? I mean, I get what you’re saying, that they’re connected, but how? How do you explain it to the average voter?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah, okay, that’s great. I mean, I’m not a Democratic political strategist and I’m not going to get paid for it.

KATIE COURIC: No, but I mean, I’m curious. What is the very real connection?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: No, no, it’s — yeah, I mean, I was saying that in the positive sense that somebody needs to practice this. So might as well be us here. So if the wealthy are not paying taxes, which they’re not under Trump, that means that you are paying taxes. If we are fighting a senseless war and spending billions and billions of dollars on it, that’s your tax money, which you’re not going to get for healthcare or anything else.

And also, if you’re fighting a war in which people around Trump, Americans and other foreign oligarchs are making huge amounts of money, you are going to be losing even more, right? And if the government is controlled instead of by your vote, if it’s controlled by the whims and the interests of individual people around the president and the president, you will always lose. It’s the feedback mechanism, your vote, which makes these people responsible to you. Without your vote and without your ability to change those who are governing you, this is the natural tendency that things are going to go.

Presidential Corruption and Its Impact on Ordinary Americans

KATIE COURIC: But what about the self-serving corruption? You talked about people surrounding the president. There’ve been a lot of great reporting on how much he has benefited financially just in his second term, right? I think last told it was $4 billion. I’m sure it’s gone up significantly since then. But how do you say the president enriching himself hurts you because why?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah, I mean, first, I think we have to be in a position to say that this stuff is just wrong. We have to be able to say that it’s morally — it’s not just that it is wrong. I mean, that it’s simply wrong, that it’s disgusting to have people profit from power in a democratic government or any other one. I mean, there has to be this abhorrence. I worry that our media class has become a little bit too jaded about all of this. And when we say, people are in silos, maybe to some extent, but my experience is that Americans are more shocked by this kind of thing when they get a sense of it than maybe journalists are. And that we —

KATIE COURIC: I’m pretty shocked, just for the record.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Good, glad to hear it. But I think you can see where I’m going with this, that part of it is being shocked yourself and being able to convey that you’re shocked as opposed to, okay, this is just one more thing.

But the reason why the president enriching himself hurts you is that there are only so many tools of government. And those tools of government have been created in order to spread the wealth, create opportunities, create institutions like schools and highways and universities, which allow everybody to have a chance. If you take those same tools of government and you only protect the ones that allow a few people to get rich and you let all the other ones crumble, that means that you’re going to be poor in the short run. And it also means that your family, the people who come after you, aren’t going to have a chance because those institutions simply aren’t going to be funded.

KATIE COURIC: I think you’re going to have to dumb it down a little more for the campaign trail, Professor, but I think we’re off to a good start.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Well, I’m happy — we can do another show which is 2 minutes long and I’ll give you my 3-second soundbites.

Transparency as a Trick, and False Equivalences

KATIE COURIC: You know, it’s interesting when I talk about the corruption with just average people, there are a couple of arguments. One is, well, he’s so transparent about it — that’s not necessarily defending what he’s doing, but observationally, oh, you know, he’s doing this, but he’s very out in the open, which I think is a very interesting observation. And secondly, I always hear, “Oh, well, Joe Biden did the same thing. Look at Hunter Biden.” And there’s no sense of proportionality in the way people are looking at this.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. I mean, “he’s open about it” is really striking because it used to be that if you did something wrong, you tried to hide it. And it shows how hypocrisy is also kind of a good thing. I mean, nobody’s perfect, but if at least you say, “Okay, we shouldn’t be stealing people’s tax money. We shouldn’t have our son-in-law making huge amounts of money. We shouldn’t be making foreign deals with hostile governments that allow the president to enrich himself personally.” Even if in the American past there have been some things that have been dodgy, if you can still say those things, you’re in one place.

But if suddenly your position is, “Well, he’s being transparent about it,” then transparency is the only thing you care about, and then you’re stuck because then you have no language of critique. And there’s a basic mistake here, which is we want everybody who’ve been in the past and they weren’t. And now it’s like, oh, well, if Trump just confesses to everything, that makes it okay. No, it doesn’t make it okay. It means that we have to reinforce what these principles actually were.

In other words, it’s a kind of entertainer’s trick that he’s pulling. He’s saying, “I admit I’m pulling a rabbit out of a hat and here’s how I do the trick,” right? Or better, “I’m a pickpocket and I just stole your wallet. Now that I’ve stolen your wallet, let me tell you how I did it. It involves the thumb muscles,” right? And then you’re supposed to be like, “Yay, good job stealing my wallet.” But he still has your wallet, right? And so it’s basically an entertainer’s trick, this whole transparency thing. It doesn’t make it any better. Like, it’s as though the only problem was ever hypocrisy.

And that gets to the Biden thing. Of course, the whole Hunter Biden thing was basically false, but of course nobody’s perfect, right? And the idea that any little infraction is the same thing as stealing billions of dollars is a product of this “on the one hand, on the other hand” thing.

KATIE COURIC: Right. These false —

TIMOTHY SNYDER: That we’ve been trained into. And partly this is a bit the media’s fault, where we have been taught that for every one side of the story, there’s another side of the story, as opposed to actually the story being that the president’s best friend seems to be extremely friendly with a Russian dictator, or the president’s son-in-law seems to be making a lot of money from Saudi Arabia. There is no other side to that story. That is itself just the story.

So that “on the one hand, on the other hand” is something we have to train ourselves out of, because if we always use that, then anything becomes possible.

The Media’s Struggle with False Balance

KATIE COURIC: I think it’s muscle memory, to defend some journalists. I think for so long, we were taught — when it was policy differences, right?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah.

KATIE COURIC: That this is a conservative view of government spending or largesse, whatever. And so I think for so long, there was an effort to be — I hate to say “fair and balanced” because that became Fox News and their motto. And so I think that people have had, some journalists have a hard time adjusting. And then I think you have the commercial interests of needing ratings or subscribers or whatever, and the fear of turning off the 70-plus million people who voted for Donald Trump, right?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. Yeah.

KATIE COURIC: I’m not defending it. I’m just trying to understand it a little bit.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. I think there is an underlying question about what the truth is here that goes deeper than that. Because what you’re describing is a method of getting at the truth.

KATIE COURIC: Right.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: And it’s a method that may feel fair and balanced, but it’s a method which is incredibly easy to game. And if someone goes way out on one side, then what happens is you end up pulling the other side halfway in that direction. So in this case, it’s obviously what’s happened is unfair to Biden. I mean, he’s not perfect, but the fact that Trump pulls the average all the way over on this side means that I believe we’ve ended up being unfair to Biden because of our habit of wanting it to be sort of this way and this way, right?

If you’re comparing Muhammad Ali to a mouse, it’s not going to end up being fair to the mouse, right? That’s a terrible comparison, but you get the idea that it’s not different quantities, it’s different qualities. And I think one has to focus on that.

But the moral question is — and now I’m going to sound terribly old-fashioned and conservative, which I am on this point — do we actually believe there’s a truth of the matter, or do we content ourselves with the method and saying, “You think this and I think this,” and implicitly, vaguely, the truth is in the middle? But it ain’t. And honestly, it never has been, not the truth. It may be true that I say this and true that you say this, but there is statistically 0% chance that the truth is between what you say and what I say. The truth is out there in the reporting. And when our journalists at The New York Times or anywhere else are at their best, it’s when they’re out there hunting for that truth.

And I worry a little bit — and this is a problem that comes from the left but which the right then imported — when we give up on the idea that actually we’re searching for the truth. That’s another reason why the “on the one hand, on the other hand” is comfortable, because it allows us to do a kind of simulacrum of the truth or searching for truth without actually searching for it. So you defended journalists and I’m going to be hard on them because I think there is basically a paradigm shift that has to happen.

KATIE COURIC: I wasn’t exactly defending them. I was basically trying to appreciate why they’ve been doing things the way that they’ve been doing. And what did you say? A sacra — what’s that?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: A simulacrum.

KATIE COURIC: A simulacrum. Let the record show this is the first time the word “simulacrum” has been used on this podcast, and I appreciate it. What does it mean exactly? An exercise? A simulation? It’s Latin, obviously.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Simulacrum means something whose purpose is to appear to be something else.

KATIE COURIC: Okay. All right. I’m going to look that up.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: A simulation is something that you can run. Like, we can run a simulation. So you caught me choosing between two words that start with “simul.”

KATIE COURIC: And thank you, Professor.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. So now you can edit this out later.

KATIE COURIC: No, no, we’re going to keep it in.

Orbán’s Concession and the Power of Deterrence

KATIE COURIC: All right. I wanted just to wrap up the Orbán stuff because I have other things I want to talk to you about. A lot of people are worried that Orbán’s not going to relinquish power. A lot of people wrote that to us. He lost, but will he leave?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah, I mean, I was concerned about that as well. He conceded shortly after noon, if I remember correctly, when it became clear that it was a landslide. And there’s a message there. If you can win in a landslide and you’ve had a lot of protests before, that means that you have deterrent power. And that goes back to our question about why protests are important. One factor which I didn’t mention is deterrence.

If you can show you have big mobilization potential, that makes it harder for the other side not to recognize the results of an election. And that’s part of the Hungarian story, and it’s part of the American story. Now, whether we choose to build up that deterrent or not, that’s one reason why you protest — if you care about factors A, B, and C, then you are also going to care about a stolen election. And if you can mobilize 9 million people for factor C, you can probably mobilize 20 million people or more for a stolen election. So that’s part of it, right — Orbán knew that there wasn’t much that he could do because of the landslide.

KATIE COURIC: I was a little surprised when he conceded, because I thought, wow, that was normal.

The Far-Right International Network

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I’m going to point out something else that happened, which I would like for Americans not to overlook because it’s something which might be in our future. And that is that Orbán already pulled out one of the most desperate tricks, which is that you fake a terrorist attack. He tried that. He claimed that explosives have been found on a pipeline.

And then with utter 100% predictability, and I predicted it and many other people did, then a few hours later he said, well, it turns out it was the Ukrainians because they were running— Orbán was running this whole campaign on an us and them where the Ukrainians were the bad guys and they were going to intervene in the elections and they were going to invade and it was terrible.

And that didn’t work at all. And this is important. It’s important that it happened. And I note this for us in the next 6 months because—

KATIE COURIC: Right. Because I know that’s one of the ways that, and we’ll get into that later.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah, but the Hungarians, Orbán did try it, and the reason it didn’t work was because Magyar and the opposition had said, “We think it’s pretty likely he’s going to try a stunt like this, and when he does try it, let’s notice it’s a stunt and let’s laugh at it.” And then that’s what they did, and it worked. And so the various things that he might have tried had already failed.

And then another thing which is worth noting, and you hinted at this before, JD Vance went there. He went there and he told Hungarians that God wanted them to vote for Orbán, which of course is incredibly shameful. I think it’s shameful that we would intervene like that. It’s shameful that we would tell other people what God wants them to do. But it was also wildly ineffective and if anything counterproductive.

And so this, although we’re talking about the international significance of the Hungarian election, this was a domestic Hungarian election. And if Orbán was going to succeed in some kind of plot to stay in power, it was going to involve Americans or Russians or both. And let’s remember that when Vance was physically present in Budapest, so were Russian Secret Service specialists in faking elections. They were all there at the same time.

If Orbán was going to do something, it was going to be with the support of this right-wing international network. Who proved to be wildly unpopular, right? To say that Vance is unpopular in other countries is to wildly overstate the case. Vance’s face is used in operations to deter people from voting in other countries. And then one of the calls at Orbán rallies, when people were heckling him, was “Russians go home.” So I think another thing that he noticed was that international backing wasn’t going to work. So these are ways that he was backed into a corner.

KATIE COURIC: So interesting. I know that you talked about this network, that you describe Hungary as the center of a far-right international network that Orbán built up in the last decade. I’m curious, who are the countries, who’s a part of this network?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I love this question because we’re America, and so we think we’re everything, and if we’re not everything, or at least at the center of everything. But when it comes to the international far right, that’s just not true. MAGA or the Trump movement have always been, from the very beginning, part of an international far-right network. Putin and his people scouted Trump for talent long before we were aware that he might be something. And they were on his side from the very beginning, and they’re still on his side.

KATIE COURIC: They meaning—

TIMOTHY SNYDER: They meaning the Kremlin. And it’s very hard for us as Americans to care about this, and it’s even harder for us to imagine that it matters, but it does.

So in the case of Orbán, when we hear the Heritage Foundation, we think that sounds like an American right-wing think tank, but the Heritage Foundation was funded by Hungary. When we hear CPAC, we think, oh, that’s an American far-right political action organization. But how American is it if it’s funded by Hungary, which it was?

The American far-right is much more cosmopolitan. It’s much more intellectual than the American center or the American left. And this is key, right? Because in all these places, Moscow, Budapest, Washington, the game is the same. You try to get people to think that you couldn’t possibly be part of a cosmopolitan international network of oligarchs because you wave the flag too much. So it just can’t be true.

But then the moment comes when the facade breaks, as it does, as it did in Hungary, and people recognize, hmm, this actually was just a guy who was in an international node and he was never a patriot. You never cared about the country. And so that’s something that can happen.

KATIE COURIC: What other countries though, Tim? Like what other?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Sorry. So Orbán was at the center because first he pioneered a kind of authoritarianism where you mostly stay within the law and where you keep having elections, but they become harder and harder for the opposition to win. Second level is the European Union because Hungary was inside the European Union. He pioneered the method whereby you take European Union subsidies for a relatively poor country, but you give them to your friends rather than sharing them with the rest of the country. The third level is Russia and the West. Hungary was generally a more acceptable-looking partner than Russia, and so Hungary helped to distribute Russian oil money among European right-wing parties as well as American right-wing institutions.

The Global Reach of the Far-Right Network

KATIE COURIC: Are they financing then elections? Because this is not, you know, these are not isolated incidents. You look at the sort of the far-right tendencies that are happening all over the world and in Europe, in many other countries. I mean, you can name them. You study this stuff all the time. Italy. Where else is this happening? France, right? Are they— do they— do their tentacles touch all these other countries and these far-right movements that we’re seeing globally?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I think as Americans, we should actually start from us because it’s a little bit more blatant in our country. I mean, it’s a little bit weird that our most prominent conservative political organization, arguably CPAC, had a foreigner, Viktor Orbán, be one of their major speakers and then went to Budapest and had a CPAC in Budapest. And the only reason you can get away with that in the US is that just nobody suspects. We just don’t suspect that we could actually be part— that we could in some way be subordinate, that we could be in some way being played, that somebody else’s money is determining what we do. So I would start from there.

But there are individual journalists, there are think tanks, and in some cases there are political parties which have been financed by this network all around Europe and North America. That said, you wouldn’t want to make the next move and say all of this is a result of some kind of a plot, because it isn’t. I mean, there are other much deeper reasons why the far right has had a renewal.

But what you can say for sure is that individuals such as Mr. Trump, for example, are deeply connected to other individuals like Mr. Orbán, in a way which suggests that at least those individuals think that their hold on power had to do with this network.

KATIE COURIC: I kind of understood what you said, but what about Italy and France and all those places? Are you saying there are other reasons for this right-wing resurgence? But are they not playing in those playgrounds at all, some of these groups?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah, they are playing in those playgrounds. But first of all, we don’t know all of it. We know individual examples of journalists, and we know individual examples of think tanks. But I guess, Katie, what I’m shying away from is the idea that we can assign blame for all of this to Orbán and Putin.

What Orbán and Putin do, and they did it very well, was to find the tendencies and the actors who would be most harmful or helpful from their point of view, and then support those. And again, returning to us, it should give us pause to think what it means that foreign actors regard certain American institutions as being harmful to the United States of America.

JD Vance, Hungary, and the Limits of the Far-Right Worldview

KATIE COURIC: You mentioned JD Vance, and I saw on one of the networks, one of the cable networks, that JD Vance’s no good, terrible, very bad week. He had a bad week. How badly wounded reputationally is JD Vance as a result of going to Hungary and now, of course, not having much success with kind of coming up with a solution for Iran? Do you think that Donald Trump is trying to throw him under the bus in any way?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I think the answer to that’s yes, but I think there’s something maybe more existential or personal going on here. Because as far as I can read him, the vice president really does believe that the world really is far right, and that the far right has been held back by various unfair forces, by rules and laws and conventions. And he seems to really think that if you could just somehow strip away these elements of what he and people like him call globalism and just let the people speak, then the far right would always win elections.

And this is what I heard him say at the Munich Security Conference. It’s a basic theme that the real people are like me, everyone else is not real, we just have to let the real people vote and we’ll always get a far-right outcome. And Hungary shows how untrue that is.

Hungary shows that what Mr. Vance thinks of as the right — which is to say, in the example of the administration, the far right — essentially means a coterie of oligarchs around the president making a huge amount of money and destroying social services and fighting senseless wars. But it turns out that that doesn’t win elections always. At least it turns out it can lead to incredibly humiliating landslide defeats.

And so before we even get to Trump exposing Vance, which I think he is, I think this is actually a moment of incredible psychological difficulty for both Trump and Vance, because Orbán was their guy. He was the master, they were the apprentices. He showed the way and they followed. And I think he was important to them as much as anyone could be. And they’re now keen to forget him.

The defeat in Hungary may set an example for people who want to change things in the US, but the defeat in Hungary, I think, is also incredibly demoralizing for people of the Vance stripe because his worldview — it showed how wrong he was. He was there, he did everything he could, and his side got absolutely demolished.

As for Iran, it’s important to remember that Mr. Vance actually doesn’t have any real-world experience in negotiation or foreign affairs, or for that matter, much of anything else. And so the idea that in a single day he could be sent off to Islamabad or anywhere else and negotiate something which serious people took months to negotiate in much better circumstances — he was being set up to fail. Of course he was going to fail.

And I think he is being set up for failure because the one thing on which he’s supposed to differentiate himself from Trump is the idea that Trump used to care about not having wars, but maybe Vance still cares about not having wars. And Trump is making that very difficult for him because he’s not giving Vance what Vance would need to actually settle this war.

Legal Accountability and the Lessons from Hungary

KATIE COURIC: You wrote, Tim, and I guess it was in a recent Substack, you said, “I want to point out one of the things that the Hungarians who won didn’t hesitate to say before and after the election is that there will be legal consequences for abuse of power.” It’s one of the things Magyar said in his victory speech, and I think the Democrats have to be ready to say that there are people committing crimes in the U.S. right now who are not being prosecuted and are not afraid of prosecution. And if you want to deter further abuse, especially around the November election, you do have to make it clear that on the other side there will be prosecutions.

I read that and I thought, hmm, maybe, but what about so many Americans who are so exhausted by impeachment hearings and retribution and consequences. Will that argument be effective with them? And tell me why you think this is so important.

The Rule of Law and Republican Government

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah, I’m going to start with the second part because maybe I can’t win the argument. But I guess what I want to say is that if somebody doesn’t win that argument, our republic is in really, really deep trouble because you can’t continue a government on a republican basis, as a small r republic obviously, without the rule of law. And you can’t have the rule of law unless it is seen to visibly affect everyone.

So the moment that you carve out any kind of exception, as the Supreme Court sadly did, and as the president has extended it in practice, and then the rest of us, not into different degrees, but I think it can be said the rest of us are somewhat complicit in this, by our normalization of Trump’s behavior. That once you do that, you’re going to have a regime change. Because as soon as you have a person who’s beyond the rule of law, in effect you have a class of people who are beyond the rule of law. And once you have a class of people who are beyond the rule of law, the game in politics is going to be to get into that class who are beyond the rule of law.

And at that point, democracy no longer matters because my vote or your vote is not going to be what determines whether you get into that class. It’s going to be how much money you have or how much access you have or how much violence you’re willing to use or how much you’re willing to threaten people. So if we can’t have legal prosecution of people who commit crimes, then we’re not going to have a republic.

Now, I take your point that people are frustrated with this. I mean, I would suggest that people might be frustrated with it because nothing actually happened. And we spent 4 years and failed, despite the fact that this is a man who called the Georgia Secretary of State and said, “Find me 12,000 votes.” We spent 4 years failing to prosecute, right? We failed for various reasons. There’s always some reason. There’s always an excuse here and an excuse there. But we had this guy dead to rights. I mean, this is a man who tried to steal an election and tried to carry out a coup. And we managed only to prosecute him for a narrow range of things in New York for those 34 felonies. Which of course in most timelines, 34 felonies would be enough.

But you see what I mean? So one source of frustration could be it didn’t actually succeed, right? But from this point, you can draw two conclusions. One would be, okay, this is exhausting. It’s hard. We shouldn’t do it. I think that way lies the end of the republic. Or the other conclusion would be, we got to do it. And this time we have to be serious about it.

And I think that is the Hungarian lesson because it’s like judo or whatever. If you’re not thinking ahead of time about getting through that block of wood, you’re not going to get through the block of wood. If you’re not talking now about how you’re going to prosecute people, you’re definitely not going to do it when the time comes.

KATIE COURIC: How much of an impediment, though, will the Supreme Court decision and Trump’s propensity to pardon people— how will those present significant obstacles in this desire for accountability?

Financial Crimes, Pardons, and the Stakes of Justice

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think politically, you want to start with the most obvious financial crimes so that even if people are pardoned, you’re still revealing the deep rot that’s at the center of all of this, that billions of dollars are being made just by proximity to the president, by betting on wars, by terrible things like this. Start with that and then let him pardon. Okay, so then there’s not justice to the individual person, but you’ve at least revealed the stakes of the injustice. That’s part of it.

The second part of it— people have violated state laws too. A lot of laws have been violated. A third part of it is that an investigation by the House and the Senate, which reveals what crimes people have committed, is also important. And it’s not all about the president. I mean, as I see it, it’s chiefly about deterring people from rallying around the president if he tries to rig the election in November. That seems to me to be the real stakes.

And whether in November people think, “I can do whatever I want for this president because I’m going to be fine,” or whether there’s some doubt about that. And I think there should be some doubt about that, that you’re going to be fine no matter what you do. And again, just to be clear, it’s not that I want personal revenge on any particular person. It’s that if a republic is going to survive, if the rule of law is going to survive, you can’t have people thinking, “No matter what I do, I’m going to be okay.”

The Rise of Christian Nationalism

KATIE COURIC: Let me turn to Christian nationalism for a moment because it’s having a moment.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Indeed.

KATIE COURIC: I would love to get your take on the rise of Christian nationalism in this country and around the world. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst recently released a poll that shows how Americans are feeling with the 250th anniversary of our country. And there’s a huge divide between Democrats and Republicans on the extent to which the US should be a Christian country. Nearly 80% of Republicans believe the US was founded as a Christian nation. 72% believe the government should advocate Christian values. 54% believe the US should be declared a Christian nation.

And I thought this was really disturbing. Another Public Religion Research Institute poll found that 56% of Republicans qualify as either adherents or sympathizers of Christian nationalism. What’s going on here?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. So Katie, you’ve called me professor 3 times already, and I’m going to take that as a license to make a really incredibly boring academic point, which is— or maybe it’s not so boring. Maybe it’s more fundamental. You also can’t do democracy without history. So those views that people hold, some of them are views about the past, and they’re wrong. The United States was not— I mean, there are issues on which you can be right and wrong, and this is one where you can be wrong. The United States was not in fact founded on Christian principles in any sense. It’s simply not true. And if more people had more classes in the first year of university about US history, they would know that. Or if more states allowed more teachers to teach the history of our country freely without restriction, more young people would know that. And that would be—

KATIE COURIC: And if there were fewer schools that were posting the Ten Commandments.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. Which violates the First Amendment of our Constitution. Then these numbers would be lower, right? So part of it— I deeply believe that part of it is the success of the attempt to blot out what US history actually is. That’s a big part of what’s going on.

And another part of what’s going on is that people would like to think that the country is founded on the views that are convenient to they themselves. And the nature of a democracy, if it’s going to work, any kind of system of division of powers, is that you’re going to be in a constant position of inconvenience. Nothing is ever going to be perfectly aligned with your own point of view. And that’s why Christian nationalism, or any analogous form of nationalism, which is based upon metaphysical views or truths that are inaccessible to normal investigation, is going to be dangerous because it means that I’m going to insist that the government works in a way which is convenient for my sense of right and wrong. And my sense of right or wrong goes beyond anything that I can communicate to anybody else. I got more to say about this topic though, so I hope there’s another question.

The Christianization of the Trump Administration

KATIE COURIC: Yes, there are. There are a lot of them. You’re going to get tired of me. It’s been fascinating and disturbing to watch the Christianization of this administration in so many different ways, whether you’re talking about Trump posting an AI image of himself as Jesus— no, sorry, I was really a doctor— to Pete Hegseth using scripture from Pulp Fiction, but mostly from the Bible, to legitimize the war in Iran, to attacking the Pope for calling him weak on crime and very liberal. As you’ve watched these things unfold, I’m curious, what do you make of them?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I have two takes. The first is that Trump is not fighting with Leo. He’s fighting with God. So Trump is fighting a proxy war with the Pope. The problem with the Pope is not that the Pope is the Pope. It’s not what the Pope says. The problem with the Pope is that the Pope is in fact a believer, which is not true of Trump. Trump is not a believer.

KATIE COURIC: This is a fascinating take that I’ve yet to hear.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Okay, I think it’s right. It’s not some kind of man-on-man thing. It’s that Trump believes that if you’re going to worship, you should worship Trump. And this is the problem. The Pope is not going to do that because the Pope happens to be a human being who believes in God. And a human being who actually believes in God is always going to be a problem for Trump because Trump’s notion of worship involves him being God. Right?

KATIE COURIC: So you’re saying he’s competing with God?

Trump’s Self-Deification and the November Election

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yes. Yes. And that’s the second point. We are at the self-deification state of the decline of our republic. It’s been known to happen before. The Roman Empire would be the famous example. It is not entirely far— it’s far from unknown for people at late stages in their careers and often sadly in late stages of the existence of their state to start trying to blur the line between themselves and what is holy.

And we can make fun of these images, we can laugh at them, we can laugh at Trump’s excuses afterwards, but that is what he is doing. He is portraying himself as a god. That is what he’s doing.

And this is my second take. I think it has a lot to do with November because, okay, let’s just take for granted that Trump doesn’t believe in God and doesn’t in fact think that he’s God. Why is he doing this in that case? He’s doing it because he’s about to face a total electoral bloodbath in November. He needs— he thinks he needs to have people who are committed to his side. His understanding of Christianity as someone who has never read the Bible, who wasn’t raised a Christian, who knows nothing about any of this stuff— but the version of Christianity that has come through to him is that Christianity is a view in which people will lay down their lives for what they believe in. And he wants people to be willing to lay down their lives for him.

So I think the self-deification thing— he has to show that he’s the object of worship because he’s got to get beyond a conventional politics where if he loses the election, his party loses power or he has to lose power. He has to get himself in some place where he thinks people are going to defend him because of who he is. So I take this very seriously. I don’t think it’s a joke. I think he has to fight with the Pope because the Pope represents belief in a God who’s not Trump. And I think he’s portraying himself as a god because he’s looking for a different political harmony. He’s looking for a different way of doing politics where people are going to do what he says, not because of the law or because he’s the elected president, but because he tells them so.

KATIE COURIC: Just because you’re a history professor, I’m curious, you mentioned the Roman Empire. When else has this happened? Would you say that this was something, for example, Hitler did?

Fascism, Political Religion, and Historical Parallels

TIMOTHY SNYDER: So in the history of fascism, the notion of a political religion is very important. The idea is that the leader— right? The Duce just means leader, Führer just means leader. The leader with a capital L mystically brings together all of the people without regard for laws or institutions or any of that stuff. And so in that notion of political religion, there is a kind of communion, right? And in that, at a minimum, what you can say is that the fascist leader is taking the place of a kind of mediator, right?

But you can take a step further and note that there really were Christofascist elements in some of these movements, especially Romania in the 1930s, but also Russia in the 2020s. Russia today is unmistakably a fascist country, and there are unmistakably “Christian” elements around it and the notion that— for example, the notion that people who die invading Ukraine will automatically be reincarnated or automatically go to heaven. That’s all happening already in Russia even if our eyes aren’t necessarily there.

So yes, in the history of fascism, we definitely have this kind of self-deification that is part of it, the notion that the leader is above everyone else, mystically communes with everyone. And sometimes there is the direct notion that this is connected to a kind of Christian story. Yeah.

KATIE COURIC: So I’m trying to kind of square that with the upcoming likely electoral defeat, right? So is he trying to say, “I’m above this”? I don’t quite understand how this inoculates him from what is likely a bloodbath, as you said, in November.

Recruiting for a Coup? Christian Nationalism and the November Elections

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. So with Trump, on the one hand, one has to point out all of his mistakes and all of his corruption. But on the other hand, one also has to be respectful of his political intuitions. You know, he’s been right before. He’s done things that have worked before. And so when he does something that maybe you and I find strange, I think it’s also important to ask, might he not have some political intuition here that maybe we wouldn’t have?

And in this case, the political intuition is this: he needs warriors, he needs followers, he needs people who are going to do things for him besides vote, because the ones who are going to show up to vote in November, they’re not going to be enough. And so if he’s going to stay in power, something else is going to have to happen around November, just like he needed something else to happen around January.

KATIE COURIC: Is he recruiting for a coup?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: He’s, yeah, that’s what I think it’s about. Or something like that, right? Like he’ll keep it vague just like he did the last time. Remember, this is a guy who even before he discovered he was Jesus was trying to get people to overcome an election and keep him in power. That already happened once. And if it can happen once, it can happen again.

And I think it’s reasonable to understand the self-deification in the context of the fact this is a guy who already once tried to overcome an election and stay in power. Now, if what he’s doing is saying, “My power is not actually based on those votes. My power is based on the fact that this is a Christian nation,” and who am I?

KATIE COURIC: That’s so scary and fascinating. It’s almost like he’s trying to recruit an army for a quote-unquote “holy war” if he doesn’t stay in power. Is that overstating it?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: No. I mean, I’m looking at you and I’m seeing Pete Hegseth talk. Like, that is exactly how Pete Hegseth— I mean, I went to the trouble of reading Pete Hegseth’s books, which therefore you don’t have to, but his basic concept is that it’s a war and the war is essentially inside the United States. And when he wants to change it from Secretary of Defense to Secretary of War, that’s what he has in mind. He’s not a serious warfighter where America’s going to defeat some other country. He has no skill for that. He has no patience for that. It’s fundamentally about trying to transform the US Armed Forces into something which could dominate the US.

Now, as you say, that’s scary, but it’s also going to fail, and it’s going to fail hard. But the reason why I’m trying to take some time to analyze this is that in order for it to fail, we have to see that it’s coming, right? Like, it’s absurd for Hegseth to define the Armed Forces of the United States as Christian warriors who should do the bidding of Christ. And it’s absurd for Donald Trump to define himself as Christ. However, those two things are happening simultaneously before our eyes. It is a kind of recruitment effort for something like a coup, but it really doesn’t have to work. And the only way it does work is if we don’t pay attention to it, don’t know what it is, don’t mock it.

Iran, Terrorism, and the Playbook for Consolidating Power

KATIE COURIC: That leads me, Tim, to Iran. You know, if in fact they really want to focus on the enemy within, why did they focus on the enemy on the outside?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I think they— I mean, by their own account, they thought this was going to be easy, like Venezuela. I mean, I think the whole point of Iran was to show our invincibility. And of course, it’s failed, right?

And I want to be clear, when I talk about these various stunts and games and the way that Christian nationalism is connected to November, or now the way that Iran is connected to November, I’m not saying that these things have to work. I’m saying that they are stunts that can be defeated and can be turned against the other side. So Iran is connected to the November elections in the way that if you win, then it’s all about how you’re invulnerable, you’re invincible. But in the present situation, what you do is you say anybody who— if the war is still going on, anybody who opposes us is supporting the Iranians. And if God forbid there’s some kind of terrorist attack inside the US, you blame the opposition as well as the Iranians or whatever mixture seems convenient to you. That’s where you are now. That’s how you would play it. And again, I say this as a historian who knows that these kinds of things are fairly routine, and I talk about it to inoculate us against it.

KATIE COURIC: In your recent Substack called “The Next Coup Attempt,” you write, as the war lengthens, the war with Iran, the chance that it will be exploited for a coup attempt increases. How so?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah, I mean, I just want to start by saying this is a standard situation. So we’ve got to abstract away from, “We’re America, this stuff doesn’t happen here.” We have to abstract away from, “That sounds frightening, I don’t want to hear about it.” And just note that it is very normal in a situation of attempted regime change to take advantage of a terrorist attack, a real one, a fake one, one that’s not clear whether it’s real or not.

Hitler came to power in part because the Reichstag fire was set on— the Reichstag, the German parliament, was set on fire by somebody. It’s still debated who, but it turns out it doesn’t matter because you can take advantage of that. Vladimir Putin, who I think it’s fair to say is the man on Earth that Trump most adores, came to power in part because of self-terrorism. The Russian secret services actually put bombs in Russian apartment buildings and killed Russians in order to claim that these were Chechens, Muslims, who did it, and to justify a war. And that war then drove Putin into popularity and into his first election as president. And I mention those examples just to try to make this normal, not in the sense that it should happen, but normal in the sense that it does.

KATIE COURIC: It does. And you even mentioned Viktor Orbán too.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Right. And so Orbán, yeah, just— I mean, 3 weeks ago now, Orbán claimed that there was a terrorist attack and it was bad, it was bad Ukrainian terrorists, but it didn’t work. And this is the important thing. We know from history that people try this kind of thing and it could be real, it could be fake, or maybe you don’t know whether it’s real or fake, but what you do know is that this is a way that people try to consolidate power and make elections meaningless. And once you know that, you’re making it much less likely to happen, because if you know it, then you can recognize it and you can say, okay, no, we’re not going to go along with this sort of thing.

KATIE COURIC: I thought that was so interesting. And you write that the Iranians probably wouldn’t carry out a terrorist attack on U.S. soil because they’re smart enough to know that it would work to Donald Trump’s advantage and he would use it for propaganda purposes, right? I mean, I don’t know if that’s necessarily— hopefully that will come to pass, but it’s more of the creation of a terrorist situation or the faking, the head fake, right?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I think with the— I mean, again, knock on wood, for all of this stuff. We don’t want any of these things to happen. But I think with these guys, the head fake is much more likely, the Orbán-style thing where you claim— I’m sorry to say it, but it’s just not such a stretch of the imagination for Kash Patel to wake up one morning and say, “Oh, our guys have arrested unknown actors planting a bomb such and such.” And then 3 days later, we find out that it’s unfortunate cooperation of the Iranians, the Democrats, and whatever, right? I’m afraid that does not really stretch my imagination. I don’t think it should stretch anybody’s imagination. I think that version, the head fake, is the most likely.

But this is also important— we do have terrorist attacks in the United States every so often, and we are more likely to have one now just regardless of the war in Iran, because the specific agencies that are tasked at the prevention of terrorism, whether it’s in DOD or FBI or in a number of other agencies, those things have been stripped down or eliminated. So institutionally, we’ve made it a lot easier. The FBI special agents who should be working on this are doing border control. So institutionally, we’re inviting a terrorist attack.

And so the other thing I want to say is, if it does happen, God forbid, I’m afraid we cannot trust this president and the people around him to accurately characterize what happened. Now, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t trust local police or local journalists or people who do serious investigations. I’m not saying that everything has to be some kind of impossible conspiracy. On the contrary, what I’m saying is that it’s predictable that the president will try to use such a thing if, God forbid, it happens. But if it does happen, we should know that the last person we can believe about it, again, sadly, is the president of the United States. And the people we should believe are the ones who are actually doing local investigations and following the facts and trying to figure it out.

KATIE COURIC: Well, it’s sort of like those ICE murders, right? You know, immediately Kristi Noem and people from the administration were saying that they basically deserved to have that happen to them, that the agents were acting in self-defense. And that’s sort of the party line. But then when you saw the videotape, right, it told another story.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. I mean, whatever— I wish I didn’t have to say this, but the ICE examples confirm it. Whatever happens, no matter how terrible it is for how many Americans, the president is going to make a story about it which is convenient for him, and him alone, and the preservation of his power. And as a nation, we just can’t afford to go along with whatever that story is.

KATIE COURIC: So be skeptical.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Be skeptical. Take your time. Dig in. Wait for the investigations. Yeah.

The Midterms, Election Integrity, and What We Must Do

KATIE COURIC: I want to end by asking you about the midterms, because so many people are concerned about free and fair elections. And you’ve touched upon how the war might be used to manipulate voters, right? And you talk about other ways like the steady hand that George W. Bush used to have a continuation of leadership, especially during wartime. But what about the efforts by the Trump administration to rig the elections? I guess I just have to say it very simply.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. Well, first of all, no matter how unfair an election is, you vote because you can win unfair elections. We started with Hungary. Hungary was at least as unfair as anything in the US is going to be, pound for pound, and they still won an overwhelming landslide victory. So even if it’s unfair, you still vote. And even if it’s unfair, you still mobilize people to vote, and you still— like, you treat the unfairness of it as a rallying cry, like, yeah, we got to climb this mountain, but we can climb this mountain.

And the third thing is, this goes back to themes of our conversation. You have to make it clear to folks who might or might not rig an election that if it doesn’t work out, like if it’s not as rigged as well as they think, they’re going to be investigated. And so they’re taking risks in doing this. You have to try to deter them. And another reason why you protest, and we talked about this, is also to deter, right? If you have mass mobilization potential, you’re going to make it less likely that people are going to try to rig elections.

And so when you bring it all together, the story is that, yeah, there are things to be frightened about. Sure, they’re going to try, but whether they succeed depends on how earnestly and how well organized we are beforehand, because things can be defeated, things can be deterred, and you can still win in the end.

The attitude that you can’t have though is, “I’m just going to wait for the election for the votes to be counted.” If that’s your attitude, then you may well lose and something terrible may well happen. If your attitude is, “I’m going to get organized, I’m going to register voters, I’m going to make sure I’m going to vote, I’m going to protest, I’m going to treat the election as part of an overall moment of self-defense and self-transformation,” then things are probably going to turn out fine.

KATIE COURIC: What are you most worried about? You told us what we need to do, what we need to be aware of, what we shouldn’t be complacent about.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: About?

KATIE COURIC: When you look at November or even the 2028 elections in this country, what are you most concerned about?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I’m not somebody who worries. I try to be somebody who—

KATIE COURIC: Seriously?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: No, I’m not. So I’m somebody who tries to note the kinds of things that can happen, right? So On Tyranny is about the kinds of things which have happened in history. And the reason why history is so important is that if you know what’s happened in the past, that gives you an advantage over all those people in the past, and you got to use that advantage.

And so it’s not that I’m worried about this or that, it’s that I want to put in front of us the possible things that could happen, right? And I’ve done this before. Like I said, for example, I predicted that Trump would try to steal the last presidential election, and I was right, and a lot of other people were wrong. But I didn’t predict that because I was worried. I predicted it because it was transparently obvious that he was going to do it, and it fit all kinds of historical patterns.

And so if we’re talking about things that could happen between now and November, it’s not that I’m worried. It’s that I know these things are possible. And if we know they’re possible, we can feel better. If we know what the particular possibilities are, then we feel better because we know what we can do to prevent them, right? Because you’re never going to win by saying, “Oh, this is America and this stuff is impossible.” Then you get clobbered. The way you win is you say, “We’re living in history and there are certain tricks they can try and here’s how you respond and here’s how you turn them against them.”

So no, I’m serious. I don’t worry about stuff. I try to identify stuff and then I try to rally people to do things. And there’s a basic emotional political truth underneath all this, which is that when you do things, you feel better. When you do things together with other people, you feel better.

These conversations like the ones we’re having now are very important, but there’s something I think more important, which is that people recognize that even if you don’t have the analysis exactly right, even if you’re not sure exactly what the thing is that’s going to happen, the most important thing for democracy is to work together before the election, is to feel your own power before the election, is to exercise solidarity before the election. To change yourself a little bit inside from the person who was worrying, from the person who was acting before the election.

Because if the election goes your way, afterwards, you’re going to be the person you were before. And if the person you were before was worrying, afterwards, what are you ready for? But if you became the person that was a little more active before the election and you win, then you’re prepared to turn that election into some kind of transformation.

Closing Remarks

KATIE COURIC: Professor Timothy Snyder, thank you so much for coming in and letting me monopolize your afternoon. It’s been a—

TIMOTHY SNYDER: It’s really been a pleasure, and I’d love to do it again.

KATIE COURIC: Thank you. Thanks so much.

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