Back on December 13, there was a Rachel Maddow special called We the People, in which she talked with Tim Snyder. (It's available as a podcast; so far I don't see video of it.) There was one part I thought should be transcribed...
RM: You wrote on your Substack recently that you're less worried that there will be a coast-to-coast, totally autocratic Trump dictatorship than you are worried about the idea that what Trump is doing to the country may pressure us — and damage us in such a way — that the country breaks up. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?
TS: Yeah, I'm actually a lot more worried about the republic breaking up than I am about coast-to-coast Trump authoritarianism. I think a lot of things would have to go right for them [for that to happen]. If you think about, from their point of view, what they're trying to do is actually quite hard, and their plans have been more or less exhausted at this point.
What I think is — we're in this kind of gray zone, where in pushing for coast-to-coast authoritarianism, they could break things. Right, so, reason number one is that they're doing this very unusual thing, historically, which is breaking the government as they make it more oppressive. That is not usually how you do regime change. You usually keep the government going and make it more repressive. But they're breaking the government.
Which means that there will be crises, I'm sad to say, and I wish we could stop it, but there will be epidemics, and terrorist attacks are much more likely. There are crises which could redound against the notion of having a central government, because the central government has failed so badly.
Also, if you're in states like California or Massachusetts or New York, possibly Illinois — at a certain point, you begin to wonder, what is the cost-benefit analysis of this whole thing that we are in? Maybe we haven't reached that point yet. But my goodness, you're paying an awful lot of tax money that goes to other parts of the country, or is just being pocketed by people around Trump, and at a certain point, one begins to wonder what the point of all that is.
And the other thing I worry about is the clash of federal institutions with each other. Because as Trump or the people around him — Miller especially — push federal institutions to do things they weren't meant to do, then they can start to fracture.
And also, I'm worried about the economy.
You put these things together, and I think the risk is greater that we'll have some kind of crack up.
The main reason I'm worried about this is the fundamental naïveté of the grifter. When you're infinitely cynical, you're also infinitely naive. And if you're a grifter and all you've ever done your whole life is grift people, then you live inside a grift bubble. And what you don't understand about the grift bubble is that in order for the grift bubble to keep getting bigger and bigger, you have to suck all the oxygen from the outside. You don't understand that your grift has limits — you think you can keep doing it and doing it.
So let's say that you're a person who was never rich, but pretended to be rich, and became president by pretending to be rich, and then got rich, and that was your grift.
Or let's say that you were a person who said you understand about poverty, and poverty is the result of gay people and billionaires and immigrants — and then you rise to power thanks to a gay billionaire immigrant. Let's say that's your schtick... [big laugh from the audience]
Snyder went on to talk some more about how the grift bubble bursts, but that's the part I recorded and have transcribed.
This fits with what Jane Coaston said on All In With Chris Hayes last Friday (December 26) about many (most) people within the Trump regime. She didn't talk about them as grifters per se, but rather as people with no interest in governing. They're only content creators who constantly feed the attention machine. Conflict and fear are the best fodder for what gets attention, so that's what they produce.
So here we are with the latest story of conflict and fear they've landed on: every Somali immigrant is said to be stealing from innocent white American taxpayers. As the Trump family illegally makes billions, and Trump pardons people who have individually stolen more than the entire Minnesota fraud.
And of course, it's one more thing that helps to undermine belief in government as part of a stable society and necessary to achieve fairness across all classes of people.
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