DeVega, Chauncey. “Historian Timothy Snyder: “It’s pretty much inevitable” that Trump will try to stage a coup and overthrow democracy” ‘Yale historian and author of the new book "On Tyranny" says we may have one year left to save American democracy VIDEO’ (01 May 2017) Salon.

  Donald Trump; Timothy Snyder (Credit: Getty/Aude Guerrucci/Penguin Random House/Ine Gundersveen)

  American democracy is in crisis. The election of Donald Trump feels like a state of emergency made normal.

  Trump has threatened violence against his political enemies. He has made clear he does not believe in the norms and traditions of American democracy — unless they serve his interests. Trump and his advisers consider a free press to be enemies of his regime. Trump repeatedly lies and has a profoundly estranged relationship with empirical reality. He uses obvious and naked racism, nativism and bigotry to mobilize his voters and to disparage entire groups of people such as Latinos and Muslims.

  Trump is threatening to eliminate an independent judiciary and wants to punish judges who dare to stand against his illegal and unconstitutional mandates. In what appears to be a violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, Trump is using the office of the presidency to enrich himself, his family and his inner circle by peddling influence and access to corporations, foreign countries and wealthy individuals. Trump and his representatives also believe that he is above the law and cannot be prosecuted for any crimes while in office.

  What can the American people do to resist Donald Trump? What lessons can history teach about the rise of authoritarianism and fascism and how democracies collapse? Are there ways that individuals can fight back on a daily basis and in their own personal lives against the political and cultural forces that gave rise to Trump’s movement? How long does American democracy have before the poison that Donald Trump and the Republican Party injected into the country’s body politic becomes lethal?

  In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University. He is the award-winning author of numerous books including the recent “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” and “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.” Snyder’s new book, “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” explores how the American people can fight back against Donald Trump’s incipient authoritarian regime.

  Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. A longer version can be heard on my podcast, available on Salon’s Featured Audio page.

1.       The election of Donald Trump is a crisis for American democracy. How did this happen?

2.       We asked for it by saying that history was over in 1989 [with the end of the Cold War]. By saying that nothing bad could [ever] happen again, we were basically inviting something bad to happen.

  Our story about how nothing could [ever] go wrong was a story about how human nature is the free market and the free market brings democracy, so everything is hunky-dory — and of course every part of that story is nonsense. The Greeks understood that democracy is likely to produce oligarchy because if you don’t have some mechanism to get inequality under control then people with the most money will likely take full control.

  With Trump, one sees the new variant of this where a candidate can run by saying, “Look, we all know — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — that this isn’t really a democracy anymore.” He doesn’t use the words but basically says, “We all know this is really an oligarchy, so let me be your oligarch.” Although it’s nonsense and of course he’s a con man and will betray everyone, it makes sense only in this climate of inequality.

3.       In my writing and interviews, I have consistently referred to Donald Trump as a fascist. I have received a great deal of resistance to that claim. Do you think this description is correct? If not, then what language should we use to describe Donald Trump?

4.       One of the problems with American discourse is that we just assume everybody is a friendly democratic parliamentarian pluralist until proven otherwise. And then even when it’s proven otherwise we don’t have any vocabulary for it. He’s a “dictator.” He’s an “authoritarian.” He’s “Hitler.” We just toss these words around.

  The pushback that you are talking about is 95 percent bad. Americans do not want to think that there is an alternative to what we have. Therefore, as soon as you say “fascism” or whatever it might be, then the American response is to say “no” because we lack the categories that allow us to think outside of the box that we are no longer in.

5.       Is this a function of American exceptionalism?

6.       Yes, it is. We made a move towards intellectual isolationism in a world where no kind of isolationism is possible. The fact that democracies usually fail is a rule which can’t apply to us. If you examine American society, there are high points and low points. But there is certainly nothing which puts us in a different category than other people who have failed, whether it’s historically or whether it’s now.

  I don’t want to dodge your question about whether Trump is a fascist or not. As I see it, there are certainly elements of his approach which are fascistic. The straight-on confrontation with the truth is at the center of the fascist worldview. The attempt to undo the Enlightenment as a way to undo institutions, that is fascism.

  Whether he realizes it or not is a different question, but that’s what fascists did. They said, “Don’t worry about the facts; don’t worry about logic. Think instead in terms of mystical unities and direct connections between the mystical leader and the people.” That’s fascism. Whether we see it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we forget, that is fascism.

  Another thing that’s clearly fascist about Trump were the rallies. The way that he used the language, the blunt repetitions, the naming of the enemies, the physical removal of opponents from rallies, that was really, without exaggeration, just like the 1920s and the 1930s.

  And Mr. [Steve] Bannon’s preoccupation with the 1930s and his kind of wishful reclamation of Italian and other fascists speaks for itself.

7.       How did the news media and others get this so wrong? Why did they underestimate the threat posed by Donald Trump and his movement?

8.       What we ended up with, from Bill Clinton onward, is a status quo party and an “undo the system” party, where the Democrats became the status quo party and the Republicans became the “undo the system” party. In that constellation it’s very hard to think of change because one party is in favor of things being the way they are, just slightly better, and the other party has this big idea of undoing everything, although it’s unclear what that really means in practice. So no one is actually articulating how you address the problems of the day, the greatest of which would be inequality. When neither party is creative, then it’s hard for scholars to get their ideas into meaningful circulation.

9.       Why is Trump not being held accountable for all of his failures, scandals and incompetence?

10.   Mr. Trump is primarily a television personality. As such, he is judged by that standard. This means that a scandal does not call forth a response; it calls forth the desire for a bigger scandal. It just whets the appetite for a bigger scandal because a television serial has to work on that logic. It’s almost as though he has to produce these outrageous things because what else would he be doing?

  Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chauncey can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

Johnson, Adam. "Timothy Snyder Tries to Put Himself to the Top of the New York Times Best-seller List." (02 May 2017) Twitter.

Jilani, Zaid. “Barack Obama Is Using His Presidency to Cash In, But Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter Refused” (01 May 2017) The Intercept.

  Defenders of Barack Obama’s decision to do things like accept a $400,000 check for a speech to a Wall Street brokerage house argue that the former president might as well cash in — everyone else does.

  That was Daily Show host Trevor Noah’s defense of Obama. “People are like why doesn’t he not accept the money? No, f*** that,” Noah said. “So the first black president must also be the first one to not take money afterwards? No no no my friend. He can’t be the first of everything! F*** that, and f*** you. Make that money, Obama!”

  This argument, while common, is based on historical ignorance. It assumes that presidents have always found a way to leverage their political connections post-presidency to make money from interest groups and wealthy political actors.

  But that isn’t the case.

  It used to be the norm for presidents to retire to ordinary life after their stint in the White House — just ask Harry Truman.

  When the Democratic president was getting ready to leave the White House in 1953, he was approached by many employers. The Los Angeles Times noted that if he was “unemployed after he leaves the White House it won’t be for lack of job offers … but [he] has accepted none of them.”

  One of those job offers was from a Florida real estate developer, asking him to become a “chairman, officer, or stockholder, at a figure of not less than $100,000” — the sort of position that is commonplace today for ex-politicians. Presumably, had Truman taken the position, it would have been a good deal for both parties: the president’s prestige and connections would also enrich the company.

  Truman declined. “I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the presidency,” he wrote of his refusal to influence-peddle.

  Although he had access to a small pension from his military service, Truman had little financial support after leaving office. He moved back into his family home in Independence, Mo., and insisted on being treated like anyone else. He would tell people not to call him “Mr. President,” and settled on a fairly ordinary routine once he was back in Independence. He would take a morning walk through the town square. He kept an office nearby where he would answer mail from Americans. He chose to engage with just about anyone who walked into his office — not only people who wrote him big checks, or invited him onto their private yachts and private islands.

  “Many people,” he once said, “feel that a president or an ex-president is partly theirs — they are right to some extent — and that they have a right to call upon him.” Indeed, his office number was even listed in a nearby telephone directory.

  He eventually agreed to write a memoir for Life magazine, but it was a lengthy project that provided far from luxurious stipends.

  Truman’s modest life post-presidency moved Congress in 1958 to establish a pension system that provides an annual cash payout as well as expenses for an office and staff.

  Gerald Ford nevertheless shattered precedent when he joined the boards of corporations such as 20th Century Fox, hit the paid speech circuit, and was made an honorary director by Citigroup.

  But his successor, Jimmy Carter, who grew up in a modest home in Plains, Georgia, did not follow Ford’s example. He refused to become a professional paid speaker or join corporate boards. He moved back to Plains, and was welcomed home by a crowd of neighbors and supporters.

  He quickly made himself busy as a nonprofit founder and a volunteer diplomat. He did make money post-presidency — but by serving ordinary people, not elites.

  He wrote dozens of best-selling books bought by millions of people across the world — the post-presidency equivalent of small donors.

  Carter explained his thinking to the Guardian in 2011, telling them that his “favorite president, and the one I admired most, was Harry Truman. When Truman left office he took the same position. He didn’t serve on corporate boards. He didn’t make speeches around the world for a lot of money.”

  The presidents who came after did not choose the same path. At a time when Japan was a major trade rival with the United States, Ronald Reagan flew to Japan for a series of paid speeches after he left office. He accepted $2 million for a pair of 20-minute speeches to the Fujisankei Communications Group. An additional $5 million was arranged for expenses related to the visit.

  Both Bushes also joined the paid speech circuit, and the Clintons made over $100 million from banks and other corporations, shortly after the Clinton presidency deregulated Wall Street. “I never made any money until I left the White House,” Bill Clinton lamented to a student group in 2009. “I had the lowest net worth, adjusted for inflation, of any president elected in the last 100 years, including President Obama. I was one poor rascal when I took office. But after I got out, I made a lot of money.”

  Obama was hardly facing poverty. He already has a $65 million book deal and that $200,000 annual pension.

  By joining the paid speech circuit — his spokesperson Eric Schultz told the press that paid speechmaking will be a fixture for the former president — Obama was making a conscious choice.

  Obama could have been like Truman or Carter, but instead chose to be like Bush and Clinton.

  Top photo: Former President Barack Obama listens as participants speak during a forum at the University of Chicago, on April 24, 2017.

White, Erin. “Black Nouveaux Riches. Research Required.” (01 May 2017) Afropunk, The Establishment.

  For some naively optimistic reasons, I find myself once again surprised and disgusted by the hypocritical anti-black criticisms over former President Obama’s paid speaking engagements that are being made by media outlets and politicians like Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
  Criticism that scarcely seems relevant compared to issues surrounding our current President who is also being investigated by the FBI and Congress, and who knows what else. The same President who has used the office as a promotion tool for his personal family businesses, since the inauguration.
  The most breathtaking and bold example of this being that fact that every time Trump’s visits his personal business, Mar-a-Lago, much of the millions of dollars needed to accommodate the trip—money paid by tax-payers—trickles right down into President Trump’s pockets. He’s effectively siphoning our money into his own bank account while being our President.
  Likewise is true with the money that the secret service and NYPD spend to make accommodations inside Trump Tower, where Trump is said to be charging them a fee for the rooms they use to protect his family. And I’m assuming Kushner and the Trump sons stay in Trump properties when they’re traveling for “business“—for the White House or their own.
  All of this grandiose spending is still coming from the guy who bragged about not paying taxes in the first place during a Presidential debate against Hillary Clinton.
  But, okay.

  Now, cashing in on the presidency after one leaves office is a pretty standard practice. Yes, there were exceptions like Truman and Jimmy Carter, but since that Reagan, the Bushes and the Clintons have all continued making preposterous sums of post-Presidency cash. In one case, Ronald Reagan accepted $2 million dollars to speak for 20 minutes at Fujisankei Communications Group in Japan. In addition to $5 million in accommodation-related expenses, The Intercept reports.
  The point I’m trying to make isn’t that paying Presidents a lot of money to stand in front of rooms and write meticulously edited memoirs isn’t a problem. We can definitely get into the ethics of that, but since Trump’s America has zero interest in ethics when it comes to capitalism and, now, flat-out plutocracy, spare me the disingenuous outrage that the first Black President of the United States isn’t lifting any more fingers for these white folks for free.

  * Erin White is an Atlanta-based writer and AFROPUNK's editorial and social media assistant. You can follow her on Tumblr or friend her on Facebook. Have a pitch or an inquiry? Shoot her an email at erin@afropunk.com.