“Trump can be stopped,” but it requires one key fact to be recognized and used against him, according to a historian Sunday.
Renowned Yale Prof. Timothy Snyder, who previously said Putin wanted Trump to win the election because the former president shows our “system is rotten,” has also spoken out about the right-wing Supreme Court justices seeming to go off the rails when it comes to presidential immunity.
Now, he says four historical precedents will help us understand how Trump can be shut down politically on Venezuela. Those examples are the American intervention in Latin America, the second Iraq war, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the “fascist wars” featuring fascist regimes that were defeated in 1945.
The historian went on to say, “No one can be sure what Trump is thinking, but it is a reasonable guess that his purposes in extracting Maduro from Venezuela were domestic. The charges that have been filed against Maduro involve drugs rather than the more serious (and far easier to prove) acts of extra-judicial killings and torture of his regime.”
“The drug angle serves the political purpose of uniting the external and the internal enemy. Because the drug trade involves foreign as well as domestic actors, it allows the Trump people to claim that its political opponents are in the service of an international plot,” he added. “Like the issue of migration, a Trumpian ‘war on drugs’ might be used to create a larger paramilitary, along the lines of ICE.”
He also notes that, “Trump and his advisors seem to want the political gains of fighting a war without actually having to fight one. They want the short cut to fascism, claiming a huge victory right away, while tweeting about the enemies at home. But fascism requires not quick operations but real combat that endangers and thus engages civilians. Even assuming that Trump’s base and Americans generally support this Venezuela action, which is doubtful, it will be forgotten within days — unless it is escalated.”
“Putin was willing to follow the fascists of the 1930s into full-scare war combined with fascism at home. Trump would no doubt like that result; but it is unlikely that he is willing or able to go that far,” Snyder wrote. “Trump is weak at home, and he can be stopped — so long as the domestic political logic of foreign intervention is recognized and turned against him. This act of war is more about regime change in the United States than it was about anything in Venezuela. It only succeeds as fascism if Americans allow it to do so. If journalists and judges recognize the connection between foreign adventures and domestic authoritarianism, an act of violence abroad will discredit rather than accelerate our own transition towards authoritarianism. And with some work and some luck, we will get to our own next elections.”
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