Renowned historian Timothy Snyder leveled two explosive accusations against President Donald Trump: that his proposed 50% defense budget increase could be a bribe to secure military loyalty for a coup attempt, and that a staged domestic terror attack is his best remaining path to nullifying elections.
Snyder, a Yale historian recognized as one of America’s foremost scholars of authoritarianism, made both cases in a Saturday Substack post laying out five historical scenarios through which Trump could exploit the ongoing U.S.-Iran war to nullify the 2026 midterms and seize permanent power.
On the defense budget, Snyder was unambiguous.
“The war has not been run in a way that brings military commanders to trust the president. Again, one has to see Trump’s proposal to increase the defense budget by nearly 50% as a kind of desperate bribe. There are sound strategic reasons why it is a terrible idea, but there is also a political one,” he wrote.
Snyder argued the proposed increase is “meant as a payoff for officers, soldiers, and sailors — people he has openly disrespected his entire life, people whose funerals he treats as an opportunity to sell his own branded merchandise — to assist him in a coup against Americans.”
On the false flag scenario, Snyder drew a direct line to Vladimir Putin’s 1999 apartment bombings, which were staged attacks that helped launch Putin’s march toward dictatorship. He called Trump “Putin’s client in the White House.”
“Some variant of terrorism is Trump’s best bet. And so one should be (preemptively, now) skeptical of Trump’s account of any future terrorist attack; we can be sure that, whatever its true origins and character, Trump will provide a self-serving account meant to serve a coup and a dictatorship,” Snyder wrote.
He warned Trump would exploit any such event to “discredit or undo elections.”
Snyder argued Trump’s position is ultimately weak, but only if Americans actively resist.
“He can only carry out a coup if we decide to obey in advance: to pretend that wartime pretexts for coups are never used, although history instructs us that they are; and then to offer our surprise to Trump as the unique political resource that can transform his weak position into a strong one,” he noted.
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