'Just by existing, he's extended this war': Timothy Snyder on Trump, Russia and Ukraine

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

60% : Trump isn't in power yet but Musk, the world's richest man, chief sponsor of Trump's comeback, appears to be telling the president-elect what to do.
59% : The reason we have Lesson One of On Tyranny is because we can't count on the non-regime-proximate oligarchs to do the right thing.
58% : Trump is a little guy, and Musk is a big guy when it actually comes to having money.
55% : I think it's because it it harmonizes both with 1970s Soviet dissidents, or anti-communist dissidents, whose main thing was to kind of be eccentric and orthogonal and to do their own thing, rather than be normal or normalized, and with the wisdom of the Nazi takeover in the 1930s, where there is, in fact, a German phrase, which is 'vorausschauender Gehorsam', which means 'obedience which leaps out ahead', or 'jumps out ahead'.
54% : "I think the throughline for Trump, going all the way back to the 1980s and his visit to the Soviet Union, through his first presidential campaign and up to the present, has always been submissiveness towards the power in the Kremlin.
54% : "Why it was in my mind?
52% : But the fact that Trump was there meant ...
50% : And they've been saying for a year in their media that they need Trump to win.
50% : "Snyder also laments as "laughable" the behavior of the US supreme court, which "cleared the landscape as best it could for Trump to return.
49% : "Unless Trump breaks it off right now, he's going to be in this kind of dependent relationship for the rest of the way, because you get used to people giving you money.
48% : And because of that, Trump was able to come back.
46% : "People can't help but think that Trump has money, but he doesn't.
44% : "I think we overestimate Trump and we underestimate Musk," he says.
43% : And I think the existence of Trump and the possibility that he would be president is itself a cause of this war, because [it] was something Russia could factor in the whole time.
42% : Snyder has written extensively on Trump and Russia, not least in The Road to Unfreedom (2018).
42% : So one thing I slightly worry about is that as we write about how all the big guys are capitulating [to Trump] in advance, we implicitly create that as a norm.
41% : And when Trump needs money for anything, he's going to be asking Musk.
40% : Trump is now screening candidates for cabinet positions on the basis of whether they're willing to repeat the big lie that he won the election in 2020 and a lot of his voters believe it, and therefore despise others who don't.
40% : But we didn't get [resistance to Trump] out of our American Republicans.
40% : And I think if you were a friend of Trump, you would be worried.
33% : "Snyder has said Trump is Russia's "only chance of winning the war".
32% : But so far in his entire career, Trump has seemed to enjoy being bullied by Putin.
30% : They could tell themselves: 'We just need to stay on the battlefield to January '25 and then the floodgates will open for us, because we're going to have our guy.'"If Trump didn't exist, if Trump had retired from politics, I think the whole Russian attitude towards this war would have been different.
29% : "The scenario is that Trump is made to understand that Vladimir Putin is bullying him and that Trump should therefore do the right thing.
29% : A New York judge said Carroll's claim Trump raped her was "substantially true".)
26% : Few believe that, though most do expect Trump to abandon Kyiv quickly.
25% : Trump lost power in 2020 but on 20 January 2025 he will take office again.
25% : (Trump was found liable for sexual abuse, not rape.
20% : Not long after, ABC News settled a defamation lawsuit over whether Trump could be said to have raped the writer E Jean Carroll.
19% : Trump blasted House Republicans, which scurried to think again.
10% : And all the threats that Trump is now going to issue - 'I'm going to primary people, I'm going to sue people' - Musk is going to pay for that, not Trump.

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