Thinking about...

In this video, I say the obvious about Trump’s proposal to increase the military budget by nearly 50%: it’s a bribe to officers and soldiers so that they will side with him when he tries to overthrow the Constitution and stay in power indefinitely.

This is where all the evidence points. If there is any consensus about Trump, it is that he is “transactional.” There is zero evidence that he has a notion of US interests. There is abundant evidence that he understands politics as a matter of people being paid off.

And that is the framework in which to understand his proposed military budget. He is paying people off. No other explanation fits the data.

Increasing the military budget from about a trillion dollars to about 1.5 trillion dollars makes no fiscal sense. We can’t pay for it without destroying basic government functions and soaking the American taxpayer. It makes no military sense. It is based upon no doctrinal innovation or review of technology. The “Trump-class” battleships it proposes are archaic, nonsensical, and more than a little embarrassing. The budget proposal makes no managerial sense. The Pentagon has never passed an audit, and Pete Hegseth has proven himself spectacularly unable to manage organizations of any kind. Putting an additional half a trillion dollars under his authority annually is superpower suicide.

The military budget proposal only makes political sense. But it does not make democratic political sense. It is not designed to be popular among the population at large. It makes authoritarian political sense. It is designed to popular among the people with guns who Trump imagines will help him control the population at large (and they should realize this, and they should be offended.) It shifts taxpayer money to soldiers and officers in exchange for their personal loyalty to an aspiring dictator. It is a bribe to stay in power as part of an attempt to change the regime of the United States. It is not a military budget but a military dictatorship budget.

Very often, when people say that Trump is “transactional,” they mean something like “just transactional”; he only cares about money, so in the end he cannot be that bad. But that is not where transactionalism leads: it leads to the basic reality that Trump has no notion of interests beyond his own, and will find it natural to take your money and spend it for his power.

Transactionalism, the conventional wisdom about Trump, leads to the conclusion that the military budget is a bribe for power. But if we need more evidence of the intention, it is all around us. Hegseth is purging the upper ranks of the armed services on the basis of politics. Both Hegseth and Trump speak about a future mission of the military against the “enemy within” in the “homeland.”

It’s a military dictatorship budget.

Seeing it in any other way, evaluating it in terms that are transparently inapplicable, makes it more likely to pass, and more likely that a future of American military dictatorship will come to pass.

None of this has to succeed. The military dictatorship budget can and should fail. But to make it fail, we have to see it for what it is.

I do my best to explain in the video. Please feel free to share it.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit snyder.substack.com/subscribe

The United States and Russia are both losing wars.

And they are losing wars that make no sense, in an uncanny folie à deux, to the benefit of China.

This video, which I filmed after dozens of meetings and public discussions in Europe this month, supplies an explanatory concept: the superloser.

A superloser is a leader of a great power, or (onetime) superpower, whose disastrous choices lead to a crash. He possesses a combination of skills that allow for a rise to personal power and the collapse of state power.

In the video I spell out the five C’s of the superloser phenomenon:

A conflict that is being lost, in the strong sense of a war: Iran for Trump, Ukraine for Putin.

A concept of power that is betrayed, by the war and generally, such that it is not only defeat that is at hand, but the continuous undermining of structures.

A corruption that makes national interests irrelevant; a shared example, one of many, is giving tax money to billionaires.

Cooperation with the other superloser, which somehow makes matters worse both for the other superloser and for the world; Trump’s nonsensical war, for example, funds Putin’s criminal war of aggression by raising oil prices, but Putin is still unable to win and now lacks excuses for failure.

A special superloser charisma, a subjective sense in society or the media that the superloser is somehow a strong man, which makes it harder to describe losses as such, and allows the damage to continue.

And there is of course a sixth C: China, which despite its own enormous problems is being handed a leading role in the world by the superlosers.

I will write this all out at some point, but for now I hope that this video will help you to make sense of the events of this year — or for that matter of the past few days, as both Trump and Putin have had to pay court to Xi in Beijing.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit snyder.substack.com/subscribe

If you are American, there is no particular reason you would have heard of Zbigniew Ziobro. He was one of the authors of the attempt to transform Poland into an authoritarian regime. When this was halted by the Polish elections of 2023, he fled to Hungary.

At that time Hungary was ruled by Viktor Orbán, who was building what seemed like an unstoppable authoritarian order. Ziobro, wanted in Poland for serious crimes, was welcomed by Orbán. But then Orbán too lost a dramatic election, and had to hand over power on Saturday.

When democracy wins, the losers go to America, it seems.

What was left for Ziobro? The United States. You might not have heard of Ziobro, but Donald Trump has.

One of the sad things about Trump’s attempt to bury American democracy is its lack of originality. The models are foreign, including people you have heard of, like Putin, people you likely have heard of, like Orbán, but also minor figures such as Ziobro.

Ziobro is a wanted man with no passport. The Trump White House just went to a good deal of trouble to bring him to the US.

This teaches us, once again, how much the Trump project us an international one. Americans are punished every day, but foreign authoritarian friends are remembered.

What does that say about us as a country, right now?

I reflect on this and other questions in this little video, filmed here in Poland.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit snyder.substack.com/subscribe

I talked with Professor Lawrence Lessig about his case that would effectively end Super PACs and dark money in politics. I think you’ll learn a lot from our conversation and hope you’ll check out EqualCitizens.US to learn more about their case and why it matters.

Thinking about... is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit snyder.substack.com/subscribe

“Superpower Suicide” is a concept to help understand the approach of the Trump regime to the rest of the world. We are fighting a war for no reason we can name, losing it, and covering our defeat with genocidal and apocalyptic propaganda. This is bad enough on its own; but I think this performance is symptomatic of something deeper — a systematic undoing of American power by Americans. In this video I stay close to very traditional accounts of the accumulation and maintenance of of state power, all of which indicate rapid and catastrophic decline as the result of specific choices in the last year. I don’t even mention one source of US power which is specifically modern: the international structures we built over decades to ensure our centrality, which the Trump

people are undoing. Many of the American fundamentals are still very sound, but a better future, or any kind of future at all, will depend on a sober reckoning with the present moment.

Thinking about... is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit snyder.substack.com/subscribe

I talked with journalist Terry Moran, who most recently was a reporter at ABC News and many other newsrooms. Our conversation spanned current events, from how we got here to what we all have to do on the other side of all of this.

Watch our full conversation here.

Thinking about... is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit snyder.substack.com/subscribe

I talked with Phillips O’Brien today about the Iran War, the Ukraine War, and other foreign affairs news. This is the second conversation Phillips and I have had recently, and I know you’ll learn as much from him as I do.

Here is the link to donate to Come Back Alive: https://savelife.in.ua/en/

Thinking about... is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit snyder.substack.com/subscribe

A quick video to remind you why we protest! I’ll be in Cincinnati tomorrow; there are thousands of protests to join across the country. Click here to see all of the locations and make your plans!

Please share this post.

My books that might be helpful.

Thinking about... is a reader-supported publication. Please subscribe.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit snyder.substack.com/subscribe

Here is a recording of my conversation with historian Heather Cox Richardson from yesterday. As two historians, we discussed the importance of history to make sense of our current moment, understanding freedom to build a better future, how people can meaningfully respond and resist, and more.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit snyder.substack.com/subscribe

Joe Kent never should have been director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Given his complete lack of qualifications and his sympathies for those who wish harm to Americans, the scandal is his appointment, not his resignation.

His resignation reveals a fault line in the Trump elite, but not one that does credit to anyone. In basic political terms, it might be suggestive that fighting a doomed war will make it harder rather than easier for Trump to steal the coming election.

In the video I sketch this out. If you find it helpful, please share.

Thinking about... is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit snyder.substack.com/subscribe