Yale history professor Timothy Snyder shared a warning on X (formerly Twitter) about what will happen if presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump wins back the White House in the 2024 election.
“Unless Trump loses, America ends,” he wrote in his first of a five-post thread.
Snyder, an expert on authoritarianism and the author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” said the U.S. Supreme Court has “made this clear” with its ruling on Monday that Trump has total immunity for “official” acts carried out when he was president.
“As has Trump himself. Over and over,” he added.
“Our enemies know this. Which is why they all, without exception, support Trump,” Snyder cautioned in further posts. “We have no excuse not to know this. And once we know it we can act. Each of us doing what we can, trusting one another, making contact.”
The historian concluded the thread, writing, “We can do this. If we each do what we can, this republic will go on, and this republic will get better.”
In 2021, Snyder warned how Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election result had been based on “personal charisma and signals to his followers and a few people in the Justice Department and hope.”
Back then, Trump was still toying with the idea of another presidential bid.
Snyder, though, predicted that a 2024 Trump attempt to flip a loss would be much, much different due to the “institutional machinery” now backing him.
“What we know historically is that a failed coup is a trial run for a successful coup,” Snyder said at the time. “Usually, when you fail in a coup, something happens to you — and Mr. Trump, nothing has happened to him.”