Historian Timothy Snyder: Trump lives in a fictional reality.
"[Trump] understands not the rules of reality, but the rules of fiction. So for him there's no such thing as lying, because there's no such thing as the truth. We're all just in this story together."
—Timothy Snyder, Levin Professor of History at Yale.
Please take the 1:28 minutes to watch this video--it's worth it. The unfortunate part about Trump living "in a fictional reality" is that he is dragging our nation into that "fictional reality" with him, and in the process is destroying what remains of democracy in the U.S.
TRANSCRIPT:
SNYDER: The first thing to understand about Mr. Trump is that he does inhabit a completely different mental world, and he inhabits it naturally and he inhabits it very gracefully. He lives in a world of fiction. Mr. Trump is not a traditional person who has made a career where he's had to deal with life around him. He's never actually been that successful in grappling with any particular element of reality. Where he has been successful is as a character on television. He's never been a successful businessman, but he has played a successful businessman on television. He understands not the rules of reality, but the rules of fiction. So for him there's no such thing as lying, because there's no such thing as the truth. We're all just in this story together. So the ways in which he's able to bring us into the world are first of all, just by saying all the time things that aren't true. A typical politician will lie now and then, but a typical politician will also recognize the principle that there is truth, and so when caught in a lie might apologize. In Mr. Trump's case that never happens because he very specifically and intentionally wants to fill up the whole space with untruth, um to fill up everything with untruth so that we're confused. The second stage is once we get there, once he changes the office of the presidency so it's no longer about talking about the world, but instead about creating the story, then he says, Distrust everyone else. There's nothing really true, it's just my opinion and your opinion. And since I'm the president, and I have media behind me, in the end of the day it's going to be my opinion that matters. Once we get to that point, where everybody doubts everything, and it's only the person who has the most media or the biggest Twitter account who counts, at that point, it's very hard to have anything like a democracy. [This transcript was corrected for accuracy; punctuation & emphasis were added.]
[edited] __________________ About Timothy Snyder: According to Timothy Snyder's Bluesky account: He is the "Levin Professor of History at Yale. Author of On Freedom, On Tyranny, with 20 new lessons on Ukraine, Our Malady, Road to Unfreedom, Black Earth, and Bloodlands."
A shout out to @ladytaurach whose earlier post made me aware of this video, which unfortunately, Tumblr wouldn't allow me to add to her post.
