#Trumpomuskovia

[tomorrowusa]

Historian and writer on democracy Timothy Snyder says that there should be no question as to who is dominant in the Musk-Trump relationship.

Allies and aides to Donald Trump should be increasingly concerned by Elon Musk’s proximity to and influence on the US president-elect, the Yale historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder said. “Trump is a little guy, and Musk is a big guy when it actually comes to having money,” Snyder said. “And I think if you were a friend of Trump, you would be worried.” [ ... ] Snyder expects that Trump’s soon-to-be home, the White House, will be a stage for uncomfortable and damaging discord between the president-elect and his most powerful ally, the world’s richest man. “I think we overestimate Trump and we underestimate Musk,” Snyder said. “People can’t help but think that Trump has money, but he doesn’t. He’s never really had money. He’s never even really claimed to have money. His whole notion is that you have to believe that he has money. But he’s never been able to pay his own debts. He’s never been able to finance his own campaigns. “Musk, with an amount of money that was meaningless to him, was able to finance Trump’s campaign, essentially.” [ ... ] Since Trump’s victory in November, from Mar-a-Lago in Florida to Notre Dame in Paris, Musk has been constantly at Trump’s side, earning the satirical nickname “first buddy” but also an appointment with the biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy to jointly head the “department of government efficiency”, or “Doge”, a group tasked with meeting Trump’s wildly ambitious campaign promise of slashing trillions from federal spending. Considering instances of Musk’s apparent influence over Trump as the president-elect has struggled to control congressional Republicans – an unruly party already split on how to continue funding the government they also want to defund – Snyder said: “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. And when Trump needs money for anything, he’s going to be asking Musk. “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 … and I think if you were a friend of Trump, you would be worried.”

Prof. Snyder has invented a name for this peculiar relationship.

“So I thought about this dependency position,” Snyder said. “I was going to call it Muskotrumpovia, because I think Musk is a more important person, but Trumpomuskovia had a nicer ring to it. “And also, I wanted Muskovia because I wanted the idea of Russia to be there in the background, because a lot of smart Russia hands are saying this all the time: this is kind of like the 1990s in Russia. You have the doddering, rich-but-not-very-rich president [Boris Yeltsin], surrounded by more youthful, more active, ambitious oligarchs. That’s the kind of scenario [America is] in.”

Trump thinks he's Vladimir Putin but he's more like Boris Yeltsin – but stupid instead of drunk like ol' Boris.

[azspot]

Russia's recent history of oligarchy and dictatorship offers some suggestions as to how Trumpomuskovia might evolve. Like Trump today, Boris Yeltsin after the Russian elections of 1996 was an aging president who owed both his election and his stature to the oligarchs around him. (We have the word "oligarchy" from the ancient Greeks, for whom it meant "rule by the few"; its present meaning, "rule by the wealthy few" we owe to Russia in the 1990s.) Yeltsin's term was a contest for power among oligarchs, who saw themselves as the true and correct holders of power. As Yeltsin become ever more incapable of holding the responsibilities of power, the oligarchs undertook what they called "Operation Successor," a search for a replacement for Yeltsin who would seem plausible to Russians but who would do their bidding. Their choice, Vladimir Putin, did not pan out as they expected; he used the power of the state to dominate them and to become the chief plutocrat.

Why is America "Trumpomuskovia"?

[mtr-amg]

In light of such concerns, Snyder – whose 2018 book The Road to Unfreedom was in large part about Trump and Russia – discussed a name for the incoming, second Trump administration that he recently coined. “So I thought about this dependency position,” Snyder said. “I was going to call it Muskotrumpovia, because I think Musk is a more important person, but Trumpomuskovia had a nicer ring to it. “And also, I wanted Muskovia because I wanted the idea of Russia to be there in the background, because a lot of smart Russia hands are saying this all the time: this is kind of like the 1990s in Russia. You have the doddering, rich-but-not-very-rich president [Boris Yeltsin], surrounded by more youthful, more active, ambitious oligarchs. That’s the kind of scenario [America is] in.”

‘Trump is a little guy, Musk is a big guy’: historian predicts trouble for president-elect | Books | The Guardian

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Timothy Snyder at Thinking About...:

1. Novelty. We need a new name for the coming regime because we need to recognize the novelty of the situation -- legally, structurally, and morally. A new constitutional regime is emerging, in which the Supreme Court has tried to place a single individual above the law, and in so doing has purported to void a section of the Constitution (the Insurrection Clause, section three of the Fourteenth Amendment). We are already in a power structure in which money has displaced citizenry. We now have people in power who no longer pretend to care about votes and elections. The sitting president tried to overthrow the previous presidential election. His co-ruler, Elon Musk, spent more on the last campaign than all of the small donors put together. He and other oligarchs chose the vice-president. Not just Trump but Musk believe they can simply threaten Americans with persecution and violence. Both use language that is redolent of fascism to define Americans as enemies deserving of punishment.

2. Personalism. Part of the novelty is the prominence of the two personalities. This is why the regime should bear the personal names "Musk" and "Trump."

Never before have people been bombarded with as much propaganda about two potential rulers as in the case of Musk and Trump. Both men are influencers with social media platforms. They both seem to believe that it is their personality that entitles them to rule. Trump, after all, tried to keep power even after losing an election in 2020. His team was preparing to contest the results in 2024. Given these habits and this attitude, he cannot regard himself as representing anything other than himself. And Musk, of course, was not elected at all. He spent an invisibly tiny fraction of his huge wealth on bribes for Trump voters, demoralization ads for Harris voters, and other support. He can't feel that he owes voters anything, since he came to power without anyone voting for him. And, given that the amount of money he spent was meaningless to him personally, he can hardly respect Trump voters for having been swayed by it. Uzbekistan is named after a Mongol raider. Mozambique is named after a wealthy trader. Russia is named after medieval slavers who captured and sold the common people. We should consider a name for an American regime that recognizes the centrality of exploitation. And thus Trumpomuskovia.

3. Russia Why the "Muskovia" part of "Trumpomuskovia"? It is Musk's name, of course. But it is also a name for Russia, and this is an association we need. The Ukrainians call Russia "Moscovia," which corresponds to the name one will find, for example, on the most famous seventeenth-century map of the region. The historical name in English was "Muscovy."

"Muskovia" in "Trumpomuskovia" recalls a few essential connections to the current Putin regime. The first is that Musk himself is a Putinist. He communicates regularly with Putin. For two years he has repeated Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine. (The same is true of his fellow South African oligarch, David Sachs, who has been named to a position of responsibility in Trumpomuskovia. Sachs is a relentlessly humorless Putinist known for his social media transcriptions of Russian war propaganda. His Putinism is so literal that he managed to get himself booed at the Republican National Convention.) And, of course, Trump's public record thus far has been one of submission to Putin. He has trained his followers to speak of a "Russia hoax," and will try to appoint Kash Patel as head of the FBI precisely to punish everyone who notes that Putin has supported Trump and his presidential campaigns. But Trump's efforts suppress only confirm the basic truth: Putin strongly preferred Trump over Clinton, Biden, and Harris, and acted to bring his preference to life. The Russian internet videos supporting Trump and the dozens of bomb threats on election day were just the brazen and most recent examples of a continuing campaign.

4. Oligarchy. The stronger connection to Russia, though, is a resemblance to the 1990s, which also suggests the name Trumpomuskovia. Russia's recent history of oligarchy and dictatorship offers some suggestions as to how Trumpomuskovia might evolve. Like Trump today, Boris Yeltsin after the Russian elections of 1996 was an aging president who owed both his election and his stature to the oligarchs around him. (We have the word "oligarchy" from the ancient Greeks, for whom it meant "rule by the few"; its present meaning, "rule by the wealthy few" we owe to Russia in the 1990s.) Yeltsin's term was a contest for power among oligarchs, who saw themselves as the true and correct holders of power. As Yeltsin become ever more incapable of holding the responsibilities of power, the oligarchs undertook what they called "Operation Successor," a search for a replacement for Yeltsin who would seem plausible to Russians but who would do their bidding. Their choice, Vladimir Putin, did not pan out as they expected; he used the power of the state to dominate them and to become the chief plutocrat.

In the current U.S. setting, our regime-proximate oligarchs have chosen J.D. Vance as the successor. To be sure, we can't know exactly what will happen next, since these oligarchical clusters depend upon impulsive and willful personalities. Perhaps Trump will look ever more like Yeltsin and his allies of today will be nudging him aside tomorrow. Perhaps Vance will play the role that Putin was supposed to play, and serve the oligarchical masters. Or perhaps Vance will behave more like Putin, inheriting Trump's mantle and then using state power to change the regime. Or perhaps Trump will see the structure of the situation, and try himself to overturn his own debts to Musk and rule without the oligarchs whispering in his ears al day long. And of course we cannot forget Putin himself, who has a strange hold over Trump, and whom Trump seems to want to rescue from his various follies. In oligarchy, all that is certain is the uncertainty. I considered these variants and others in other posts.

5. Instability. The word "Trumpomuskovia," with its length and awkward accents (like "Czechoslovakia") is meant to suggest the inherent weakness of the new regime. New things are unstable. Personal politics are unstable. The Russia of the 1990s was unstable. Oligarchies in general are unstable. Dictatorships are unstable — as Syria has just reminded us. Trump will likely try to save Putin, just as Putin once tried to save Assad. But, in the end, all of that will fail. In the short run, can Trump and Musk stick together? In some sense, it would seem that they have to, since Trump needs Musk's money and Musk needs Trump's hand signing away power to him. How can they separate, and the Trumpomuskovite regime break? There are at least three scenarios. The first is that the oligarchs and the current president and the designated successor fight amongst themselves until some new structure emerges. The second is that Musk and the other oligarchs succeed in weakening the federal government to such an extent that there is no longer anything for Trump to dominate.

Timothy Snyder has an excellent Substack post about how Trump 2.0 will be Trumpomuskovia, basically means to turn the USA into Putin-era Russia.

[mariacallous]

How to call this thing that is coming to America in a month?

"Administration" seems inaccurate, since it assumes that the elected president just administers a government for four years, whereas Trump clearly wants to rule indefinitely. It also seems wrong since the people he has appointed will chiefly break things rather than run them.

And so "regime" rather than administration. But whose?

It's not Trump's. He's a poor man, compared to Musk. And he owes Musk a great debt, more than he owes his voters or his other donors. Looking ahead, it will be Musk, not Trump, who pays for all the lawsuits to quiet the rest of us, or for the campaigns to primary dissenting Republicans.

It's funny to say "President Musk," but that's not quite right: we face a situation in which the officeholder has less power than than the moneybag. In another post I called this "Trumpomuskovia." But perhaps Musk’s name should really come first, before Trump’s. Mu…mp…

And so "Mump." The Mump Regime.

And that recalls a very essential element of the collapse. One weakness of democracy in the United States has always been public health. The lack of a national health system brings us shorter lives, greater anxiety, and less freedom.

Now, with RFK Jr., we face the rollback of vaccinations, and thus a return, precisely, of mumps. And rubella and measles, which are halted by the same vaccine. And much else. The rest of oligarchical cabinet will weaken government by law through incompetence, spite, or avarice. But RFK Jr. will break society by making us sick.

And, thus, another reason to call this thing the Mump Regime. Get ready.

[misfitwashere]

Trumpomuskovia

Four scenarios

TIMOTHY SNYDER

NOV 30

History grounds us. 

History can help us find our footing. This is not because we can ever know what will happen next. It is rather because history can make familiar some consistent patterns of human life.

Such prompts for further thought are not analogies. When we think in terms of analogies, we get stuck on the differences, and those sticking points then becomes an excuse not to think historically at all. Of course what comes next in the 2020s won't be exactly like the 1790s or the 1860s or the 1930s or the 1990s — the reference points I am choosing here. 

But in recalling these epochs (or others) we can start to see certain resemblances, certain patterns, and get ourselves thinking again.

In this spirit, I offer these four scenarios for Trumpomuskovia, the musko-trumpified America that is already upon us.

The 1790s. Rescuing Russia

One possible Trumpomuskovia rescues Russia: actively, passively, or just by collapsing. This scenario draws from the eighteenth century, the time of the partitions of Poland.

Empress Catherine’s Russian Empire, founded just decades before, was in trouble. It had no clear means of succession, and Catherine herself was the German wife of a murdered tsar (her husband). It saved itself by warfare in Ukraine, bringing under its control its fertile territories. Fortunately for Catherine the Great, its western neighbor, Poland, suffered from tremendous inequality of wealth, and was rent by struggles between clans of magnates -- or, as we would say today, oligarchs. One of her former lovers was made king. He did not always do what she wanted, but his Poland was not going to In this situation, Russia was able to intervene in Poland, brings about its partition, and claim Ukraine (beginning the relatively short historical period when Ukraine was ruled from Russia).

Today the Russian Federation, founded a few decades ago, is also in trouble. It has no clear means of succession, as its ruler has done away with democracy and established a personal dictatorship. He has a fantasy of Russian unity with Ukraine, based in some considerable measure on the exploits of the eighteenth-century empress, Catherine. Like Catherine, Putin counts on divisions within (and among) western powers. His campaign for Ukraine has been extremely bloody, and has brought the Russian economy to the point of collapse.

But like Catherine, Putin has favorites that are close to power: Musk and Trump. They will not always do exactly what he wants, but they probably generally will, and their will certainly bring a fractious oligarchy. Putin is counting on the Musk-Trump regime to rescue him by turning American power away from its allies and towards Russia. Quite a few of Trump's proposed appointments, and much of Musk's rhetoric, suggest that rescuing Russia will be the priority.

The 1860s. Secession

When Poland was partitioned at the end of the end of the eighteenth century, it was a shock. Could a major country simply disappear from the map? A second scenario is suggested by the 1860s, when the United States nearly did.

Some of Poland's rebels, such as Tadeusz Kościuszko and Kazimierz Pułaski, crossed the Atlantic to help America's fledgling republic, which they hoped would avoid the mistakes of their own. Kościuszko saw slavery as a curse that could weaken the United States, much as serfdom had weakened Poland. Unlike Poland, the young American republic faced no great neighbor, at least after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 withdrawal of the British after the War of 1812. But the issue of slavery was almost enough to break the American republic anyway. In the aftermath of the Civil War, whites in southern states were able to exert disproportionate political power, by preventing African Americans from voting, and by dominating first the Democratic and then the Republican Party.

The United States in 2025 will be, in some sense, the victory of the old south. But is it a sustainable one? When people think of themselves as rebels they sometimes push too far when they actually have power. The social and cultural policies proposed by Trumpomuskovia are mainstream in much of the country, but not for most of the population. And the implementation of some of them, especially mass deportation, can reveal fault lines inside the federal government, between the federal government and the states, and among the states. An attempt to deport millions of people in 2025 could lead to clashes within and contests for control over the armed forces. Over the longer run, repressive social and cultural policies could lead to shifts of population, making the differences among the states still greater than they are. Trump has already been telling his people that the differences between them and the "enemy within" are greater than those between America and China or America and Russia.

Will Trumpomuskovia be stable? It is not a great leap for people to decide to move to California, on the logic that the state could make it alone, and already has a secession movement. Indeed, these moves are already happening. 

From there it is a small step to start thinking of constellations of states that would be wealthier and more functional than the current United States. A west coast union would certainly be richer, and would have its own borders with Canada and Mexico. 

It is sad to think about. But the next round of musing could easily follow: a west coast union plus Canada plus the New England, New York and Minnesota would have an economy about 2/3 the size of what was left of the United States, with a far higher GDP per capita, a better standard of living and longer life spans — just going by today’s numbers. 

Such a hypothetical country would not have to worry about free trade with Canada, since it would be Canada; and it would not have to worry about free trade with Mexico, since it would have a border with Mexico. Unlike the residual United States, aka Trumpomuskovia, it would not be fighting a trade war with the European Union.

The 1930s: Electoral Fascism

This is the most familiar of the thought experiments and so probably requires the least elaboration. The resemblances are all familiar.

A politician who has attempted a coup d'état comes to power later anyway on the strength of elections, with a minority of the overall vote. He is supported by conservatives who want the Left to suffer and businesspeople who imagine that all he will do is suppress the trade unions. This politician speaks angrily of the media as "the enemy of the people" and condemns his political opponents as "the enemy within." He hopes for some kind of emergency in order to declare a state of permanent emergency -- for Hitler this was the Reichstag Fire of 1933, for Trump it could be something entirely imaginary. At that stage of fascism, an event in the real world could be made an element of a conspiracy; at the current stage, the event in the real world might not even be necessary.

Trump speaks, sensibly enough from his fascist perspective, of "Hitler's generals." What Trump has in mind is Hitler's personal control of the armed forces, which began in 1934 when soldiers and officers began to swear a personal oath to the Führer instead of an oath to the German constitution. It was indeed this event that made of Hitler the Führer, the Leader, rather than simply the chancellor or prime minister. Hitler's men opened their first concentration camp right after he came to power; if Trump's men are able to round up millions of non-citizens, they too will be in camps -- an institution, as we know, that can be turned to other purposes than its initial ones. The first major act of violence of Hitler's SS, aside from establishing those camps and running them, was a mass deportation of non-citizens.

From this scenario come the political lessons that I have tried to make familiar in other posts and in On Tyranny.

The 1990s: Reliving Russia

The fourth and final scenario is one that some of us will remember. Indeed, the 1990s in Russia might be seen not just as a point of reference, but as an origin story of Trumpomuskovia. In my book The Road to Unfreedom, I tried to argue that Russia, with its oligarchy, media monopolies, and fascism, revealed possible futures for the United States. This has never seemed a more reasonable place to begin an analysis than right now. 

In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, men who became known as oligarchs struggled to control the parts of the economy that could return quick profits -- the minerals, the metals, the pipelines, the hydrocarbons. All of this took place against the background, especially in the West, of either intensely naive or intensely cynical free market ideology: what ever is happening in Russia must be for the best, since without the state the magical forces of capitalism will ensure growth, freedom, and democracies. Instead, the collapse of the state led to wealth inequality, a battle for final control at the top, the perfection of alternative realities and media disinformation, and now fascism and a war of atrocity against Ukraine.

In that struggle, a doddering elected president, Boris Yeltsin, was surrounded by a cluster of oligarchs. The successor they chose, Vladimir Putin, was eventually able to tame them all, and become the oligarch king, the boss of bosses. In doing so he did not clean up the system, but simply insured that all of the dirt was his own. This situation rather strongly resembles the America of today, with an elderly president, Donald Trump, surrounded by a cluster of oligarchs. The oligarchs have chosen his successor: JD Vance. 

It is very hard to tell, right now, who is actually running the show, if anyone. All of the headlines are about shocking personalities who do not identify in any sense with the larger interests of the country. Elon Musk and his tame DOGE seem set to dismantle the parts of the American government that are profitable and seize them for himself. All of this recalls late Yeltsin, and thus the transition of Putin. A difference: ketamine and fentanyl for the White House, not vodka as in the Kremlin back then.

Here’s the twist: there is actually an overlap of personnel in the two scenarios, and so now we are perhaps dealing with one history, rather than the past as an inspiration for the present. When Putin was elected president of Russia in 2000, no one would really have imagined that he would not only survive the oligarchs but become their chief and still be ruling a quarter century later. So is the Putin in this scenario… Putin? 

It is tempting to imagine that Putin, who has to be regarded now as one of the oligarchs around Trump, could also unexpectedly end up on top, as America relives the Russia of the 1990s. He certainly occupies quite a lot of Trump's mental space. He is working to bully Trump, to make him feel subordinate (for example by showing baked pictures of his wife on television). Nikolai Patrushev, a central figure in the Russian intelligence and security apparatus under Putin, reminds Trump that he has debts to pay. Putin clearly has like-minded allies around Trump, Musk most importantly. Some of the people at the top of Trump's preferred national security team (Gabbard, Hegseth) mix Putinism and anti-qualifications.

Or is the Putin in this scenario Vance? Putin is now 72, and Trump is now 78. Will either of them be around in four years? Putin’s mass murderer client Assad is on the run in Syria and the ruble is well under a penny. At some point, one can at least imagine, Putin’s charisma fades. It is not hard to imagine Trump or Putin or both expelled from oligarchs' island. Putin won after the 1990s as an outsider; who is the dark horse now? Vance is the closest thing to a Putin-like figure in this scenario: odd background, less money than the people around him, rich patrons, clear ideology, smarter than he seems. But might one of his oligarch patrons actually emerge on top? 

Or could Trump himself, despite looking like Yeltsin, surprise us and end up being the Putin of the scenario, first getting close to the oligarchs, then using the government to freeze them out, and finally himself getting rich, as he has always wanted? 

But if our Reliving Russia scenario is the helpful one, the crucial point of resemblance is the dismantling of government and the oligarchical claim on whatever is left. Who emerges on top is, in some sense, secondary.

Combinations

History helps, because everything that has happened was something that could have happened. And those things that could have happened, usually unexpected at the time, stretch our minds about what might happen. 

In the near future, in coming months and years, these four scenarios can intersect and combine. A Trumpomuskovia that seeks to rescue Russia can also be one that relives Russia. A Trumpomuskovia that looks fascist is also one that risks secession.

History warns. It would be wonderful if these scenarios helped people in positions of responsibility to make good choices.

History surprises. Strikingly, we see in most of the scenarios presence of Ukraine: for the old Russian Empire, and for the present one, and for that matter for Hitler, whose chief war aim was the control of Ukraine. Ukraine is a useful shortcut as we try to evaluate Trumpomuskovites: what do they say about Ukraine? As a rule of thumb, those that wish for its fall also want the fall of the American republic. I would expect that the first actions regarding Ukraine will be a harbinger of what is to come for America if Ukraine is sold out, expect America to be sold for parts.

History enlivens. It gets us outside the box of the daily outrages and our emotional responses. As we think outside the box, we sometimes catch a glimpse of what is inside it. In all four of these past moments, we see the problem of inequality somewhere close to the origin of political collapse. Any future rescue operation for the American republic will have to begin there.

[futileexercise]

Out future.

[yourreddancer]

History can help us find our footing. This is not because we can ever know what will happen next. It is rather because history can make familiar some consistent patterns of human life.

Such prompts for further thought are not analogies. When we think in terms of analogies, we get stuck on the differences, and those sticking points then becomes an excuse not to think historically at all. Of course what comes next in the 2020s won't be exactly like the 1790s or the 1860s or the 1930s or the 1990s — the reference points I am choosing here.

But in recalling these epochs (or others) we can start to see certain resemblances, certain patterns, and get ourselves thinking again. In this spirit, I offer these four scenarios for Trumpomuskovia, the musko-trumpified America that is already upon us.

[mariacallous]

History grounds us.

History can help us find our footing. This is not because we can ever know what will happen next. It is rather because history can make familiar some consistent patterns of human life.

Such prompts for further thought are not analogies. When we think in terms of analogies, we get stuck on the differences, and those sticking points then becomes an excuse not to think historically at all. Of course what comes next in the 2020s won't be exactly like the 1790s or the 1860s or the 1930s or the 1990s — the reference points I am choosing here.

But in recalling these epochs (or others) we can start to see certain resemblances, certain patterns, and get ourselves thinking again.

In this spirit, I offer these four scenarios for Trumpomuskovia, the musko-trumpified America that is already upon us.

The 1790s. Rescuing Russia

One possible Trumpomuskovia rescues Russia: actively, passively, or just by collapsing. This scenario draws from the eighteenth century, the time of the partitions of Poland.

Empress Catherine’s Russian Empire, founded just decades before, was in trouble. It had no clear means of succession, and Catherine herself was the German wife of a murdered tsar (her husband). It saved itself by warfare in Ukraine, bringing under its control its fertile territories. Fortunately for Catherine the Great, its western neighbor, Poland, suffered from tremendous inequality of wealth, and was rent by struggles between clans of magnates -- or, as we would say today, oligarchs. One of her former lovers was made king. He did not always do what she wanted, but his Poland was not going to effectively resist. In this situation, Russia was able to intervene in Poland, brings about its partition, and claim Ukraine (beginning the relatively short historical period when Ukraine was ruled from Russia).

Today the Russian Federation, founded a few decades ago, is also in trouble. It has no clear means of succession, as its ruler has done away with democracy and established a personal dictatorship. He has a fantasy of Russian unity with Ukraine, based in some considerable measure on the exploits of the eighteenth-century empress, Catherine. Like Catherine, Putin counts on divisions within (and among) western powers. His campaign for Ukraine has been extremely bloody, and has brought the Russian economy to the point of collapse.

But like Catherine, Putin has favorites that are close to power: Musk and Trump. They will not always do exactly what he wants, but they probably generally will, and their will certainly bring a fractious oligarchy. Putin is counting on the Musk-Trump regime to rescue him by turning American power away from its allies and towards Russia. Quite a few of Trump's proposed appointments, and much of Musk's rhetoric, suggest that rescuing Russia will be the priority.

The 1860s. Secession

When Poland was partitioned at the end of the end of the eighteenth century, it was a shock. Could a major country simply disappear from the map? A second scenario is suggested by the 1860s, when the United States nearly did.

Some of Poland's rebels, such as Tadeusz Kościuszko and Kazimierz Pułaski, crossed the Atlantic to help America's fledgling republic, which they hoped would avoid the mistakes of their own. Kościuszko saw slavery as a curse that could weaken the United States, much as serfdom had weakened Poland. Unlike Poland, the young American republic faced no great neighbor, at least after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 withdrawal of the British after the War of 1812. But the issue of slavery was almost enough to break the American republic anyway. In the aftermath of the Civil War, whites in southern states were able to exert disproportionate political power, by preventing African Americans from voting, and by dominating first the Democratic and then the Republican Party.

The United States in 2025 will be, in some sense, the victory of the old south. But is it a sustainable one? When people think of themselves as rebels they sometimes push too far when they actually have power. The social and cultural policies proposed by Trumpomuskovia are mainstream in much of the country, but not for most of the population. And the implementation of some of them, especially mass deportation, can reveal fault lines inside the federal government, between the federal government and the states, and among the states. An attempt to deport millions of people in 2025 could lead to clashes within and contests for control over the armed forces. Over the longer run, repressive social and cultural policies could lead to shifts of population, making the differences among the states still greater than they are. Trump has already been telling his people that the differences between them and the "enemy within" are greater than those between America and China or America and Russia.

Will Trumpomuskovia be stable? It is not a great leap for people to decide to move to California, on the logic that the state could make it alone, and already has a secession movement. Indeed, these moves are already happening.

From there it is a small step to start thinking of constellations of states that would be wealthier and more functional than the current United States. A west coast union would certainly be richer, and would have its own borders with Canada and Mexico.

It is sad to think about. But the next round of musing could easily follow: a west coast union plus Canada plus the New England, New York and Minnesota would have an economy about 2/3 the size of what was left of the United States, with a far higher GDP per capita, a better standard of living and longer life spans — just going by today’s numbers.

Such a hypothetical country would not have to worry about free trade with Canada, since it would be Canada; and it would not have to worry about free trade with Mexico, since it would have a border with Mexico. Unlike the residual United States, aka Trumpomuskovia, it would not be fighting a trade war with the European Union.

The 1930s: Electoral Fascism

This is the most familiar of the thought experiments and so probably requires the least elaboration. The resemblances are all familiar.

A politician who has attempted a coup d'état comes to power later anyway on the strength of elections, with a minority of the overall vote. He is supported by conservatives who want the Left to suffer and businesspeople who imagine that all he will do is suppress the trade unions. This politician speaks angrily of the media as "the enemy of the people" and condemns his political opponents as "the enemy within." He hopes for some kind of emergency in order to declare a state of permanent emergency -- for Hitler this was the Reichstag Fire of 1933, for Trump it could be something entirely imaginary. At that stage of fascism, an event in the real world could be made an element of a conspiracy; at the current stage, the event in the real world might not even be necessary.

Trump speaks, sensibly enough from his fascist perspective, of "Hitler's generals." What Trump has in mind is Hitler's personal control of the armed forces, which began in 1934 when soldiers and officers began to swear a personal oath to the Führer instead of an oath to the German constitution. It was indeed this event that made of Hitler the Führer, the Leader, rather than simply the chancellor or prime minister. Hitler's men opened their first concentration camp right after he came to power; if Trump's men are able to round up millions of non-citizens, they too will be in camps -- an institution, as we know, that can be turned to other purposes than its initial ones. The first major act of violence of Hitler's SS, aside from establishing those camps and running them, was a mass deportation of non-citizens.

From this scenario come the political lessons that I have tried to make familiar in other posts and in On Tyranny.

The 1990s: Reliving Russia

The fourth and final scenario is one that some of us will remember. Indeed, the 1990s in Russia might be seen not just as a point of reference, but as an origin story of Trumpomuskovia. In my book The Road to Unfreedom, I tried to argue that Russia, with its oligarchy, media monopolies, and fascism, revealed possible futures for the United States. This has never seemed a more reasonable place to begin an analysis than right now.

In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, men who became known as oligarchs struggled to control the parts of the economy that could return quick profits -- the minerals, the metals, the pipelines, the hydrocarbons. All of this took place against the background, especially in the West, of either intensely naive or intensely cynical free market ideology: what ever is happening in Russia must be for the best, since without the state the magical forces of capitalism will ensure growth, freedom, and democracies. Instead, the collapse of the state led to wealth inequality, a battle for final control at the top, the perfection of alternative realities and media disinformation, and now fascism and a war of atrocity against Ukraine.

In that struggle, a doddering elected president, Boris Yeltsin, was surrounded by a cluster of oligarchs. The successor they chose, Vladimir Putin, was eventually able to tame them all, and become the oligarch king, the boss of bosses. In doing so he did not clean up the system, but simply insured that all of the dirt was his own. This situation rather strongly resembles the America of today, with an elderly president, Donald Trump, surrounded by a cluster of oligarchs. The oligarchs have chosen his successor: JD Vance.

It is very hard to tell, right now, who is actually running the show, if anyone. All of the headlines are about shocking personalities who do not identify in any sense with the larger interests of the country. Elon Musk and his tame DOGE seem set to dismantle the parts of the American government that are profitable and seize them for himself. All of this recalls late Yeltsin, and thus the transition of Putin. A difference: ketamine and fentanyl for the White House, not vodka as in the Kremlin back then.

Here’s the twist: there is actually an overlap of personnel in the two scenarios, and so now we are perhaps dealing with one history, rather than the past as an inspiration for the present. When Putin was elected president of Russia in 2000, no one would really have imagined that he would not only survive the oligarchs but become their chief and still be ruling a quarter century later. So is the Putin in this scenario… Putin?

It is tempting to imagine that Putin, who has to be regarded now as one of the oligarchs around Trump, could also unexpectedly end up on top, as America relives the Russia of the 1990s. He certainly occupies quite a lot of Trump's mental space. He is working to bully Trump, to make him feel subordinate (for example by showing naked pictures of his wife on television). Nikolai Patrushev, a central figure in the Russian intelligence and security apparatus under Putin, reminds Trump that he has debts to pay. Putin clearly has like-minded allies around Trump, Musk most importantly. Some of the people at the top of Trump's preferred national security team (Gabbard, Hegseth) mix Putinism and anti-qualifications.

Or is the Putin in this scenario Vance? Putin is now 72, and Trump is now 78. Will either of them be around in four years? Putin’s mass murderer client Assad is on the run in Syria and the ruble is well under a penny. At some point, one can at least imagine, Putin’s charisma fades. It is not hard to imagine Trump or Putin or both expelled from oligarchs' island. Putin won after the 1990s as an outsider; who is the dark horse now? Vance is the closest thing to a Putin-like figure in this scenario: odd background, less money than the people around him, rich patrons, clear ideology, smarter than he seems. But might one of his oligarch patrons actually emerge on top?

Or could Trump himself, despite looking like Yeltsin, surprise us and end up being the Putin of the scenario, first getting close to the oligarchs, then using the government to freeze them out, and finally himself getting rich, as he has always wanted?

But if our Reliving Russia scenario is the helpful one, the crucial point of resemblance is the dismantling of government and the oligarchical claim on whatever is left. Who emerges on top is, in some sense, secondary.

Combinations

History helps, because everything that has happened was something that could have happened. And those things that could have happened, usually unexpected at the time, stretch our minds about what might happen.

In the near future, in coming months and years, these four scenarios can intersect and combine. A Trumpomuskovia that seeks to rescue Russia can also be one that relives Russia. A Trumpomuskovia that looks fascist is also one that risks secession.

History warns. It would be wonderful if these scenarios helped people in positions of responsibility to make good choices.

History surprises. Strikingly, we see in most of the scenarios presence of Ukraine: for the old Russian Empire, and for the present one, and for that matter for Hitler, whose chief war aim was the control of Ukraine. Ukraine is a useful shortcut as we try to evaluate Trumpomuskovites: what do they say about Ukraine? As a rule of thumb, those that wish for its fall also want the fall of the American republic. I would expect that the first actions regarding Ukraine will be a harbinger of what is to come for America if Ukraine is sold out, expect America to be sold for parts.

History enlivens. It gets us outside the box of the daily outrages and our emotional responses. As we think outside the box, we sometimes catch a glimpse of what is inside it. In all four of these past moments, we see the problem of inequality somewhere close to the origin of political collapse. Any future rescue operation for the American republic will have to begin there.

[misfitwashere]

Why is America "Trumpomuskovia"?

A New Name for a New Regime

TIMOTHY SNYDER

DEC 9

Trumpomuskovia is a word I introduced in an essay about some historical moments that might help us to understand the coming reality. Some of you asked why. Here are five reasons.

1. Novelty. We need a new name for the coming regime because we need to recognize the novelty of the situation -- legally, structurally, and morally. 

A new constitutional regime is emerging, in which the Supreme Court has tried to place a single individual above the law, and in so doing has purported to void a section of the Constitution (the Insurrection Clause, section three of the Fourteenth Amendment). 

We are already in a power structure in which money has displaced citizenry. We now have people in power who no longer pretend to care about votes and elections. The sitting president tried to overthrow the previous presidential election. His co-ruler, Elon Musk, spent more on the last campaign than all of the small donors put together. He and other oligarchs chose the vice-president. 

Not just Trump but Musk believe they can simply threaten Americans with persecution and violence. Both use language that is redolent of fascism to define Americans as enemies deserving of punishment.

2. Personalism. Part of the novelty is the prominence of the two personalities. This is why the regime should bear the personal names "Musk" and "Trump." 

Never before have people been bombarded with as much propaganda about two potential rulers as in the case of Musk and Trump. Both men are influencers with social media platforms. They both seem to believe that it is their personality that entitles them to rule. Trump, after all, tried to keep power even after losing an election in 2020. His team was preparing to contest the results in 2024. Given these habits and this attitude, he cannot regard himself as representing anything other than himself. 

And Musk, of course, was not elected at all. He spent an invisibly tiny fraction of his huge wealth on bribes for Trump voters, demoralization ads for Harris voters, and other support. He can't feel that he owes voters anything, since he came to power without anyone voting for him. And, given that the amount of money he spent was meaningless to him personally, he can hardly respect Trump voters for having been swayed by it.

Uzbekistan is named after a Mongol raider. Mozambique is named after a wealthy trader. Russia is named after medieval slavers who captured and sold the common people. We should consider a name for an American regime that recognizes the centrality of exploitation. And thus Trumpomuskovia.

3. Russia Why the "Muskovia" part of "Trumpomuskovia"? It is Musk's name, of course. But it is also a name for Russia, and this is an association we need. The Ukrainians call Russia "Moscovia," which corresponds to the name one will find, for example, on the most famous seventeenth-century map of the region. The historical name in English was "Muscovy."

"Muskovia" in "Trumpomuskovia" recalls a few essential connections to the current Putin regime. The first is that Musk himself is a Putinist. He communicates regularly with Putin. For two years he has repeated Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine. (The same is true of his fellow South African oligarch, David Sachs, who has been named to a position of responsibility in Trumpomuskovia. Sachs is a relentlessly humorless Putinist known for his social media transcriptions of Russian war propaganda. His Putinism is so literal that he managed to get himself booed at the Republican National Convention.)

And, of course, Trump's public record thus far has been one of submission to Putin. He has trained his followers to speak of a "Russia hoax," and will try to appoint Kash Patel as head of the FBI precisely to punish everyone who notes that Putin has supported Trump and his presidential campaigns. But Trump's efforts suppress only confirm the basic truth: Putin strongly preferred Trump over Clinton, Biden, and Harris, and acted to bring his preference to life. The Russian internet videos supporting Trump and the dozens of bomb threats on election day were just the brazen and most recent examples of a continuing campaign.

4. Oligarchy. The stronger connection to Russia, though, is a resemblance to the 1990s, which also suggests the name Trumpomuskovia. 

Russia's recent history of oligarchy and dictatorship offers some suggestions as to how Trumpomuskovia might evolve. Like Trump today, Boris Yeltsin after the Russian elections of 1996 was an aging president who owed both his election and his stature to the oligarchs around him. (We have the word "oligarchy" from the ancient Greeks, for whom it meant "rule by the few"; its present meaning, "rule by the wealthy few" we owe to Russia in the 1990s.) Yeltsin's term was a contest for power among oligarchs, who saw themselves as the true and correct holders of power. As Yeltsin become ever more incapable of holding the responsibilities of power, the oligarchs undertook what they called "Operation Successor," a search for a replacement for Yeltsin who would seem plausible to Russians but who would do their bidding. Their choice, Vladimir Putin, did not pan out as they expected; he used the power of the state to dominate them and to become the chief plutocrat.

In the current U.S. setting, our regime-proximate oligarchs have chosen J.D. Vance as the successor. To be sure, we can't know exactly what will happen next, since these oligarchical clusters depend upon impulsive and willful personalities. Perhaps Trump will look ever more like Yeltsin and his allies of today will be nudging him aside tomorrow. Perhaps Vance will play the role that Putin was supposed to play, and serve the oligarchical masters. Or perhaps Vance will behave more like Putin, inheriting Trump's mantle and then using state power to change the regime. Or perhaps Trump will see the structure of the situation, and try himself to overturn his own debts to Musk and rule without the oligarchs whispering in his ears al day long. And of course we cannot forget Putin himself, who has a strange hold over Trump, and whom Trump seems to want to rescue from his various follies. In oligarchy, all that is certain is the uncertainty. I considered these variants and others in other posts.

5. Instability. The word "Trumpomuskovia," with its length and awkward accents (like "Czechoslovakia") is meant to suggest the inherent weakness of the new regime. New things are unstable. Personal politics are unstable. The Russia of the 1990s was unstable. Oligarchies in general are unstable. 

Dictatorships are unstable — as Syria has just reminded us. Trump will likely try to save Putin, just as Putin once tried to save Assad. But, in the end, all of that will fail.

In the short run, can Trump and Musk stick together? In some sense, it would seem that they have to, since Trump needs Musk's money and Musk needs Trump's hand signing away power to him.

How can they separate, and the Trumpomuskovite regime break? 

There are at least three scenarios. The first is that the oligarchs and the current president and the designated successor fight amongst themselves until some new structure emerges. The second is that Musk and the other oligarchs succeed in weakening the federal government to such an extent that there is no longer anything for Trump to dominate.

The third is that the Trumpomuskovian designated deputies of destruction -- people like Hesgeth, Gabbard, and Patel -- are actually nominated, confirmed by the Senate, take office in the highest positions of national defense, intelligence, and policing; and then do what they are supposed to do. If we actually do see an America of intelligence collapse (Gabbard), extralegal persecutions of designation internal enemies (Patel), and "holy war" against immigrants and others (Hegseth), the risk for Musk is that the country will fall apart in such a way that it will be hard for him to become a trillionaire. American deconstruction is a process that Musk will want to curate himself, and so here his interests can diverge from Trump's.

In serious times it is important to be creative, because we need the creativity for concepts, and we need the concepts to see the facts before us. Trumpomuskovia is the coming reality, and the word gives us some angles of view. 

The better we see the new regime, the more clearly we might also see its fractures and weaknesses. Analysis is the first step to action, and analysis begins with the words. I hope that you find this one useful.

[misfitwashere]

The Mump Regime

Musk, Trump, and Illness

TIMOTHY SNYDER

DEC 20

How to call this thing that is coming to America in a month?

"Administration" seems inaccurate, since it assumes that the elected president just administers a government for four years, whereas Trump clearly wants to rule indefinitely. It also seems wrong since the people he has appointed will chiefly break things rather than run them.

And so "regime" rather than administration. But whose?

It's not Trump's. He's a poor man, compared to Musk. And he owes Musk a great debt, more than he owes his voters or his other donors. Looking ahead, it will be Musk, not Trump, who pays for all the lawsuits to quiet the rest of us, or for the campaigns to primary dissenting Republicans. 

It's funny to say "President Musk," but that's not quite right: we face a situation in which the officeholder has less power than than the moneybag. In another post I called this "Trumpomuskovia." But perhaps Musk’s name should really come first, before Trump’s. Mu…mp…

And so "Mump." The Mump Regime.

And that recalls a very essential element of the collapse. One weakness of democracy in the United States has always been public health. The lack of a national health system brings us shorter lives, greater anxiety, and less freedom. 

Now, with RFK Jr., we face the rollback of vaccinations, and thus a return, precisely, of mumps. And rubella and measles, which are halted by the same vaccine. And much else. The rest of oligarchical cabinet will weaken government by law through incompetence, spite, or avarice. But RFK Jr. will break society by making us sick.

And, thus, another reason to call this thing the Mump Regime. Get ready.