Timothy Snyder warns of “attempted coup” by Trump

Iran war

“Tyrannical behavior” – expert paints a bleak scenario

The renowned US historian Timothy Snyder warns: Donald Trump could use the war in Iran to stage a coup in the USA.

On Tuesday, US historian Timothy Snyder warned of a possible “next coup attempt” by Donald Trump in an essay on his website and in a detailed thread on the X platform. Snyder, a renowned Eastern Europe expert and author of bestsellers such as “On Tyranny,” describes several scenarios in which democratic systems could tip into authoritarian rule.

Snyder writes unequivocally on “Why is Trump so enthusiastic about destroying Iran’s civilian infrastructure? That won’t decide the war. There’s probably another reason behind it: He wants to provoke an Iranian response that he can use for his own purposes.”

At the center of his contributions is the thesis that Trump could deliberately bring about or exploit a domestic political crisis in the course of the war with Iran – for example through a provoked or even staged attack (“false flag”) that is attributed to Tehran. The aim is to distract attention from foreign policy problems and to create an environment that justifies the use of the military at home.

“Using a wartime incident to seize total power is normal tyrannical behavior,” Snyder said. He refers to Russia’s authoritarian President Vladimir Putin. Its political rise began in 1999, among other things, in the context of supposedly Islamist terrorist attacks in Moscow. Provocation is not a complex form of politics, says Snyder. Trump is also smart enough to know that.

In addition to this scenario, Snyder outlines four other paths to dictatorship that are known from history in his essay. The USA is structurally vulnerable to a coup due to the current constellation of war and the midterm elections coming up in a few months. It is up to citizens not to avoid the historical facts, said Snyder. If people dismissed such a scenario as unrealistic, they would only make it more likely.

Snyder is one of the United States’ leading intellectuals; as a historian he has primarily researched the history of Eastern Europe and the Holocaust. He used to teach at Yale University in the US state of Connecticut, but after Trump’s re-election he took a leave of absence and took up a professorship at the University of Toronto in Canada.