Tyranny Expert Explains Why Trump’s Latest Spin Is ‘Basically A Scam’

Yale history professor Timothy Snyder isn’t buying GOP nominee Donald Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the Project 2025 handbook, following backlash to some of its proposals.

The extreme policies contained within the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s document — which was crafted by dozens of Trump’s former aides — are widely believed to be the agenda that Trump will pursue in a potential second administration.

On Sunday, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi noted it was a “tricky one” because “they actually went down and wrote everything they were going to do and then Donald Trump goes out to these rallies and tells people, ‘I’m not involved in this, I don’t agree with a lot of this stuff, it’s got nothing to do with me,’ which is actually part of what authoritarians sometimes do.”

Snyder, an expert on authoritarianism, agreed.

Trump is “trusting that his people will believe him, no matter what he says,” he explained. “That is part of an authoritarian dynamic where you can lie to your own people and then you can say something completely different the next time and they nod their heads and say, ‘Oh yes, I knew it all along.’ That’s part of what it means to belong to that sort of thing.”

“The shift is basically a scam,” Snyder continued.

Trump “doesn’t have another transition team besides the people who are involved in writing Project 2025 and he doesn’t have another transition plan asides what’s written down in Agenda 47 and Project 25,” he added. “That is it. That is the thing. There is no other thing. He can try to relabel it but … what it stands for is quite clear” with proposals to “wreck the federal government,” replace experts with Trump loyalists and gut the administrative state.