IHIP News - Trump Ally Speaks Out Against Him on His Mental Decline "He's Out of His Mind"

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

We are joined by historian Timothy Snyder to discuss Europe's view on Trump's mental decline. Order our new book, join our Substack, shop our merch, and more by clicking here: https://linktr.ee/ivehaditpodcast.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I would like to welcome Timothy David Snyder. He is a historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and studies tyranny closely. He is the author of On Tyranny, On Freedom, and more. Timothy, welcome. Before we get started, I want to put up some reporting that came out today from The Daily Beast. Kylie, will you pop this up? Trump ally shocked at president's psychological state and private meeting. A key European ally of Donald Trump said he was traumatized.

by a meeting where the U.S. president's psychological state came across as dangerous, according to diplomats, with knowledge of the conversations. And this is the Prime Minister of Slovakia, Robert Fico. Have you seen this or with your relationships with people in Europe? What do you have to say about this? I hadn't seen it, but it's an interesting thing for FICO to be saying because Fico is a right-wing populist and is very very, much aligned with Mr. Trump on pretty much every issue. So it's not somebody who would be out to get Mr. Trump on the contrary. So that's, I haven't seen it and I have no personal knowledge, but that's a very striking bit of reporting for that reason.

Really interesting. I said he thought the president was out of his mind. Okay. I follow you on Twitter and I'm on Instagram and I really liked you had a post about, I'm assuming you're referencing, there was an article in the Atlantic recently where the journalist was like, after a long time, I finally come to the conclusion that this is fascism. And you said, okay, listen, instead of wasting the time acknowledging the obvious, let's fight it. Can you please elaborate on that? I'm happy to, but I'm going to do it from the position where I've always been, which is that whatever you think this evil is, once you recognize it as an evil, you're responsible to be doing something. about it and any discussion that we're having about the nature of the evil is

important in so far as it instructs then the tactics that we choose and the strategy that we have that's the point that's the whole point right so what I worry what I'm worried about here is that there have been a number of folks who have essentially made the claim that everybody who says that this is a radical evil for example fascism those people are just off their rocker. We don't have to pay attention to them. And therefore, and here comes the dangerous part, we can do nothing. And we've lost a ton of time. And I think we've disempowered some otherwise very capable people by telling that story, that like all the people who are warning that Trump would

someday use violence, et cetera, those people are crazy. We should ignore them. We've lost 10 years, I mean, I don't want to over-dramatize this, but we've lost 10 years where a lot of good organizing could have been done because people used an ideological debate as a reason to set aside. And so now what I'm worried about, and I hope I'm wrong, Jennifer, what I'm worried about now is that now that it's just so transparent that there was something to worry about, whatever you want to name it, and there was a reason to use serious terms in describing that danger, that now those very same people are going to say, okay, I accept that it's a very serious danger.

I accept that it's fascism. And then that, this is, I hope I'm wrong, but then that becomes their form of action, Okay, but that's not action. You know, that's, if you recognize now that it's fascism, that means that for the last 10 years, you probably weren't doing enough. And that means you had a lot of time to, lost time to make up for. So what I would urge is that, because there was that Arquill Atlantic, but there have been a bunch of statements like this and there's going to be, there's about to be a bunch more.

What I would urge people to do is to first get involved in their communities, first join some kind of organization, and then rather than counting on confessing, it seemed like a good person because you're confessing a mistake. Rather than doing that, tell your followers how you are engaged in your community. Give them an idea of what they can do. Because just owing up to your mistake is not actually action. It's nice. It's good. It's fine. But what's really important is if you have that analysis, that you show where that analysis has led you, what actions you're now taking. Spread that. So what I'm hearing is a sense of urgency. And I, like you, have felt this for the last 10 years.

I felt it even before then because I lived in Oklahoma City and all of the incubation for MAGA was in red states. So his ascension didn't surprise me. I'm familiar with this breed of conservative politics. And I use conservatives in quotes. But we live in a time now where it's a, because everybody's monitoring everybody online. I said it at this day, you're saying it at this point, and there's all of this kind of one-upsmanship. And this is something that I kind of struggle with. And like, I'm really upset with Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer because I feel like they're not meeting this moment.

I feel like they play patty cake with them and vote with them sometimes. And they're not understanding how vulnerable we all are. And yesterday, the Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumers, did this. this video. And I thought it was AI at first because he's like, Christy Gnome and Stephen Miller are fucking liars and we're not going to vote for it. And I was like, oh my God, yes, Chuck, yes, this is what we need. And I'm like, please, I don't want that to be AI because at my age, you know, I fall for AI all the time. But it was real. And so in that, I told our followers on the podcast this morning, if he has this energy and he sustains this energy instead of, because I

feel the urgency that you're describing. He said of me going back and go, well, Cheki, voted for him at this point and that point, that's not helpful either. Like, when everybody arrives to resist, we must unite, regardless of past statements, past denials, past inactions, past appeasements. What are your thoughts on that? So yeah, I'm with you. I mean, the thing I'm going to add is that what we should be doing is circling in glory. the people we admire, right? So, like, I like this person's podcast. This was the local organizer of the protest I went to, like, naming and praising the people who do good things. Because on the left, this is a problem that, like, we have this sort of, like, if the person isn't, you know, a perfect,

beautiful virgin Messiah, then, like, or whatever, you know, like, if they're not all these things, if they're not flawless, then we pick at the flaws, you know, or we look for hypocrisy. And then when we imagine that we find a little bit of hypocrisy or imperfection, that somehow we've done something. But we haven't done anything. We've just spent time. So what we have to do is prop up the people who are doing good things. And that's how we're going to get to 26 and 28, by the way. Like, it is fine to keep prodding the elected officials that we have. We should be doing that. But we should also recognize that 26 and 28 are probably going to involve people we haven't even heard of yet who are emerging from the struggle, who then take on a new role in.

in electoral politics. So I agree with you, like, practically, the only way to get there is a coalition. There has to be a coalition, which means that your job is to get along with the person who's to your right and the person who's to your left, because they're wrong about some stuff. And so are you, right? We're all wrong about something. So you can only win with a coalition, but you can't, you have the coalition because you recognize what the danger is. And you recognize that, like, by acting together, you can do stuff together. When you just use words, then you can't do anything. But like when you act together,

then it's actually possible to disagree about stuff and still like people and still think, okay, we're doing something together, we're moving forward. You said something that I thought was really interesting because I love diving into like the psychology behind these people. And you had a reel on your Instagram where you've said that the people in this regime

don't feel any loyalty to America. Like it's arbitrary to them. And what's so fascinating, And I think you're spot on with that. And I want you to elaborate for my listeners. But what's so fascinating about that is how their grift is, especially where I come from, is here's the cross and we're wrapped up in patriotism. But my mother, he's a lifelong atheist.

When Trump first came on, she goes, well, thank God, somebody's finally exposing these evangelicals for the hypocrites. I always knew they were. And the reveal that's been coming with all of the hypocrisy in this movement is really studying, but you really tap into this patriotism or this sense of feeling national identity, which is their big selling point. But you say it means nothing to them being an American. Yeah. No, I'm baffled. I mean, honestly, I'm baffled that anybody would see these guys is in any way at all caring about the United States of America. They obviously don't. I mean,

and I think it's one of the most important, and maybe the central truth about Mr. Trump in particular. He doesn't understand what a country is. It's just not in his mind. He doesn't know what it needs to be a sovereign state. He doesn't know what the American Revolution was about. He has no idea why anybody would have taken part in it. He has no idea why anybody would have fought in the Civil War. He has no idea why anybody would fight in any war.

This is how he doesn't understand Ukraine because he has no, like for him, it's just a real estate deal. And this is why he doesn't understand why they won't just sell us Greenland. Because he doesn't, he literally doesn't understand the basic political reality of or political and moral reality that most people live within, which is that there are sovereign states and that you care about your country by trying to make it better. He does not accept that the world is made of sovereign states. The world is just made of wealthy people

who are trying to scam each other. That is the entirety of his world. And so for him, it is, I mean, it's sad, but it's sad, and I wish I weren't true, but it is all a scam. It is all a grift. It is all a television show. There is nothing in Mr. Trump's career

from beginning to end, whether he was in business or whether he's been a politician, There's literally nothing which suggests that he understands or would take a risk for or identifies with the United States of America. There's absolutely nothing. I mean, the fact that he wears, you know, that he wears just one outfit and it's red, white, and blue. Like, that's as far as it goes. There's literally nothing beyond that.

And I wish, I'm glad you asked about this because I wish more folks would consider this because it really is something that should unite more people. He doesn't care whether the U.S. exists or not. He simply doesn't. What he cares about is himself and maybe his family, possibly. He doesn't care if the United States exists or not. And there's no evidence that he cares about that. You know, I challenge anybody to assemble any evidence that Mr. Trump cares about where the United States of America exists or not because, you know, there isn't any.

There's a ton of evidence which suggests that he would finally like to be a very wealthy person. There's a lot of evidence for that. And there's a lot of evidence that being in power has allowed him to finally become that thing he always wanted to become, which is a wealthy person with the money to put his bad taste, you know, into reality. But beyond that, there's just not a whole lot. Do you think that's the through line to the oligarchs? Because when you get that wealthy, you you really don't live within borders anymore. Laws don't apply to you. You don't fly commercially. You know, go from your plane to your boat. You know, Elon Musk acts like he cares so much about

America, but clearly he cares about dismantling it. Now he set his sights on Europe, on the European Union. And I wonder, is that the through line? It seems psychologically like you just get so wealthy that you don't really belong anywhere. I would, I mean, I agree, but I would distinguish between somebody like Trump and somebody like Musk. So Trump is an old-fashioned like rich guy. Like for him being rich is, I've got gold decorations in my house, you know, or like for him being rich is, look, I can tear down my house and add a wing to it, right? Like, He's a very unimaginative rich guy. His, like, his fan, like, no, his plutocrat fantasies just extend to, you know,

hey, look, I've got a house in Florida, right? Like, that's it. You know, and so I've got, you know, I've got well-tailored suits. I've got people around me and I'm going to die, you know, in Egyptian cotton sheets in the White House. That's it. It doesn't go any further than that because he's not, he's not really a very rich person. And for most of his life, he hasn't been.

And he actually, I think, does have some idea of what he's never been poor, obviously. but he has been mathematically poor. He's been in debt. He's been able to imagine what it would be like not to have any money. Whereas somebody like Musk, that is a completely different world. I mean, I think when you cross 10 million, sorry, 10 billion, you get into a different zone. Or maybe it's 20 billion. But then when you're in that, when you're in that, you're into like a Putin-Musk sort of zone,

you are in a different world where your sense of what's meaningful touches on the fantastic. So I'm going to live forever. I'm going to invade Mars. I'm going to invade Ukraine. Right? Ukraine doesn't really exist. And those fantasies are what become important to you because those fantasies are what make you in some way you imagine immortal.

In fact, they make you ridiculous and murderous because they're incredibly damaging. But you're living then in the world of fantasy. I think, I mean, I think what has to think that see Trump as a servant or an instrument of somebody like Musk in that sense, right? Because Trump has never really been a rich guy. Like Americans look at him and they, oh, that's a rich guy. But he's never really been a rich guy. And so therefore, the Putin's and the musks of the universe have some leverage on him because he knows the difference.

He can see, okay, those guys have a hundred times more money than I do, even though I'm president of the United States. It's fascinating. Okay. So his foreign policy has been such a disaster. And I think that your understanding of him not understanding sovereign states was the first step where people, just bristled at Americans if you think about Canada. And initially in the first month or two, how arrogant his policy was that it's going to be the 51st state and how dismissive they were of their sovereignty. And now you see our former like rock solid allies looking for more stable economic partners.

And where I come from, you have a lot of people, country club Republicans, the unimaginative rich people that you were describing Trump, that type of American man. that says, well, I'm fiscally conservative and socially liberal. This foreign policy that he is prompting, where you have Canada that's looking to China and the European Union looking to other more stable partners, what is the underlying? It's not going to happen immediately, but the underlying economic breakage of that into the future. Well, first of all, a lot of it actually goes back to our oligarchs. So, like, if you're Musk or if you're Peter Thiel, you have an active interest in breaking up the European Union because the European Union is the only entity in the world which has effective regulation of what you do. And so a lot of our policy, especially the parts that J.D. Vance is very outspoken about, is about breaking up the European Union basically just so we can.

break up their digital security so Musk and Teal and others can make a ton of money. And in that, like, it's not clear which comes first. Is it the oligarchy or the fascism that comes first? Because what they want to do is they want to make the European information spear much more like ours, where like right-wing Nazi stuff just runs completely rampant, where there's no fact-checking, there's no verifiability, there's no transparency, where the guy at the top gets to set the whole framework for the conversation. that's what they want, and that does push your whole politics towards fascism,

but it's also a model in which those guys make a ton of money. So it's a little bit hard to say what comes first. What's sad is that the interest of the United States come last. It's not in our interest as a country to make the Europeans hostile, to break up the European Union. That's our biggest trade partner. That's our big set of allies. Those are the people who, for the last 80 years, have helped us to become the most rich and powerful country in the history of the world.

It doesn't make any sense from the point of view of any American. except for like two or three South Africans. It doesn't make any sense at all for us to break these relations. And do you think that he, when he did the meeting with Putin in Alaska, I saw recently online that he, in one of a vestibule in the White House,

he had a picture of himself in Putin from that Alaska summit. And I'm not a foreign policy expert you are, but it appears that since that meeting, his foreign policy has been very much aligned with Putin and I have a friend Professor Ruth Ben Giot and she explains that Putin, for us to bend the need of Putin right now, it's a failed state. They have a lot of debt, a lot of inflation.

And so just the optics of the United States bending the need of Putin like this, what is your take? This is your area of expertise and my listeners are always interested in hearing and experts so that we're armed with more information. Yeah, well, the rest of Ukraine war is, I mean, I think the central historical conflict of our time. And it's about a dictatorship, Russia, trying to quash a democratic neighbor, Ukraine,

basically because democracy could be contagious. It's an oligarchical war. It's a war of one of the richest people in the world. Either Putin or Musk is the richest person in the world. It's the richest person in the world who is in charge of a country which is entirely depended on natural gas and oil sales using incredibly bad ideas like Ukraine doesn't exist or whatever in order to try to destroy a sovereign state next to them. And this is a war which could

easily be brought to an end. Trump talks about how it's the peace prize. All we would have to do is supply the Ukrainians with the weapons they need, seriously have and enforce sanctions on Russia, especially on natural gas and oil. And this war would end. It is within our power to end this war, probably within months. But instead of that, we've been repeating the demands of the Russians towards the Ukrainians. We've basically put our leverage on the side of the aggressor. When I say the aggressor, I don't just mean the country that started the war. Russia didn't just start this war. They've been kidnapping children by the tens of thousands to be assimilated. They've been murdering local civic leaders. They've been torturing prisoners of war. They've been committing

essentially every war crime you can imagine, right down to stealing national treasurer and burning books. Basically every war crime that's on the books, they have committed it. And that's why Putin is an indicted war criminal. But you're right. The only reason they're still in this war is because of soft, flabby American policy. They really wanted Trump to win this election. Biden's policy wasn't enough, but it was in the right direction. They really wanted Trump to win, and they made no secret of that whatsoever. And the reason is this, that Trump and the people around him are unable to to mount any kind of consistent policy vis-a-vis Russia. They say they want the war to end, but they try to do it by supporting the aggressor rather than doing the things that it's not

just a moral thing. You can't end a war by supporting the aggressor because the aggressor will then just continue the war or start a different war. It's just completely elementary logic, and it's not reflected in our foreign policy at all. This goes back to your earlier question, though. Trump doesn't, it's not that she just understands, it's not just that he doesn't understand Ukrainian sovereignty or why Ukrainians would fight this incredibly difficult and painful war for four years. He doesn't understand that at all, right? He just can't get it because he would never do it himself and he doesn't know anybody who would. What he fundamentally doesn't get, though, is that this is in the interest of the United States of America. It is in our

interest to support our allies. It's in our interest to support Europe. It's in our interest to make sure that international law is not violated by invasions because all those things, keep us prosperous and all those things help us to be free. But he doesn't get that because, again, it's not that he doesn't care about the U.S. It's not even a factor for him. He doesn't have the concept of what would be good for the U.S. For him, Putin is a richer guy than he is. And when he has a conversation with Putin, then for the next several days, what comes out of Trump's mouth are just Russian talking points. And it's sad. Like, it's pathetic. It's just, it's actually a little bit humiliating. Like if you are an American and you care about our country, it's humiliating to have

our head of state, our president, our commander in chief, be such a mental, like, such a mental puppet, like such a remote control mental puppet of someone who is by every conceivable measure of power, so much weaker. Yeah, it's fascinating to me that to a lot of Americans, he is the idealized version of masculinity, yet he is so submissive. to his core, he is submissive to Putin and his own worst impulses. This is fascinating. I could talk to you forever. I'd love to have you back on again. Thank you so much. Thanks for the work that you put on your Instagram and I hope you have a good week. Thank you very much. Very glad to talk.