Timothy Snyder: Comments on the Trump succession battle going on now...Vance, Rubio, Miller

[jmbar2]

Last edited Tue Jan 27, 2026, 11:40 PM - Edit history (1)

Link to tweet

Miller is an apparent problem for Vance, because Miller gets to run things and Vance doesn’t. 2/

But when Trump is gone, and everything is a mess, Vance can blame Miller for the “distortions” of the true MAGA doctrine. 3/

From this it follows that Vance wants Miller out, but maybe not quite yet, because he needs MAGA to remember Miller if Miller is going to be the fall guy. 4/

This is a problem Vance has: he talks to MAGA about things they don’t remember or didn’t notice when they happened. 5/

Meanwhile Rubio looks relatively good. Our foreign policy is disastrous, but not in a way that MAGA notices, even if the rest of the world does. 6/

The main humiliation is obviously Greenland, where we alienated our allies and encouraged our enemies in order to get nothing that we hadn’t already had for 75 years. 7/

But the Greenland portfolio has been Vance’s, not Rubio’s; Vance generally gets assignments where his weaknesses are exposed, but he doesn’t seem to grasp this. 8/

The horror of our politics is that state murder of responsible citizens is connected, by the perpetrators themselves, to internal factions and rivalries. 9/

It’s as though they get up in the morning and try their best to be fascists but at the end of the day they kill, lie, and plot for personal power like the late-Brezhnev politburo. 10/

[Fiendish Thingy]

1. Succession, not secession. Nt

[jmbar2]

3. Thank you!

Good editors are worth their weight in gold.

[newdeal2]

2. In the end, Trump will burn it all down

He wants no successor. He wants to be THE man.

[jmbar2]

4. Snyder says that is the fatal weakness of tyrannies

Tyrants don't care what comes next.