Authoritarianism expert Timothy Snyder slammed President-elect Donald Trump’s controversial Cabinet picks and explained why he believes they are intentionally terrible.
“These appointments are not just poor choices in the traditional sense,” Snyder, a history professor at Yale, told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi.
“Each of them individually is historically bad,” he acknowledged. “But taken together, these are not people who are going to be bad at their jobs in some sort of normal sense. Taken together, these appointments suggest an attempt to actually make the American government dysfunctional, to make it fall apart, to pervert it, to have it do things that it’s not supposed to do until it’s not capable of doing anything at all.”
It’s not “just that these people are not qualified enough” or even “totally unqualified,” said Snyder.
“It’s that they are anti-qualified,” he continued. “They are qualified to do the opposite of the thing that they are supposed to do.”
Among Trump’s most controversial selections are former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to lead the U.S. intelligence services, Fox News personality Pete Hegseth as defense secretary and former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) as attorney general.
It’s part of a coherent strategy on the “notion that the American government should be falling apart, American society should be in chaos, and it would be a good thing,” said Snyder.
Watch Snyder’s full analysis here: