What if we’re paying attention to the wrong things?

Historian Timothy Snyder thinks we may be. For all the angst over Trump restricting press access, Snyder argues reporters don’t need to follow the president everywhere, especially when his words are being used as “weapons.” The bigger problem, he says, is that the press too often confuses what Trump says with what he can actually do.

And AI? Snyder thinks we’re so busy worrying about machines getting smarter that we’re missing what they may already be doing to us: making us easier to manipulate and less capable of thinking for ourselves.

Then there are the midterms. The threats are real. But Snyder’s message to voters is emphatic: “You can win big even when they threaten and even when they cheat.”

Snyder is one of the world’s leading scholars of authoritarianism and the author of On Tyranny and On Freedom. We discuss threats to elections and the press, extreme wealth, AI, the affordability crisis, weakened government protections, even the physical remaking of Washington.

I always come away from talking to Tim Snyder seeing the landscape a little differently. He connects things that can look unrelated, puts the present in a much longer frame, and somehow leaves you feeling that what happens next is less inevitable than it seemed an hour ago.