Trump joins the ranks of authoritarian 'superlosers:' top historian

President Donald Trump loves to assert that he’s a “winner.” Way back in February 2016, he promised, “We are going to win so much.” Then almost exactly 10 years later, in February this year, he declared, “Our country is winning again. In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it. People are asking me, ‘Please, please, please, Mister President, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore.’” For those who can’t take it, renowned historian Timothy Snyder has good news: Trump — and by extension the United States — is now a “superloser.”

According to Snyder, “A superloser is a leader of a great power, or (onetime) superpower, whose disastrous choices lead to a crash. He possesses a combination of skills that allow for a rise to personal power and the collapse of state power.” He goes on to explain the “five C’s” of the superloser phenomenon.

First is “conflict.” For both Trump and Putin, disastrous wars in Iran and Ukraine have weakened them politically and the countries they lead globally. Both former superpowers have revealed the limits of their military might and have had their economic and diplomatic standings shredded by losing major wars.

Second is a broken “concept” of power. Both Russia and the US have betrayed existing power structures in ways that weakened rather than strengthened their reach. Russia had historically sat in a balancing position between Europe and China, but its invasion of Ukraine destroyed EU relations, forcing it to strengthen its reliance on China, and having lost the war, effectively making it a “satellite” of China. According to Snyder, “The US has likewise betrayed its own concept of power” as the hegemony that gave it dominance following WWII has been torpedoed by Iran and Trump’s other diplomatic mistakes.

Third is corruption. Both Trump and Putin have made it very clear that they serve “small oligarchical clans” above anyone else, including the key interests of their countries. And as Snyder explains, “If you can’t think in terms of the interests of your state, it’s unlikely that the wars that you start are going to make sense. And neither the war against Ukraine nor the war against Iran made any sense.”

Fourth, “superlosers cooperate with each other,” which Snyder says is “in a way paradoxical, because when a loser helps a loser, one ends up with more losing.” Putin can help Trump gain power, who in turn ends up diminishing U.S. power. At the same time, Trump’s actions in Iran have benefited Russian oil interests by driving up demand, but this takes away Putin’s excuse for why the war was going so badly. While Putin used to claim the West was undermining Russian efforts, “now that the U.S. is on the side of Russia, there’s no excuse… So the loserdom is contagious,” and “neither of them has any excuse for why they’re losing so badly.”

Snyder says that a fifth aspect of superloserdom is charisma. It took a special type of charisma for Trump and Putin to attain and hold power, and once they had it, they proceeded to set their nations on the path to loserdom.

All of this, says Snyder, adds up to a sixth “C,” which is China, to which both Russia and the U.S. are now ceding power.

Snyder asserts that both are now subordinate to China. As noted above, the war with Ukraine has pushed Russia more firmly into Chinese orbit. At the same time, Trump lost a trade war with China, which was then further empowered by the blowback from his decision to launch war with Iran. Now in recent days, “both Trump and Putin have had to pay court to Xi in Beijing.”

The situation is surprising, Snyder says, because “objectively,” China has been facing decline and shouldn’t have been able to catch up to the US. “But superloserdom has the power to change all of that. What it has done is allow the relative decline of China to be eclipsed by the absolute decline of the United States.”

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