“Do Not Obey in Advance”: Timothy Snyder on How Corporate America Is Bending to Trump

We speak with Yale historian and author Timothy Snyder, an expert on authoritarianism, about how corporate America has responded to Donald Trump’s reelection. Snyder’s 2017 book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century came out just a month after Trump began his first term, and opened with the warning: “Do Not Obey in Advance.” That message has been widely cited following ABC News’s decision to settle a Trump defamation case by donating $15 million to his future presidential library. Major tech leaders have also cozied up to the president-elect in recent days, including with major donations to Trump’s inauguration. “There is a problem when the people who have the most money set the example of yielding to power first,” says Snyder. “It’s textbook anticipatory obedience.”