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‘A scary place’: Jason Stanley on leaving Trump’s America

Stuart Braun

DW

03/04/2025

Having written two celebrated books on fascism in the 20th century, American scholar Jason Stanley, who is Jewish, draws direct parallels with the second Donald Trump presidency.

“Fascism is what the Trump administration is now doing,” he told DW of the president’s second term in office.

In late March, Stanley announced his decision to quit Yale University and move to Canada, where he will work at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He follows Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore, two Yale history professors who are a married couple, who also left for Toronto after the US presidential election.

“I’m afraid of being targeted by the federal government,” he said in relation to his decision to leave Yale.

Referencing the vulnerability of immigrant academics who could be deported for speaking out under Trump, he added: “I’m leaving because my non-citizen colleagues cannot speak about politics on social media… or else they might have their visas pulled.”

In Stanley’s 2018 book “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them,” he describes how fascism “dehumanizes segments of the population” to justify “inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment [to] expulsion.”

He says the Trump administration, which has been accused of deporting immigrants in defiance of court orders and has limited free speech by withholding funding for universities or federal agencies who promote so-called “DEI” (diversity, equality and inclusion) policies, can no longer be called “populist.”

The word ends up “whitewashing the threat,” he said, reiterating his view that Donald Trump’s intolerance is fascist by nature — a point made in his 2024 book, “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.”

“The United States is getting to be a scary place generally,” he continued. “[The] University of Toronto can be a haven; we can bring scholars and journalists there to protect them better than we can do in the United States.”

Stanley aims to help nurture a more inclusive academic environment from his new position. He says the Munk School plans to “create the world’s top center for defending democracy,” and will welcome journalists from both democratic and authoritarian countries like Russia and the US.

He also wants to protect his children who are Black and Black Jewish. Stanley says that attacks on DEI and on “Black history” are “an attack on Black people.”

“I want my kids to grow up in conditions of freedom.”