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As they say, you can’t make this stuff up. It all feeds (so to speak) a narrative about Trump as a bizarre anomaly among American leaders, an exception to all the rules and therefore, perhaps, less of a threat than his actions might suggest.

As an antidote to that way of thinking I watched a featuring three high-profile professors who left Yale University this year and came to the University of Toronto. The Times headline over the video sums it up: “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.”

The three – , and – got a lot of publicity a few weeks ago about their move to Canada. It was widely reported that they were “fleeing” the United States because of Trump, a story line that for one thing flattered Canadians who like to think of our country as a bastion of never-Trumpism.

It’s not quite that simple. Snyder, a rock-star historian if such a thing exists, has subsequently made clear that he came to U of T for largely personal reasons (he and Shore are married and have young teenagers). “I was not and am not fleeing anything,” he wrote in

Nonetheless, all three academics have studied fascism in theory and practice, Snyder notably as the author of “Bloodlands” and “On Tyranny,” Shore as an authority on European intellectual history, and Stanley as the author of “How Fascism Works.” And all three warn in the video that Trump is bringing a form of fascism to the United States.

Stanley says he went to U of T because he wants to work “without the fear that I will be punished for my words.” Shore says the lesson of 1933 (when Hitler came to power in Germany) is “you get out sooner rather than later.” Snyder argues that the notion of American exceptionalism leads to a kind of thinking where the very concept of freedom narrows “until what you’re talking about is authoritarianism.”

There’s no room here to rehearse  to feed those fears. You’ve read about them: riding roughshod over the courts; deporting people without even the pretense of due process; using federal power to intimidate critics and reward friends; threatening universities that don’t fall into line with his policies; cowing much of the media. And something Canadians are all too familiar with: declaring fake emergencies to impose tariffs and bypass the power of Congress in that area.

It’s debatable whether that amounts to “fascism” or something else. In the Times, three other political scientists who have studied the end of democracy argue the U.S. is headed to something

By that they mean a system where parties still compete but the incumbent party uses state power to intimidate opponents across so-called civil society: corporations, universities, the media, organizations of all kinds. The result is a system akin to that in authoritarian countries like Hungary, Turkey and Venezuela. The label isn’t nearly as important as the result.

To conclude, some words from , publisher of the New York Times: “A free people need a free press. Across the world, we’ve seen democracy in retreat. And for aspiring strongmen seeking to undermine the laws and norms and institutions that underpin a healthy democracy, the free press is usually one of the first targets. It’s no secret why. Once you’ve constrained the ability of journalists to provide independent information to the public about those in power, it becomes far easier to act with impunity.”