A former Yale University professor has revealed why President Donald Trump’s second term prompted her and her husband to leave the United States for Canada.
Marci Shore, a scholar of totalitarianism, announced last month that she and her husband, tyranny expert Timothy Snyder, were moving to the University of Toronto.
In an interview published Monday by The Guardian, Shore said she had become increasingly alarmed by what she sees as the normalization of extremism in U.S. politics, thanks to Trump’s shamelessness and tactic of throwing wrongdoing “all in your face.”
Shore said she first considered leaving the U.S. after Trump’s 2016 election win over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton but Snyder felt they should stay.
“My fear is we’re headed to civil war. There’s a lot of guns. There’s a lot of gun violence,” Shore warned. “There’s a habituation to violence that’s very American, that Europeans don’t understand.”
Shore said people who voted for Trump in 2024 “had plenty of time to think about it, and they chose this. And that disgust, I couldn’t shake that. I thought: ‘People wanted this — and I don’t want to have anything to do with this.’”