Fascism expert Jason Stanley — who left Yale University for Canada earlier this year over fears of the U.S. political climate — has spelled out the authoritarian playbook he believes Donald Trump and his administration are currently following.The professor, who’s now at the University of Toronto, also predicted the chilling way Trump will continue his power grab in the near future.Since the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last week, Trump and his top officials have relentlessly attacked people on “the left,” with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller going as far as to pledge to “destroy” what he described as left-wing “terror” networks.It’s “completely playbook,” Stanley said of the rhetoric on Tuesday’s broadcast of “The Weeknight” on MSNBC. “Scholars of authoritarianism have been warning about this for years. Every authoritarian ever waits for an atrocity to happen, a terrorist attack, and they have planned how they’re going to use it.”“They’re going to use it to target the political opposition,” Stanley continued, noting how Miller, the architect of Trump’s extreme anti-immigration agenda, in particular is “now talking about Democrats the way he talks about immigrants.”It’s “just what we expected,” said Stanley. “It’s what you would do if you were scripting this. You would wait for some atrocity to happen that shocks the nation, and then you would blame it on the political opposition and use the levers of the state to target the political opposition. This is the next phase. This is the U.S. citizen phase — the targeting of U.S. citizens.”The scholar later envisioned further attacks on media that report critically about Trump, or a billionaire ally of the president buying up outlets. Other organizations “will be targeted by the arm of the state and connected with crime” and nongovernmental organizations are also “obviously next,” he said.“That’s just what they do,” the professor warned, adding that “the key thing is to remain calm” and “resist the attempt to connect [a tragedy] with the administration’s enemies.”Watch the full exchange here:Close