Former NY Times economic columnist Paul Krugman called for a purge of the “MAGA ideology” and said the country will go through a period of “de-MAGAification,” the way Germany went through denazification. “We really need to do a thorough purging of the United States,” Krugman said. “We need a de-MAGAification, and that is, you know, I’m not going over the top by using a word that’s very similar to the denazification that we pursued successfully after World War II in Germany. And we need something, it’s not just the MAGA ideology, but the whole structure of, here’s the unequal power, here’s the unequal wealth that made this horrific moment possible.”

PAUL KRUGMAN: The President of the United States is mentally ill, but everybody knows that. So while we should continue to focus on this degeneration taking place in front of our eyes, we should also, beyond that, ask what we can do about the powers, the interests, the system that put this horrifying person in a position of power. Hi, I’m Paul Krugman. First video update in a while. It’s May 31st. If you have been following some of the news, you may know that Trump’s mental deterioration, which was obvious, has been obvious for quite a while, got even more extreme in the past few days. Tellingly, the things that are really driving him into more obvious dysfunction are things that are blows to his ego. I was especially struck, I was rattled actually, by his reaction to the wave of artists canceling out on the self-glorifying concert series he’s holding on the mall. So if you hadn’t seen it, here’s what he said on Truth Social, that after artists are getting the yips, I am thinking about bringing the number one attraction anywhere in the world, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the greatest president in history, Donald J. Trump. Oh my God. I would not want to trust this guy alone in a room, let alone running the world’s formerly greatest power, although he’s doing a lot to run that into the ground. Okay, but we do that, right? It’s not really a surprise to find out that he has lost his mind, what was left of it. And yet he is in power. People who did a lot to put him in power did so knowing this. The billionaires who contributed vast sums of money to his campaign, the Supreme Court which gave him immunity back in 2024, they all knew who they were doing this for. They understood what they were doing. Now, maybe even they are getting a bit of cold feet now as he goes over the edge and as we’re starting to see in Iran and elsewhere, what happens when you have a lunatic running the United States, a lunatic who has far more power than any previous president because all of the normal institutional safeguards have been short-circuited or dismantled. Still, they are continuing to support him, and they’re continuing to do so not just in concrete ways but verbally, which matters. They continue to cover for him. Just the other day, Jeff Bezos, who is not an idiot, he has to know what he’s looking at, but he said, oh, Trump is much more mature than he was in his first term, which is obviously a complete lie. That is not what Jeff Bezos thinks, and it’s also telling you that he is still providing cover. The Supreme Court, although it’s been knocking back a few things, is for the most part continuing to give Trump treatment that it would never have accorded not just to any Democratic president but to any previous Republican president. Okay, this is not coming out of thin air. These people are not, I’m not talking about Trump, but people who are empowering him are not stupid. Some of them are weak, but they are also acting because they think there’s something in it for them. All of this is about, at some level, it’s about money and power for people beyond Trump, and it’s made possible by the fact that there is so much money in the hands of a few people, many of whom turn out, not too surprisingly, to be terrible, insensitive, anti-Democratic people themselves. We need much more. Obviously, we need to defang Trump as much as possible and make sure that neither he nor anybody who follows in his footsteps has power after the next two elections. But beyond that, we really need to do a thorough purging of the United States. We need a de-MAGAification, and that is, you know, I’m not going over the top by using a word that’s very similar to the denazification that we pursued successfully after World War II in Germany. And we need something, it’s not just the MAGA ideology, but the whole structure of, here’s the unequal power, here’s the unequal wealth that made this horrific moment possible. It’s not going to be easy, and maybe it’s not going to be doable, but we have to try, because this is a nightmare. This is a nightmare beyond, I think, even the worst fantasies of progressives, beyond the worst fantasies of conservatives who still have a conscience, and there still are plenty of those, but they’re no longer MAGA. This has to be turned around, and we should not, above all, whitewash or forget this moment. This is where a lot of forces in America have been leading, and if we don’t do something beyond just getting rid of Trump, it’s going to happen again. Have a good rest of your weekend.

RealClearPolitics Videos