New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on Wednesday issued a dire warning about what’s to come in the 2020 presidential election, and he predicted that supporters of President Donald Trump would try to violently disrupt voting.
“I wonder how many people are ready for just how bad the next six weeks plus are going to be,” Krugman wrote on Twitter. “This is going to be the most dangerous election since 1860, with substantial odds that America as we know it will be damaged or even destroyed.”
The Nobel Prize-winning economist then walked through how Trump will try to contest the results of the election if he loses, as current polls suggest he will.
“There is… a near-zero percent chance that he’ll accept the result if he loses,” he predicted. “He’ll try to stop counting of absentee ballots, claim massive fraud, and probably try to get the Supreme Court to overturn the result. Expect violence from Trump supporters, maybe lots of it, both to disrupt voting on Election Day and in the days that follow.”
The bottom line, Krugman concluded, is that “if you aren’t terrified, you aren’t paying attention” and encouraged his followers to “be asking what you personally can do to save democracy, which is very much under threat.”