It’s no secret that President Donald Trump enjoys praise and adoration, but according to Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman, this is no mere vanity, but part of a “flattery-failure doom loop” that is burning the country down.
Citing a recent New York Times piece entitled “Trump Is the Only Person Who Can Save America, According to His Cabinet,” Krugman notes that an average of one in six statements made by the president’s officials during Cabinet meetings is intended to either flatter Trump or attack his opponents.
“This ‘Dear Leader’ treatment is unprecedented in American history,” notes Krugman. “Regardless of how successful, no previous president has been showered with this kind of obsequiousness and deification.”
And what’s more, no one “outside the MAGA bubble” is being fooled.
“Americans are increasingly seeing Trump as the loser he is,” writes Krugman. “He has failed on every front. Manufacturing employment is down, inflation is outpacing wages, consumer sentiment is at a record low, mortgage rates are up. Trump’s war of choice has led to utter humiliation. According to current polls, Americans are giving Trump extremely low approval ratings, both overall and on every major issue — even border security.”
Yet still, within “the MAGA fantasy bubble,” Trump is “hailed, almost literally, as the Second Coming.” His “personality cult” has become so fanatical, says Krugman, that Republicans have begun to treat him as more of a monarch to whom they should surrender their role as an independent branch of government.
As evidence of this, he nods to a recent post from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who declared, “President Trump is the ONLY one who could have gotten Iran… to the negotiating table.”
“When prominent people in a republic act as if they were living in a monarchy,” Krugman warns, “the republic increasingly becomes a monarchy in reality.”
He says that Republicans on the Supreme Court have done even more harm in this regard: “Right-wing legal thinkers have increasingly embraced ‘unitary executive theory,’ under which the entire executive branch — including agencies Congress has designated as independent — answers personally to the president, who can hire and fire officials at will. The Roberts Court hasn’t explicitly endorsed this theory. But the Court has given presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts — effectively placing Trump above the law. And Roberts has declared that the president is ‘the only person who alone composes a branch of government,’ which, combined with the subservience of both Congress and the Court itself, does in effect make Trump a dictator.”
Krugman asserts that the fusion of “flattery and failure” that has developed under “America’s most incompetent modern president” is no accident, but part of a “self-reinforcing doom loop.”
“Trump needs and demands sycophantic praise and unfettered power in part to compensate for the fact that he’s such an objective failure,” Krugman concludes. “And while his manifest unfitness is part of the explanation for his failure, his policy disasters also have a lot to do with the bubble that surrounds him. Nobody dares to tell him when he’s wrong. Nobody can stop him from indulging his whims, no matter how disastrous their consequences.”