Trump is 'dissociating' as his 'downfall' nears: Nobel economist

As it becomes increasingly evident that President Donald Trump’s “downfall” is imminent, he is going to lash out and cause as much damage to the country as he can before “losing all of his power.” This is according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who warned on Wednesday that Trump’s collapse has similarities to that of one of history’s greatest tyrants.

“It’s not news to anybody that Trump is ego-driven, disconnected from reality, and at the same time, somehow commands a level of deference and obedience from the entire machinery of the federal government that no president has ever had before,” Krugman begins. “This is really quite serious. What I don’t think people are fully aware of is just how bad it can get, given that Trump is so obviously dissociating, decompensating, that he’s not all there. Obviously, he was already a very problematic personality, which was doing a great deal of damage to the United States. I don’t think even now people fully appreciate the amount of damage that has been done. Even before the Iran War, Trump’s provocations, insults, his trade wars, really destroyed the world’s trust in America.”

But history offers frightening examples of how bad things can get. Krugman points to the German film Downfall, which portrays the final days of Adolf Hitler, saying, “the parallels are there.” For example, “Hitler was obsessed with building a gigantic gaudy ballroom.” But more pressing was the fact that “he knew that defeat was looming. He knew that his power was collapsing. And his reaction was, among other things, to take it out on his own country.” According to Krugman, “He felt that Germany had failed him. And so he had a plan, often called the Nero Decree, which was to destroy as much as possible of Germany’s infrastructure, supposedly to deny it to the victorious allies, but in large part to punish Germany.”

Here Krugman turns to Trump, saying that while the president often rejects negative polling, “he is behaving like somebody who knows that his days of supreme power are about to end. He, of course, is not going to accept that it’s his fault. It’s the fault, obviously, of the Democrats, who are all communists. It’s the fault of the Republicans, who didn’t live up to his leadership. The fault of everybody but him.”

With the end of his power approaching, Trump’s first impulse is to leave his name and imprint “everywhere.” Krugman points to reporting by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who revealed that Trump “spends most of his time thinking about his construction projects and trying to leave his mark on everything in Washington.”

But according to Krugman, “What I don’t think we’re fully appreciating even about those projects is that there isn’t a whole lot of actual construction. There’s a lot of starting of stuff, but so far it’s been mostly destruction, mostly tearing stuff down. We don’t have a triumphal arch, but we have a hole where the ballroom is supposed to be. We have just a lot of damage having been done to our nation’s capital and to the iconic structures that were supposed to define, symbolize who we are as a country. The scale of the destruction is really quite amazing.” Noting a photo of the White House grounds marred by a combination of ballroom and UFC cage match construction, Krugman points out, “Basically, Trump has left, so far, wreckage in his wake.”

What’s more, says Krugman, “even the things which have not involved tearing stuff down, the gilding of statues, the horrific redecoration of the White House, is surpassingly ugly. That’s partly because Trump has terrible taste, but it’s also, I think, a clear sign of aggression. He’s saying, oh yeah, you’re going to give me a 33 percent approval rating? Well, I’m going to make the nation’s capital as ugly as I can in this little time as I possibly can[.] How much more will be coming?”

Krugman concludes with a grim warning, saying, “Bear in mind that Trump hates America. He hates the values on which America was built. He hates democracy. He hates rule of law. He hates all of the things that are what we’re supposed to be about as a nation. But increasingly it looks as if he just plain hates this country because it doesn’t love him. How much damage will he do? How much damage can he do? I don’t want to make a specific prediction, but I’m worried. And don’t say that he won’t do that or he can’t do that. Those have been famous last words again and again over the past decade. So this is going to be even worse, even uglier, I think than most people imagine.”