President Donald Trump points toward supporters at the end of a campaign rally in Youngstown, Ohio, October 12, 2026. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
On Wednesday, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman sounded the alarm about President Donald Trump’s plan to “punish” the U.S. during the final two years of his term. According to Krugman, Trump is preparing to take a page from two of history’s most terrible tyrants.
“By the middle of March 1945,” writes Krugman, “even Adolf Hitler knew that the war was lost. Soviet forces were within 45 miles of Berlin. American forces had crossed the Rhine and were well on their way to encircling the remaining German defenders. But Hitler didn’t believe that he had failed. He believed that he had been failed by the German people. So on March 19 he issued the ‘Decree concerning demolitions in the Reich territory,’ which has come to be known as the Nerobefehl or Nero decree. It ordered the destruction of Germany’s own infrastructure — supposedly to deny that infrastructure to the Allies, but the obvious purpose was to punish his own country.” While the order was never carried out, according to Krugman, it serves as a warning for how Trump will respond after his party takes a beating in the midterms – an effort the president is already ramping up.
Trump has put himself at the center of the midterm campaign, telling voters to “pretend I am on the ballot.” With the GOP poised to take major losses, Krugman notes that it’s unlikely Trump will be happy “when Americans show what they really think of him.” The president will almost certainly “claim that the election was rigged and try to overturn the results,” but assuming that fails, he’ll likely crank up the punishment. “Loss of Congress will limit Trump’s power, but by no means eliminate it,” writes Krugman. “Above all, he will retain immense capacity to inflict destruction on America, not to mention America’s allies.”
As an example of the latter, he points to recent news out of Ukraine. According to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the country hasn’t received warnings from its western allies about impending Russian missile strikes in several days. This could merely be due to some technical issue, but in Krugman’s estimation, “Anyone dismissing the possibility that Trump is trying to punish Ukraine for daring to deny victory to his friend Vladimir Putin must have slept through the past two years.”
Domestically, Trump is continuing his destructive spree of vanity projects. Krugman points to recent news that the administration suddenly cut down hundreds of trees in a D.C. golf course, attempting to remake it per the president’s whims. But its full transformation is “unlikely to happen given the political winds, and in any case there was no need to rush the destruction. This was almost surely an act of spite, a deliberate act of vandalism, undertaken precisely because Trump knows he won’t get his way. And while a few hundred trees are not in themselves that big a deal, they represent the shape of things to come. Think of the Kennedy Center, a national icon that Trump is destroying because he can’t put his own name on it, as the model for what is all too likely to happen to America over the next two years.”
Krugman warns that even if Democrats take congressional power, Trump’s destructive efforts will still be enabled by the “corrupt, partisan majority on the Supreme Court,” and by those in his orbit who are willing and “even eager to break the law.” But what Democrats must do, Krugman concludes, “is make it clear that everyone who aids and abets Trump in his Neroism can and will be held accountable to the full extent of the law. At this point, anyone who says something like ‘We should look forward, not back’ is making it significantly less likely that we will have anything to look forward to.”
