Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and bestselling author who now works as an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, weighed in Wednesday morning on something that’s been bothering many of us, worrying many more, and terrifying even more than that: What happens if all of the lies and shady constructs that Trump has assembled for this election — to try and fool people into thinking either that everything’s great and it’s because of him or that everything’s awful and he’s the only one who can fix it — all falls apart and he loses?
What do his true believers do?
Unfortunately, Krugman doesn’t believe the answer to that is a good one. Firing up his Twitter account, Krugman laid out his own predictions, and they’re more than a little bit dire.
I wonder how many people are ready for just how bad the next six weeks plus are going to be. 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 1/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) September 23, 2020
Trump’s campaign strategy is to brazen it out with obvious lies: the virus isn’t a threat, we have a vaccine, the economy is booming, violent mobs are roaming the streets of New York. Many people will believe him 2/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) September 23, 2020
Even so, it probably — probably — won’t be enough. He’s behind in the polls, and the two most cited models give him a 15-23 percent chance of winning 3/https://t.co/XniB9rDFYjhttps://t.co/OfcVZmE5aH
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) September 23, 2020
There is, however, a near-zero percent chance that he’ll accept the result if he loses. He’ll try to stop counting of absentee ballots, claim massive fraud, and probably try to get the Supreme Court to overturn the result 4/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) September 23, 2020
Expect violence from Trump supporters, maybe lots of it, both to disrupt voting on Election Day and in the days that follow. Is this overheated? So far Trump and his party have borne out every prediction by pessimists and made fools of optimists 5/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) September 23, 2020
If you aren’t terrified, you aren’t paying attention. But terror isn’t productive; you should be asking what you personally can do to save democracy, which is very much under threat 6/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) September 23, 2020
The hardest part about reading Krugman’s tweets is that so much of what he’s saying is backed up by contemporary evidence: Trump is telling those exact lies — his DOJ just declared three major American cities “anarchist jurisdictions” despite protests in those cities being confined to a few square blocks of ongoing conflict between protesters and police. He repeatedly conflates the stock market, which is faring decently, with the larger economy, which is still facing millions of people out of work and facing eviction. He has promised a COVID vaccine before the election, despite every expert saying it’s not possible.
But for the Trump voter, facts are irrelevant. When you “attack” their president, you are attacking them. They have centered our democracy on a single man.
Part of the solution, of course, is to ensure high enough voter turnout and a landslide so large that Trump’s margin of loss is unquestionably clear. But another part, after the election, is going to have to be a campaign of anti-propaganda, an education campaign for people who have surrendered themselves to a fantasy world where they hold all the power that Donald Trump has promised them they held.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
