I was going to ask whether the democratic ship of state was sinking or had already sunk. Then I read Paul Krugman. By Hal M. Brown

I used Perchance AI last night to make the above illustrations. As I was lying in bed before getting up I thought of the analogy of the Titantic and how its builders intended to build a luxury liner that was unsinkable. Then I though of the line about what the Founding Fathers had given the nation widely attributed to Ben Franklin: “a republic, if you can keep it.”

This is still on a Government website:

How long it stays there remains to be seen.

Then I got out of bed and scanned down my overnight email and saw this (highlighted below):

I clicked on it before I went through my usual perusal of websites to see the morning news and opinion. 

Here’s what I saw:

Krugman starts off slowly writing about Trump’s tarrifs, deportations, and the economy. Then he builds to what I planned to write about. He writes:

Unfortunately, one possible effect of the bad economic news may be to induce MAGA to put the real Project 2025 — the plot to destroy American democracy — on an accelerated schedule.

Or as I think of it, I don’t think we’re in Hungary anymore.

He goes on to explain how Viktor Orban took a gradualist approach to destroying democracy in Hungary. noting that the ruling party “had the luxury of time because until recently the party remained quite popular with the Hungarian public.”

Then he wrote:

It's now clear, by contrast, that Trump and MAGA don’t have the luxury of time. Trump’s approval has already cratered. He inherited an economy with low unemployment and subdued inflation, but is now presiding over a weakening job market and will soon face a burst of inflation, with nobody but himself to blame. He may manage to bully government statisticians into cooking the books and making the numbers look good, but that’s harder than it looks. And even if the official numbers say everything is great, nobody will believe it.

So if Trump and MAGA want to hold on to power, they’ll have to do so in the face of low public approval and poor economic performance. 

What does “quickly and blatantly mean? Krugman concludes as follows:

Indeed, as CNN reported the other day, Republicans are trying in multiple ways to, in effect, rig the midterm elections. Their actions include a plan for an extreme, mid-decade gerrymandering in Texas that could cost Democrats multiple House seats; attempts to interfere in voting procedures, for example by banning states from accepting mail-in ballots after election day and forcing states to require proof of citizenship. Much of this is clearly unconstitutional, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

And what if these actions aren’t enough? Remember, Trump supporters, with his clear encouragement, already tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The important point is that right now Trump has immense power, thanks in large part to the cowardice of many of the institutions that should be holding him in check. But he’s also rapidly bleeding support, in large part because he’s completely failing to deliver on his economic promises.

That combination makes this an extremely dangerous moment. 

The oppostite of being soft is being hard. What could this look like less than Trump declaring martial law and using the armed forces to overthrow democracy? 

If he tries to do this the only hope for saving democracy that I can see is that patriots in the military say a “hard no.” I will leave it to you to imagine how this woud play out.

It is instructive to compare Trump’s position, not just to Orban’s, but to Hitler’s in the late 1930’s. Orban took the slow route to conquest of just one country. Hitler, who already had an iron grip on Germany, mounted a successful juggernaut to conquer Europe. 

Could Trump accomplish what Hitler did by mounting a blitzkrieg to take over not other free nations, but “just” the United States?

You can read, or reread, my speculation on this in “What did Hitler have that Trump doesn’t.”

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Hal Brown's Substack

I'm a retired psychotherapist who writes about politics.

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