Manic misspelling rage poster Trump gave Paul Krugman a gift so he added “Deranged BUM” to his Substack profile. I wish he'd call me a disparaging name too. By Hal M. Brown

 

Paul Krugman hardly needs publicity. Check this out:

Below is what the Daily Beast article about this looks like.

If you’re reading this and don’t know who Paul Krugman is, and admire him for his insights, you must be a Trumper who by some twist of fate stumbled on my Substack. 

This is the comment I posted on Krugman’s Substack:

Here’s the image I put on BlueSky:

I’ve written so often about Trump’s psychopathology that I am weary of the voice in my head composing new ways to describe the mental aberrations that make him the most dangerously unhinged nation’s leader in history out crazying crazy leaders like Caligula and Idi Amin. 

Like other manic malevolent leaders, think Wonderland’s Queen of Hearts, he relishes his power to order “off with their heads.” 

The Queen of Hearts had her loyal court. Trump has his. Some of them showed their loyalty yesterday after they spoke following the unhinged manic and malevolent off-the-rails address by Dictator Donald.

In his serious Substack regarding Trump’s lies about violence in D.C. Krugman managed the following bit of levity:

I’m not in competition with Krugman for click. His Substack today, as I write this, got 925 hearts, 240 comments, and 175 restacks.

But, hey I’m human, and considering the time and effort I put into my writing I like knowing people appreciate little old me. I would welcome joining the Trump Esteemed Enemies list and having him call me a nasty name. I could write a Substack about it and put the name in my profile.

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What can I possibly say about how chilling what is reported in this story is?

Excerpt from RawStory:

Internal documents obtained by The Washington Post and reported on Tuesday reveal a secret Pentagon plan by the Trump administration to create a standing force of military personnel that could be rapidly deployed to U.S. cities or communities to quell public protests or any situation President Donald Trump deems "domestic civil unrest."

The proposal to create what it dubs a "Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force"—which evidence shows has been under serious consideration by the administration over recent months—would utilize existing statute, including invocation of Title 32, to authorize the deployment of specialized National Guard units anywhere in the country within hours, according to the documents.

The article summarizes The Washington Post (subscription) article “Pentagon plan would create military ‘reaction force’ for civil unrest.”

The photo that they chose to illustrate it is fairly benign as it shows only three soldiers and a few military vehicles.

The soldier in the foreground doesn’t seem to have a firearm, but he does have a long baton under his arm and, oddly, an American flag on his back.

The obvious questions are how long, if this happens, will it be before a peaceful protestor is killed, and if this happens how will the country react to this?

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. 

These are Krugman's concluding sentences: 

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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