Paul Krugman did a great job of running down the backlash that’s rapidly developing among the public that says it all in this piece called “The Paranoid Style in Maga Policy”. This was the most interesting observation, however:
As the economy stumbles and the stock market tanks, consumer confidence lags, and even some Trump voters are losing faith, what I find particularly revealing is how the Trump cabal are responding. They aren’t rethinking their policies; they aren’t even making major efforts to justify their policies to an increasingly skeptical public. Instead, they’ve instantly descended into a pit of insane conspiracy theories.
Thus, according to Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, those rowdy audiences at town halls aren’t citizens sincerely concerned about government layoffs and looming cuts to Medicaid; they’re “paid protestors” hired by “George Soros-funded groups”.
Gotta say, those Soros people are pretty impressive if they’ve managed to secretly hire fake protestors for town halls all across America.
What about those Tesla protests? According to Musk, they aren’t a response to his Nazi salutes and the chainsaw DOGE has been taking to crucial public services. In his mind they’re a conspiracy organized by five people, three of whom happen to be Jewish and two of whom happen to be dead:
And that big decline in the stock market? According to Trump, it’s not a response to concerns about his zigzagging tariff policies. “I think it is globalists that see how rich our country is going to be and they don’t like it.” Yep, globalist Trump-haters have tanked a $48 trillion market.
If all of this sounds crazy, that’s because it is. What we’re hearing from the Musk-Trump Administration sounds, if I can use the term, distinctly un-American. It’s the kind of rhetoric you expect from an authoritarian regime that attributes every setback to sabotage by rootless cosmopolitan enemies of the state.
Then again, why should we be surprised? An excellent recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times, using data from the World Values Survey, shows that at this point the U.S. Right’s values are in fact very similar to those of authoritarian regimes like Russia and Turkey, and not at all like those of Western democracies, or for that matter its own values a generation ago:
While rule by crazy conspiracy theorists is an unquestionably bad state of affairs, let me lay out two specific reasons it’s bad.
First, it means that the people in charge won’t learn from failure. When things go wrong — when planes crash, or forests burn, or children die of preventable diseases, or the economy enters stagflation — it won’t be because policies should be reconsidered. It will be because sinister globalists are plotting against America. And the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Second, there will be a search for scapegoats. Much of the federal government is already in the midst of a de facto political purge, with professional civil servants replaced by apparatchiks and job cuts falling most heavily on agencies perceived as liberal. These purges will intensify and broaden, increasingly extending to the private sector, as the administration proves itself incapable of governing effectively.
They’re already saying this as you can see with Trump’s daft bullshit about the “globalists” tanking the stock market. He’s clearly spooked but he’s in so deep that he can’t get out. Apparently, none of them can.