Much has been said about how President Donald Trump’s claims often don’t correspond with reality, but according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, it’s inaccurate to say that Trump is merely lying. Instead, there is an alarmingly “extreme” reason Trump and his MAGA followers reject objective fact.
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As Krugman explained on Thursday, MAGA is characterized by a denial of reality. Krugman offers no shortage of examples:
“The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism. But hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people. Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America, not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rake its 2 million square miles of boreal forest. We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault. The economy is in a ‘golden age.’ Prices are down. And Trump has a 59 percent approval rating. Trump won the 2020 election. Communism is the greatest threat facing America.”
With all this in mind, writes Krugman, “What Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to shoot the messenger.” He notes that while anyone can experience a bout of wishful thinking, “what we’re seeing now isn’t run-of-the-mill motivated reasoning. It’s something far more extreme.”
Here Krugman brings up author George Orwell, who famously described this situation, writing, “In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone.”
“Totalitarians, however,” writes Krugman, “denied that objective facts existed. Furthermore, reality is mutable, changing with the leader’s whims.” As Orwell put it, “If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five.”
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Krugman asserts that the GOP has proven surprisingly susceptible to this “totalitarian mindset,” noting as an example how “they behave as if they were courtiers to Kim Jong Un. Trump speeches are sometimes followed by ‘endless applause moments,’ because none of Trump’s loyalists wants to be seen as the first person to stop clapping.”
According to Krugman, Americans are paying a real cost for MAGA’s “war on reality.”
“Remember,” he writes, “1.2 million Americans died from Covid — a number that would have been much lower if MAGA misinformation hadn’t caused so many people to refuse vaccination. Now we’re seeing a frightening rise in measles and other infectious diseases, and God help us if another pandemic strikes with Trump or his successor still in charge. Climate denial and hostility to renewable energy will mean more pollution even as it consigns the U.S. to energy and economic backwardness. And the Iran war — which Trump started and now refuses to end because he won’t accept reality — has destroyed America’s credibility and depleted our weapon stocks with stunning speed.”
“But,” Krugman concludes with grim jest, “anyone pointing out the obvious is, of course, a Communist.”
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