Renowned economist Paul Krugman has called for Donald Trump and his MAGA movement to be decisively defeated in the 2026 midterm elections and the 2028 presidential race.
And “beyond that, we really need to do a thorough purging of the United States,” the winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences said in a video message shared on his Substack on Sunday.
“We need a deMAGAfication. And I’m not going over the top by using a word that’s very similar to the denazification that we pursued successfully after World War II in Germany,” he continued, referring to the Allies’ post-World War II effort to remove Nazi ideology and personnel from positions of power in Germany.
Watch the full video on Substack.
Krugman — a longtime Trump critic who for years has repeatedly attacked the president’s economic policies, foreign policy decisions and, most recently, his Iran war — argued there must also be a rejection of the circumstances that led to Trump’s rise to power.
There has to be a repudiation of “not just the MAGA ideology, but the whole structure of hugely unequal power, hugely unequal wealth that made this horrific moment possible,” said the former columnist for The New York Times.
“It’s not going to be easy, and maybe it’s not going to be doable,” he acknowledged in his comments, which came amid growing speculation over the GOP post-Trump.
“But we have to try because this is a nightmare,” he urged. “This has to be turned around and we should not, above all, whitewash or forget this moment. This is where a lot of forces in America have been leading and if we don’t do something beyond just getting rid of Trump, it’s going to happen again.”