QAnon Rules: The Paranoid Style In The Musk-Trump Regime
It was predictable that the co-presidency of Donald Trump and Elon Musk would eventually face a backlash. After all, Trump’s entire campaign was built on fantasy promises -- like lowering grocery prices on day one of the Administration – that he had no way and no plans to honor. Moreover, the Administration’s actual policy agenda manages to be both deeply unpopular and economically destructive.
Even so, I admit that I am surprised at how quickly the backlash has developed. Republican members of Congress, rather than face angry denunciations by their constituents, have stopped holding town halls in their home districts. Tesla dealerships across the country are beset by protests, and in some cases vandalism. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal have both turned critical as the economy and the stock market rapidly deteriorate.
Notably, America’s oligarchs have been slow to wake up and smell the outrage. Until very recently most CEOs and large investors were bullish on Trump. But Trump’s dizzyingly erratic moves on tariffs may have finally delivered the message to the oligarch class that the Musk-Trump duo have no idea what they’re doing.
You can see this dawning revelation in stock prices. Let’s be clear: The stock market is not a good measure of how the economy is doing. It is, however, an indicator of the mood of people with a lot of money to invest. Now that reality has begun to set in, the market has given up all of the “Trump bump,” the stock gains that followed Trump’s election victory:
If you ask me, the public and especially big business are still behind the curve in understanding how much damage these people will inflict. Already we have a secretary of health and human services who responds to a major outbreak of measles by suggesting we take cod liver oil, and we have an agriculture secretary who suggests that the solution to high egg prices is to raise your own chickens. Plus we’ve destroyed our alliances and are rapidly undermining our scientific and technological capacity.
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 is 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.
It’s a scary prospect. I only hope that enough people get scared and angry enough, soon enough, to save America as we knew it.
Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former professor at MIT and Princeton who now teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. From 2000 to 2024, he wrote a column for The New York Times. Please consider subscribing to his Substack, where he now posts almost every day.
Reprinted with permission from Paul Krugman.
