Krugman continues to lay out a theme he started talking about yesterday: Trump's break with reality. The crux of the argument:
Does Trump actually believe that (the protests were small)? I suspect that he does. In the grip of delusion, a powerful person will dismiss and destroy anything that challenges their self-aggrandizing alternate reality. This explains why there is no one in Trump’s inner circle who dares to tell him that his poll numbers are, indeed, very bad; or that it’s a bad look to commute George Santos’ prison sentence for fraud and identity theft. When people try to tell him things he doesn’t want to hear, he gets angry.
I would even take this a step further. The reason why democracies succeed in the long run is that you cannot remain in an autocratic bubble when you have to face the voters. You have to adjust and explain your actions. Trump feels no such compunction. He continues to do things that are self-evidently damaging to the United States because he thinks that eventually - or even right now - he will be proven right. It's one thing to believe that tariffs will make us richer by 2028, but Trump may very well believe that they are making is richer today. Who, exactly, is going to tell him differently?
I still believe that the great mass of Americans do not want to slide into Trump's form of authoritarianism. I am up in the air as to whether we have the tools to prevent it, but I think we generally prize our democracy. If Trump retreats further into his narcissistic delusions and he has no one around him to correct those delusions, I would guess that this will further erode him standing even with some of the people who voted for him.
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