Krugman urges – Paul Krugman says Trump and MAGA must be decisively defeated in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential race, arguing that the country needs a deeper “deMAGAfication” beyond simply removing one politician—using a comparison to postwar Germany.
Paul Krugman didn’t stop at defeating Donald Trump.
In a video message shared on his Substack on Sunday. the renowned economist—who won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences—said the country needs to do more than toss the current political moment aside. He called for a “thorough purging of the United States. ” and used a phrase he likened to the Allies’ post-World War II effort in Germany.
“We need a deMAGAfication,” Krugman said. He immediately drew the parallel himself. arguing he wasn’t “going over the top” in language that was “very similar to the denazification that we pursued successfully after World War II in Germany.” The comparison landed with weight: denazification was meant to remove Nazi ideology and personnel from positions of power. and Krugman said the United States should aim for a comparable dismantling.
Krugman’s remarks were specific about political timelines. He called for Trump and his MAGA movement to be decisively defeated in the 2026 midterm elections and the 2028 presidential race. But he insisted that rejection can’t be confined to those elections alone.
According to Krugman. there has to be a repudiation not only of a political label. but of the conditions he says produced Trump’s rise. “There has to be a rejection of the circumstances that led to Trump’s rise to power,” he said. He then described what he believes lies beneath the movement: “not just the MAGA ideology. but the whole structure of hugely unequal power. hugely unequal wealth that made this horrific moment possible. ” he said.
The Nobel laureate acknowledged the scale of that task. “It’s not going to be easy, and maybe it’s not going to be doable,” he said. Still, he urged Americans to try—adding urgency to the moment rather than looking only ahead. “But we have to try because this is a nightmare,” he said.
Krugman also warned against moving too quickly to soften or erase what happened. “This has to be turned around and we should not, above all, whitewash or forget this moment,” he said. In his framing. forgetting would be a mistake because “a lot of forces in America have been leading” toward the kind of political rupture he believes the country is now living through.
He argued that getting rid of Trump isn’t enough on its own. “If we don’t do something beyond just getting rid of Trump, it’s going to happen again,” Krugman said.
Krugman is a longtime critic of Trump. and the video message sits against a familiar backdrop: he has repeatedly attacked the president’s economic policies and foreign policy decisions. and more recently. his Iran war. His newest call comes as speculation has grown about the GOP’s direction after a Trump era.
Taken together, the message is clear about the choice he thinks voters face: defeat Trump at the ballot box in 2026 and 2028, yes—but then follow through with what he describes as a deeper political cleansing, aimed at the ideology and power structures he says made the crisis possible.
Paul Krugman deMAGAfication Donald Trump MAGA 2026 midterm elections 2028 presidential race Nobel Prize Substack denazification United States politics GOP post-Trump
So he wants to do Germany stuff here? wild.