Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is calling for a sweeping “deMAGAfication” of the United States, explicitly comparing the effort to the campaign of denazification imposed on Germany after World War II.
In a video posted to his Substack under the title “Learning from a Mentally Ill President,” Krugman, who once claimed that the Internet would have a minimal impact on society, argued that defeating President Donald Trump and his allies in the 2026 midterm elections and the 2028 presidential election would not be enough to reverse the political transformation of the country.
Ex-NYT author Paul Krugman says the US needs a “purge” of MAGA supporters akin to denazification.
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“We need to defang Trump as much as possible and make sure that neither he nor anybody who follows in his footsteps has power after the next two elections,” Krugman said.
But Krugman went considerably further, calling for a broader political and cultural reckoning aimed at the movement that returned Trump to the White House.
“But beyond that, we really need to do a thorough purging of the United States. 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.”
The remarks quickly circulated across social media, where conservative commentators accused Krugman of using inflammatory language that appeared to cast tens of millions of American voters as the domestic equivalent of the defeated Nazi regime.
Krugman, who spent more than two decades as a columnist for The New York Times before leaving the newspaper, framed the rise of the MAGA movement as the product of a deeper economic and political imbalance. He argued that any long-term effort to prevent a similar movement from emerging would require confronting not only Trump’s political influence but also “the whole structure of hugely unequal power, hugely unequal wealth that made this horrific moment possible.”
The economist’s remarks reflect an increasingly aggressive strain of anti-Trump rhetoric among some prominent Democratic commentators, who have argued that electoral victories alone will not be sufficient to dismantle the political coalition that has reshaped the Republican Party and returned Trump to office and reveal that liberal cultural leaders have developed a totalitarian streak, which explains why Joe Biden began censoring critics almost immediately upon taking office.
Critics, however, contend that calls for a “purging” of the country—and comparisons between Trump supporters and the population of postwar Germany—carry unmistakably authoritarian implications. They argue that the language is especially striking when directed at a mass political movement supported by millions of American voters exercising their rights through the democratic process.
As the video continued to spread Tuesday, Krugman had not issued any additional public clarification of what a “thorough purging” or “deMAGAfication” campaign would entail.
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Krugman is a good example of the liberal leftist war on masculinity.