Date: 2025-07-05 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00028506
TRUMP
AN AUTHORITARIAN AGENDA
American democracy is about to undergo a serious stress test.
I lived through the slow and steady march of state capture
as a journalist working in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey.
AN AUTHORITARIAN AGENDA
American democracy is about to undergo a serious stress test.
I lived through the slow and steady march of state capture
as a journalist working in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey.
Original article:
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
I think I am more concerned than most Americans about the true danger of the Donald Trump
Peter Burgess
I sometimes share with you perspectives about what we’re up against from non-American writers and journalists. Asli Aydintasbas, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., and a former journalist, published this short essay recently in Politico Magazine. As we prepare for Trump’s regime, I thought you’d find her views useful.
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American democracy is about to undergo a serious stress test. I know how it feels, in part because I lived through the slow and steady march of state capture as a journalist working in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey.
Over a decade as a high-profile journalist, I covered Turkey’s descent into illiberalism, having to engage in the daily push and pull with the government. I know how self-censorship starts in small ways but then creeps into operations on a daily basis. I am familiar with the rhythms of the battle to reshape the media, state institutions and the judiciary.
Having lived through it, and having gathered some lessons in hindsight, I believe that there are strategies that can help Democrats and Trump critics not only survive the coming four years, but come out stronger. Here are six of them.
1. Don’t Panic — Autocracy Takes Time
President-elect Donald Trump’s return to power is unnerving but America will not turn into a dictatorship overnight — or in four years. Even the most determined strongmen face internal hurdles, from the bureaucracy to the media and the courts. It took Erdoğan well over a decade to fully consolidate his power. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Poland’s Law and Justice Party needed years to erode democratic norms and fortify their grip on state institutions.
I am not suggesting that the United States is immune to these patterns, but it’s important to remember that its decentralized system of governance — the network of state and local governments — offers enormous resilience. Federal judges serve lifetime appointments, states and governors have specific powers separate from those granted federally, there are local legislatures, and the media has the First Amendment as a shield, reinforced by over a century of legal precedents.
Sure, there are dangers, including by a Supreme Court that might grant great deference to the president. But in the end, Donald Trump really only has two years to try to execute state capture. Legal battles, congressional pushback, market forces, midterm elections in 2026 and internal Republican dissent will slow him down and restrain him. The bottom line is that the U.S. is too decentralized in its governance system for a complete takeover. The Orbanization of America is not an imminent threat.
2. Don’t Disengage — Stay Connected
After a stunning electoral loss like this, there’s a natural impulse to shut off the news, log off social media and withdraw from public life. I’ve seen this with friends in Turkey and Hungary with opposition supporters retreating in disillusionment after Erdogan’s or Orbam’s victories. Understandably, people want to turn inwards.
Dancing, travel, meditation, book clubs — it’s all fine. But eventually, in Poland, Hungary and Turkey, opponents of autocracy have returned to the fight, driven by a belief in the possibility of change. So will Americans.
Nothing is more meaningful than being part of a struggle for democracy. That’s why millions of Turks turned out to the polls and gave the opposition a historic victory in local governments across Turkey earlier this year. That’s how the Poles organized a winning coalition to vote out the conservative Law and Justice Party last year. It can happen here, too.
The answer to political defeat is not to disconnect, but to organize. You can take a couple of days or weeks off, commiserate with friends and mute Elon Musk on X — or erase the app altogether. But in the end, the best way to develop emotional resilience is greater engagement.
3. Don’t Fear the Infighting
Donald Trump’s victory has understandably triggered infighting inside the Democratic Party and it looks ugly. But fear not. These recriminations and finger-pointing are necessary to move forward. In Turkey, Hungary and Poland, it was only after the opposition parties faced their strategic and ideological misalignment with society that they were able to begin to effectively fight back.
Trump has tapped into the widespread belief that the economic order, labor-capital relations, housing and the immigration system are broken. You may think he is a hypocrite, but there is no doubt that he has convinced a large cross-section of American society that he is actually the agent of change — a spokesman for their interests as opposed to “Democratic elites.” This is exactly what strongmen like Erdoğan and Orban have achieved.
For the Democratic Party to redefine itself as a force for change, and not just as the custodian of the status quo, it needs fundamental shifts in how it relates to working people in the U.S. There is time to do so before the midterms of 2026.
4. Charismatic Leadership Is a Non-Negotiable
One lesson from Turkey and Hungary is clear: You will lose if you don’t find a captivating leader, as was the case in 2023 general elections in Turkey and in 2022 in Hungary. Coalition-building or economic messaging is necessary and good. But it is not enough. You need charisma to mobilize social dissent.
Trump was beatable in this election, but only with a more captivating candidate. For Democrats, the mistake after smartly pushing aside President Joe Biden was bypassing the primaries and handpicking a candidate. Future success for the party will hinge on identifying a candidate who can better connect with voters and channel their aspirations. It should not be too hard in a country of 350 million.
Last year’s elections in Poland and Turkey showcased how incumbents can be defeated (or not defeated, as in general elections in Turkey in 2023) depending on the opposition’s ability to unite around compelling candidates who resonate with voters. Voters seek authenticity and a connection — give it to them.
5. Skip the Protests and Identity Politics
Soon, Trump opponents will shake off the doldrums and start organizing an opposition campaign. But how they do it matters. For the longest time in Turkey, the opposition made the mistake of relying too much on holding street demonstrations and promoting secularism, Turkey’s version of identity politics, which speaks to the urban professional and middle class but not beyond. When Erdoğan finally lost his absolute predominance in Turkish politics in 2024, it was largely because of his mismanagement of the economy and the opposition’s growing competence in that area.
Trump’s appeal transcends traditional divides of race, gender and class. He has formed a new Republican coalition and to counteract this. Democrats too, must broaden their tent, even if means trying to appeal to conservatives on some issues. Opposition over the next four years must be strategic and broad-based.
Street protests and calls to defend democracy may be inspirational, but they repel conservatives and suburban America. Any grassroots action must be coupled with a clear, relatable economic message and showcase the leadership potential of Democratic mayors and governors. Identity politics alone won’t do it.
6. Have Hope
Nothing lasts forever and the U.S. is not the only part of the world that faces threats to democracy — and Americans are no different than the French, the Turks or Hungarians when it comes to the appeal of the far right. But in a country with a strong, decentralized system of government and with a long-standing tradition of free speech, the rule of law should be far more resilient than anywhere in the world.
Trump’s return to power certainly poses challenges to U.S. democracy. But he will make mistakes and overplay his hand — at home and abroad. America will survive the next four years if Democrats pick themselves up and start learning from the successes of opponents of autocracy across the globe.
Transcript THIS IS A DUPLICATE OF THE TRANSCRIPT FROM
This is Mehdi Hassan from Zeteo. I've got Paul Krugman with me, who is another sub-stacker and, of course, just happens to be a Nobel Laureate economist as well. Paul is with me for the next half hour. We're going to take your questions, comments, talk about the craziness that we're living through.
Every time you think we can't live through more history on a daily basis, history is made. Paul, I know that you know this stuff inside out. I'm looking at the stats. They're saying this is the worst three-day performance of the SNP since 1987. Trillions of dollars of value lost.
The worst stock market start for the beginning of a new presidential term in history. All sorts of records being broken and not in a good way. But from your perspective, having studied this stuff, experienced this stuff, been around longer than me, how bad is it?
Well, I mean, the first rule when talking about the stock market and economics is that the stock market is not the economy. The stock market is not the economy. That's the second and third rule as well. Paul Samuelson once said that the stock market had forecast nine of the past five recessions. So the stock market itself is, you know, obviously it's impossible not to stare at it, and especially given the wild swings. But the point is actually that it's the symptom. of something which is much more important, which is that if we don't actually have a recession, we're certainly going to be seeing a really bad year for the economy. And this is really the first time in history that a president has caused a terrible economy. We've had presidents who failed to respond. And Herbert Hoover screwed up or was hapless in response to the Great Depression, but he didn't cause it. You can talk about various, but nothing Never before have we had a economy that was chugging along quite nicely. And along comes Donald Trump and he decides that he's going to do his, you know, fulfill his tariff obsession. And all of a sudden, there we go. Yeah. And they've had to lie about it. Of course, this administration is defined by, if nothing else, dishonesty. I don't know if you saw the Stephen Miller clip on Fox saying, we inherited a catastrophe and a calamity. And Donald Trump saying, you need to take the medicine to fix things. Fix what? You inherited the fastest growing economy in the industrialized world. Yeah, we come in with solid growth, 4% unemployment, 2-2.5% inflation. It's all fine. And nothing happened. There was no external shock, as we tend to say in the profession. There was just this, but he has this thing about Paris, and even there, as you say, everything is a lie. All of the claimed reasons for the tariffs are a lie. Exactly what's going on, it's just something in Trump's id that is driving this thing. What's unique about it also is that Although we know that it's drastic stuff that's going to happen. We don't know how drastic. We don't know from day to day what's going to come next. There are people saying that Trump needs to promise that he will or won't do that. What good is a promise from Donald Trump? Has he ever made good on any promise to anyone? And it's that uncertainty, even more than the tariffs per se, it's the uncertainty that is really killing the economy. I mean, I don't know if you saw, there was a fake Bloomberg account called Walter Bloomberg that moved markets this morning by saying there would be a 90-day pause by misquoting Kevin Hassett, the Council of Economic Advisers guy. And markets moved because they were so happy at the idea of a 90-day pause. Maybe he should actually do one. But anyway, the White House tamped that down. Thank you to Elon Musk for creating more chaos and confusion with fake blue check accounts in the middle of a crisis. PJ Schuster in the chat, and we've got over... Ooh, we're about to hit 3,000 viewers already within five minutes. So appreciate you all joining us here on this live. And we will take as many questions and comments as we can. PJ Schuster in the chat is asking, well, he's making the point that ignorance, not just dishonesty, is driving a lot of this. You mentioned he's obsessed with tariffs, Paul. One thing that's come out in recent days is just how moronic and ignorant Donald Trump is when it comes to finance and the economy. He's talking about bilateral trade deficits, being in and of themselves inherently evil, a sign of a loss. I think he said, it's a loss if we run a deficit with any country, a trade deficit. You are someone who has taught international trade for decades. Tell us about why that's such an insane thing to say. I mean, first of all, you don't even expect trade to be balanced. in any given year or even for longer periods of time, right? We have international movements with international flows of money. We have investment. If foreigners are investing in your country, then by the arithmetic, you have to be running a trade deficit. It's the other side of that. And I know arithmetic has a well-known liberal bias, but there we are. And then country by country, I mean, if we take, look, he's going on and on about Canada. And Canada, he always exaggerates their surplus by a factor of three. But all of that bilateral deficit with Canada is oil and hydropower generated electricity. So, yeah, there's this country next to us. That has tar sands and that has lots of hydropower. So, yeah, of course we're going to buy more stuff from them because that's right there and that's stuff that can't – there's absolutely no reason. Well, think about it. I have a bilateral trade deficit with the grocery store around the corner. They sell me stuff and I don't sell them anything. But I have a bilateral surplus with my students at CUNY because they pay tuition which flows through to me and I don't buy anything from them. So the idea that countries – why should countries – country by country, why should trade new ballots? It's crazy. And it's a good thing you mentioned the point balance, because he's not even saying he wants to run a surplus. He's saying neither a deficit nor a surplus, just a balance with every one of the 190 odd countries in the world from, you know, Laos to he's put massive tariffs on Lesotho in Africa, which is interesting because in his address to Congress, he claimed to never heard of Lesotho. That was his big gag in the speech, but he's tariffed them. Yeah, I mean, they put down a formula. And, you know, this whole thing. Look, this is, as far as we can tell, they finally settled on the tariffs three hours before his speech. And they did it with this boneheaded formula. So it was mechanical. It wasn't even. He claimed we've gone through and looked at their policies, but we know they didn't do a bit of that. They just took this formula. And... It produces crazy results, but nobody checked. I mean, they should have at least censored it to take out the McDonald Islands, which have nothing there but penguins. But somehow or other, we're putting a tariff on the penguins. And there's a real question even where this came from. We're not – there's some back and forth about – but one of the stories is it turns out that – Cat GPT and a couple of other AIs will, in fact, recommend the Trump policy. Now, exactly why that's happening, we don't know. But it's been a joke that this is Skynet from the Terminator movies has discovered that it doesn't need to drop bombs on us. All it has to do is give us bad tariff advice. Indeed. And Ginger is asking in the chat, Paul, how bad can it get? Oh, me. It all depends on how far it goes. But look, we have... we have this, the global economy that we have now, and the U.S. is part of that. Like it or not, we are, you know, we've built our economy as we have it now around very intense relationships, especially with Canada and Mexico, but also with a lot of the rest of the world. And you're basically, think of it as, you know, we're effectively mining our harbors and blocking the runways at our airports. We're shutting ourselves off from international commerce. And, you know, if we If you gave us 15 years, we could rebuild the economy to not have all this international trade, although it would be poorer because we benefit from the trade, but to say, okay, we're slapping on these massive tariffs now, or I guess next week or something. But anyway, that is – so that's a hugely depressing force. And among other things, the uncertainty means that business is paralyzed. Are you going to – should you invest in – Should you put new equipment in your components factory in Mexico? Well, not if there's going to be 25% tariffs. Should you try to build up productive capacity in the United States? Well, not if the tariffs might come off. So everybody just sits on their hands. That's why a recession has become more likely than not. And it's insane. We would be better off if Trump would just definitively settle on disastrous tariffs, because disastrous tariffs that might or might not happen is even worse. That's a very good point. You can't make any kind of plans. As this morning's movement showed, somebody mentions in the chat, China's now going to get 104% tariff. He's going to put another 50% on. What does the Chinese government do in response? Well, they will certainly – they've already imposed tariffs of their own, but we do in fact have a bilateral deficit with China. They sell a lot more to us than we do to them. So the thing that you worry about now is what about – I think they've already done some of it. We depend on – on China for a lot of important stuff. We depend on them for rare earths that are crucial to semiconductors. We depend on them for a lot of components. Over time, they will, you know, we can wean ourselves of that dependence and we need to do that. That's actually what part of what the Biden administration was trying to do, the CHIPS Act and all of that was about building domestic capacity. But Trump says the CHIPS Act was a disaster. And meanwhile, he's just creating a rupture. I mean, you know, break the link, the linkages between the US and China. And that's really harmful on both sides. And the Chinese will make sure that, you know, they will retaliate. I mean, I'm actually, I mean, that was, I've kind of accepted that we were going to have a really bad rupture with China. And that's going to be costly. And China is not, the Chinese are not good guys. They are, you know, of all the countries that Trump is targeting, China actually does has done some bad stuff, although not on the scale Trump thinks. But, you know, I'm thinking about the Europeans and the Canadians. But, you know, other countries, this is a problem we have as Americans. We don't really think that other countries are real. We can't imagine that they have their own politics, that they have their own national pride, their own patriotism. But they do. And we have, to use the technical term, we have really pissed off the whole world. And... And so there will be a huge blowback. I mean, you're seeing the comments from Mark Carney, from Keir Starmer. These are Atlanticist, pro-American, centrist politicians from our closest allies, the UK, Canada, saying the world has changed. It is not the world it was yesterday. We need to think without the United States. I mean, anyone who thinks that's not happening is in denial. I would point out to folks, thank you for all your questions. No way we can get through on so many of them. We have about 5,400 of you watching live. So we appreciate you all for turning up for this conversation. important timing for this conversation. Someone asked in the chat, I didn't catch the name, Paul, could this madness work? Well, no. I mean, because what is the madness supposed to achieve? Yes. What's the metric? What's amazing about how many of the things that Trump is demanding the country stop doing is that they aren't actually doing them. So he wants Canada to stop smuggling vast quantities of fentanyl. Well, they aren't. It's like 40 pounds per capita. It's not happening. So you can't demand a concession that a country stop doing something that only exists in your imagination. And the bilateral trade stuff, yeah, you could do all of that, but that's just conceivable. If you put tariffs high enough, yeah, you will shut down world trade. And if there's no trade, then you can't have a trade deficit. But the cost is enormous. So the idea that this is going to work out beneficially to the United States is madness. Yeah, so they've, as you pointed out earlier, mine the harbors. The Trump administration is basically North Korea, the United States, like out of choice. We've just cut ourselves off from the world in this bizarre way. We've sanctioned ourselves. And that is dumb, right? To do the kind of general across-the-board tariff, call it reciprocal. But there is, as you know, Paul, in economics, especially on the left, a case for certain tariffs, targeted tariffs, protection of domestic industry. That's always been the case. Somebody asked in the chat, what about Sean Fain, the UAW chief, the auto workers union boss, who is supporting the auto tariffs? Is he wrong to do so? I think he is. I mean, I understand he's sort of difficult. I mean, there's a little bit of politics in the union as well. And workers do feel that they've lost jobs to foreign, to imports. But But realistically, the U.S. auto industry will actually shrink as a result of all of this stuff. We sell a fair bit of automotive stuff to Mexico and Canada in the first place. So this tit-for-tat retaliation that's almost certainly coming will damage it. And also – There's the supply side of the industry. There is no such thing as a US car. American, yes, because Mexico and Canada are also part of North America. But there's no such thing as a US car. They're only North American cars. Everything is produced out of many components. And you're ripping up this whole supply chain production network, which is going to actually cost jobs. And maybe, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe... Five, ten years down the pike, we might end up with more auto jobs, although probably lower wages, at least adjusted for inflation. But I think – I understand, you know, Sean Fain, he probably is – he's trying to walk a tightrope here, and I think it's problematic. And, you know, by the way, the UAW represents Canadian auto workers as well. And the Canadian branch is extremely upset with him because they are basically themselves very much on the line here. So I don't know whether his political calculations were right, but in terms of the actual welfare of the workers he represents, he is making a mistake. So I just want to quickly remind everyone, we've got over 6,000 of you watching right now. Make sure you're signed up to Paul Krugman's Substack. Make sure you're signed up and supporting Zeteo. Support independent journalism, especially at a time like this. Paul, we talked about the kind of idiocy of Donald Trump when it comes to tariffs. Okay, Donald Trump went to Wharton. His dad probably got him in. We know he's not the sharpest tool in the box. But he's hired as Treasury Secretary a guy who has more experience with Wall Street than most people we know, right? If you drew up 100 people in America who have the most experience with Wall Street, he'd be in there, Scott Besson. And yet he... as well as saying nonsensical things. He went on Meet the Press, Paul, and he said that basically if we get rid of federal workers and trim the fat in federal government, they can then be relocated to the manufacturing sector. That's insane. Why is someone like Besant saying that? Well, this is the Trump administration, so you... You honor the teachings of Chairman Donald. It's a very strong cultural revolution field. We'll take all the professors and send them out to be farmers. But it's also... Look, yeah, this is... Look, even a sane administration... You know, government top officials don't explicitly criticize the president's policies. They might quit, but they, you know, they share it. But this is real authoritarian regime pledging loyalty. The more absurd, the more you're required to defend it. And look, it's also true that, I mean, Besson clearly knows better than what he's saying. But it's also true that... Wall Street, what makes you think that Wall Street guys are good economists, right? You wouldn't want me trading in the markets. You wouldn't want a typical, you wouldn't want a fund manager necessarily making economic judgments. It's a different discipline. And to the extent that Trump has economic advisors, they're all selected for loyalty rather than talent. That's a very good point. I was also going to ask about this idea that roles have reversed, right? There seems to be this case where Republicans say, well, we're the ones now sticking up for the workers and manufacturing and who cares about the stock market? And then you've got Democrats and liberals saying, oh, no, look, the S&P 500 is down. And people are talking about, is there some role reversal? One statistic that's doing the rounds, which is one you know, I'm sure, is that the 1% in this country own 50%. of the stocks, and the bottom 50% own 1%. So there is this Republican argument kind of cosplaying as old school leftists saying, we'll ignore the stock market. Most Americans don't have any stake in it. Well, I don't – I'm not a big – I mean, if it was just the stock market, I wouldn't be inclined to say that. If we were actually doing something that helped workers and the stock market was down, fine. That's not the issue. But the stock market is instead – it's just serving as a kind of visible signal of the – people who have actual money on the line think that this is crazy. That's the reason to look at it. A couple of things there. None of this is pro-worker. The tariffs are going to raise the cost of living and they actually hit Lower income people spend a higher share of their income just in general, but they spend a higher share of it, particularly on goods, on imported goods, than higher income people. So this is especially, it's a very regressive tax that Trump is putting on. And the... It's also the idea that good jobs don't have to be in manufacturing. In fact, many manufacturing jobs are not good, especially since the unions have been largely crushed. So if you really cared about workers, you'd be trying to make workers better off across the board. You'd be talking about raising our absurdly low minimum wage. You talk about strengthening workers' bargaining power. All of that Trump is trying to crush. Yes. Trying to destroy the legal protections for labor organizing. So to say that, oh, and he has Paris and that makes him a pro worker president. That's the same. Also, they're not hiding what they're saying. I mean, Lutnick keeps going on TV and saying insane things to the Commerce Secretary. He said that we want Americans to be doing the assembly line iPhone production. We want to bring that back here. Americans should stand in an assembly line to build iPhones, which will then cost around $30,000 to buy, according to Forbes magazine, if we made it all in the US. The whole thing is just insane. But as you say, it is Chairman Trump. Even if they know better, they're not going to say otherwise. Yeah, I mean, they'd be waiting for the Red Book if Donald Trump was capable of writing. I mean, it was, no, the whole thing, and, you know, one of the things, it's a little offbeat here, but there are some smart people who are protectionists. I think they're wrong. 95% of the comments think they're wrong, but there are some smart people. Bob Lighthizer, but anyway, they're all, none of them are in the administration. Because being a smart person with a reputation out there in the world for being smart and knowing something even is poison for the Trump because they want the loyalty. If you have any kind of independent standing, any kind of independent thinking, then you might actually at some point say, I'm sorry, the president is wrong about this. And that's not to be allowed. Paul, you said most smart people are not protectionists. But when you say free trader, if that's the other side of the coin, that is what has turned a lot of people off Democrats, especially in quote unquote, some of these left behind communities in swing states, in the Michigans, in the Pennsylvanias, you know, what is often called the wreckage of NAFTA and free trade. It is true, is it not? Or do you disagree that a lot of these communities were left behind in some shape or form by the offshoring of jobs and the failure to rebuild something better in its place? Well, they were left behind, although actually the offshoring is only one of multiple factors. If you ask what happened to West Virginia, it's not mostly globalization. It's not environmental policy. It's mostly automation. It's the fact that the coal, we started, coal miners, we got rid of coal miners and started blowing up mountains instead. But yeah, there is something there. And There's been a lot of change in thinking, and what you should be doing for these left-behind regions is you should be subsidizing new forms of employment, manufacturing, but also anything else. You should have an industrial policy that specifically targets the regions that are left behind, that also serves national security, that tries to rebuild good jobs. You know who had a program like that? Yeah, Catherine Marte in the chat just made that point, Paul, that Biden had this industrial policy and had record industrial manufacturing levels going up. Yeah, I mean, and that's everything that people say that we should be doing. I mean, I would have liked, Biden would have liked, you know, the original Build Back Better program was a much bigger scale version of this, but it was all directionally right as opposed to trying to bring... assembly lines and garment manufacturing back to the United States. These are not things that, these are not, these would not be good jobs even if we could get them. And, I'm sorry, if you actually do the math, you discover that even if you completely shut down trade, even if you completely eliminated the trade deficit, manufacturing would go from like 10% of employment, total employment, to like 12.5%. If you say, how can we get back to the days when we were a 30% manufacturing nation? The answer is that we can't. And that's not a bad thing, right? We're a wealthier economy. Services take up more of our time and resources. Yeah, and we're so good at manufacturing. We're so efficient that we don't need many manufacturing workers. The same reason we don't have many farmers. We've moved to the service sector. So this whole thing is sort of toxic nostalgia. The idea that we can somehow turn back the clock and make it 1955 again and wouldn't want to. Toxic nostalgia is a good phrase given they say, make America great again. You always want to ask them, well, which year is it that you're saying it's great? Give us that date, economically or culturally. A lot of people in the chat are asking before we wrap up, well, why is he doing this? Why is he tanking the economy? Why is he wrecking his own poll ratings? Philo says it's a shakedown. And many other people are pointing out what Chris Murphy, Senator from Connecticut, has pointed out, that a lot of this is politics, not just economics. It's about using tariffs to bring... domestic businesses and corporations and foreign countries to heal. Well, there's some of that. We do know that during the tariffs that were During the first Trump administration, there were exemptions granted to tariffs. And if you look at who got the exemptions, it tended to be very much related to political connections. So there is a shakedown element. But I think we don't want to overthink this. To an important degree, we have Donald Trump 40 years ago. thought that he was smarter than everybody else and tariffs with the answer. And he never admitted he was wrong. And now he's going to prove that he was right all along, no matter how deep a depression he generates along the way. Yeah, I don't know if you saw that story in the Times from a few years ago, but apparently in 1988, was it or 87, he lost out on an auction for a piano from Casablanca to a Japanese financial firm. And that's when he first came out calling for tariffs against Japan, which is both absurd, but totally believable, knowing what we know about Donald Trump. The sense of which pettiness and ego runs the world, especially since we've now got this kind of leader principle, unitary executive, and we have a petty, resentful man in there at that position. So, yeah, it's crazy. Before we wrap up, let's broaden out and let's try and be positive as we head for maybe a recession. I remember last time you and I spoke, I asked you for your prospects on a recession. We now have JP Morgan and all the rest of them upping their prospects for a recession. Goldman Sachs, 60%, 45%. As we head towards maybe a recession, we had, what, several hundred thousand people took to the streets across the United States over the weekend. Oh, really? I hadn't seen the latest numbers. Apologies. Well, in the millions, then. Let me rephrase. In the millions, people took to the streets across the United States of America. What did you make of that, especially compared to some of the... A lot of people were saying, where are the protesters? Where are the protesters? Well, people took to the streets this weekend, and the message was very clear about Trump, Musk, and the government. Yeah, there's been a clear shift in the vibe now. The democratic impulse in America, a small d democratic impulse, is not dead. People care. They hear a lot. And they were kind of stunned for a little while. But now you can just see, and this is really massive. This is not some, you know, it's only leftist. This is middle-aged regular people out there demonstrating who are outraged. And that's a good sign. I mean, this is... The great danger when you have a would-be dictator, which Trump is, is that everybody just rolls over believing that his triumph is inevitable. And guess what? We're not rolling over. And that's a very big deal. It is a very big deal. I've got to ask one last question. I didn't see the name. Someone in the chat just said, Paul, do you think there'll be near-term interest in doing economics right now, economics degrees, given everyone's talking about tariffs and Trump destroying the economy? Well, I mean, God knows. If you think about people who have, in some sense, benefited from Trump's craziness, I would say that the two people I would think of most... of all are are myself because I'm suddenly getting a lot more subscribers to my sub stack, you know, because people want to people want to be enlightened. And and Mark Carney, who is very likely to win big in the Canadian elections and when the Liberal Party was given up for dead. Yes. So, you know, yeah. Although I would say that most of this stuff, you don't need a Ph.D. You need to actually pay attention. You need to learn some. But just thinking about economics, which doesn't necessarily require formal credentials, is the way to go. And academia being what it is, you have to write five very abstract papers and get them published in journals to get tenure before you can start talking about current events. So I think that was... Well, PC is probably not the way. Well, I think Wharton Business School won't want to be advertising that one of their alums just crashed the global economy. I'm not sure it's a good ad for Wharton, what Donald Trump's been up to. There are over 8,000 of you in this chat. I expect and hope and demand that all 8,000 of you are subscribers to Zeteo and to Paul Krugman's sub stack. And not just subscribers, but paid subscribers. Because one thing about a free press, it's not free. So do support independent journalism. Paul, always a pleasure. Fascinating conversation. I think we all learned a lot. Okay, great to talk to you. Thanks so much, everyone. See you all soon.