By now it’s obvious to anyone willing to see — which many people still aren’t — that Donald Trump is, in practice, waging war against American greatness.Krugman is right. From his early fight against USAID, which diminished America's soft power worldwide, to his tariff mania, which gives America a trade policy suitable to an emerging country rather than a global superpower, Trump is clearly making America less great, whether he consciously realizes it or not. Beyond tariffs, Krugman cites Trump and Elon Musk's attacks on the functionality of the Social Security website, with further assaults on the system clearly to come. Krugman also cites Robert Kennedy's vaccine skepticism and the administration's "savage funding cuts and layoffs at the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes for Health," which "are already having a catastrophic effect on medical research." Krugman writes:
Even if research funding is restored, even if NIH and other agencies try to rebuild, U.S. science will have suffered huge long-term damage. So will the world trading system, which will never be the same even if the Trump tariffs are reversed, and the effectiveness of the federal bureaucracy, which will be impaired for many years even if DOGE’s depredations stop.I think Trump wants this because he doesn't want any entity in the world -- not just anyone, but anything -- to be more powerful than he is.
He knows on a gut level that the America of NATO and other global alliances, and of soft-power agencies such as USAID, was big and powerful before he entered politics and would have remained big and powerful long after he dies if he'd merely made minimal changes to them, as he did in his first term. So they had to be brought down to size.
The same is true of America as an economic force. The country was big and powerful when he was a child and had no influence on it, it was big and powerful when he wasn't president, and it was on course to remain big and powerful long after his death. So it needs to be diminished, and its economy had to be completely remade as his economy.
Science was big. It had the power to give life. Therefore, it was far too powerful for Trump to bear. So it also had to be brought down to size.
And, obviously, the Constitution and the rule of law predated Trump and have been, up till now, bigger and more powerful than he is. That was intolerable to him.
Trump was never the most powerful real estate developer in New York, much less the most powerful businessman in the world. He never built the world's tallest building, though he tried. The wives and girlfriends he treated as arm candy were never the most super of supermodels. He was a TV star, but he was never the star of a show spoken of with reverence, like Seinfeld or The Sopranos. He became president, but he lost the popular vote when he won and he couldn't get reelected as an incumbent.
Now he sees the opportunity to be more powerful than anyone or anything on the planet. He's not the richest man in the world, but the richest man in the world works for him. Elon Musk is dismantling government agencies that predate Trump, would have outlived him, and have in some cases threatened him. Trump loves having power over them.
I suspect that Trump is enjoying the global market crash. Who has ever wielded such power? Who has ever taken a global economic order that was fundamentally sound and destroyed it by sheer will? It took bad decisions by many firms to cause the Great Recession in 2008. Trump has that much power all by himself!
For all its flaws, America was strong and resilient in 2024. Even if Trump had somehow been a great president in his second term, he would have been perceived as someone who merely made a good thing better. Making a good thing abysmal clearly shows that he's much more powerful than someone who's just a great president.
I know that Trump believes that everything he's doing is brilliant, and that he's making the country unimaginably great. But I think he's really happy with where America is now. He's changed everything -- sure, it's a shambles now, but the ability to destroy this much this fast is power, isn't it?
