Expect Violence From Trump Supporters To Disrupt Election, Warns Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman, 2008 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, warned the public Wednesday, “If you aren’t terrified, you’re not paying attention.” He said that this election will be the most dangerous since 1860, and that everyone should be considering what they can personally do to help save democracy.
Paul Krugman, whose Nobel Laureate bio notes that he has been called “the most important political columnist in America,” offered the voting public a little free advice Wednesday morning. In a series of six tweets, he warned of what can be expected over the next six weeks — Trump lying about COVID-19, vaccines, the economy, and protests/riots, and his supporters eating it up regardless of evidence. He warned that Trump will very likely lose the election, based on the best current models, and that there’s almost no chance the president will accept the loss. Worse, he warned that Trump’s supporters will engage in violence on election day, and afterwards.
Trump's campaign strategy is to brazen it out with obvious lies: the virus isn't a threat, we have a vaccine, the economy is booming, violent mobs are roaming the streets of New York. Many people will believe him 2/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) September 23, 2020
There is, however, a near-zero percent chance that he'll accept the result if he loses. He'll try to stop counting of absentee ballots, claim massive fraud, and probably try to get the Supreme Court to overturn the result 4/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) September 23, 2020
If you aren't terrified, you aren't paying attention. But terror isn't productive; you should be asking what you personally can do to save democracy, which is very much under threat 6/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) September 23, 2020
He’s hardly the first to predict that there will be violence over this election. In June, the Transition Integrity Project, a bipartisan collective of around 80 political operatives and academics, began to meet to consider possible scenarios and outcomes, Newsweek reported.
“All of our scenarios ended in both street-level violence and political impasse,” said Rosa Brooks, a professor of law and policy at Georgetown University, and a former Defense Department official who helped organize the group, told the Globe. “The law is essentially … it’s almost helpless against a president who’s willing to ignore it,” she said.
According to Live Science, even back in 2012, mathematician Peter Turchin predicted chaos and political violence for 2020, based on analysis of centuries of patterns.
The concerns about attempts to disrupt elections may already be proving valid — for the first day of early voting in Virginia, pro-Trump protestors turned up in force at a voting site, actually having to be moved back as they blocked voters from accessing the polls, and later causing voters to be moved for protection from the protestors.