Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman warned on Wednesday that President Donald Trump is "dissociating" as his "downfall" grows increasingly imminent, and said the president will lash out and inflict as much damage on the country as he can before "losing all of his power." Krugman, who received the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of trade patterns and spent roughly a quarter-century as a New York Times opinion columnist before launching his Substack, has been a persistent critic of the president's trade and economic policies. In a post on his Substack, Krugman argued that Trump's collapse bears similarities to that of one of history's greatest tyrants.

"It's not news to anybody that Trump is ego-driven, disconnected from reality, and at the same time, somehow commands a level of deference and obedience from the entire machinery of the federal government that no president has ever had before," Krugman began. "This is really quite serious. What I don't think people are fully aware of is just how bad it can get, given that Trump is so obviously dissociating, decompensating, that he's not all there. Obviously, he was already a very problematic personality, which was doing a great deal of damage to the United States. I don't think even now people fully appreciate the amount of damage that has been done. Even before the Iran War, Trump's provocations, insults, his trade wars, really destroyed the world's trust in America."

History, Krugman argued, offers frightening examples of how bad things can get. He pointed to the 2004 German film Downfall, which portrays Adolf Hitler's final days in his Berlin bunker as Soviet forces closed in on the city, saying "the parallels are there." Hitler, he noted, "was obsessed with building a gigantic gaudy ballroom." More pressing, Krugman said, was that Hitler "knew that defeat was looming. He knew that his power was collapsing. And his reaction was, among other things, to take it out on his own country."

According to Krugman, Hitler "felt that Germany had failed him. And so he had a plan, often called the Nero Decree, which was to destroy as much as possible of Germany's infrastructure, supposedly to deny it to the victorious allies, but in large part to punish Germany." Issued in March 1945, the decree was largely defused after Armaments Minister Albert Speer, who had run Germany's wartime economy, worked to countermand it.

Turning to Trump, Krugman said that while the president frequently rejects negative polling, "he is behaving like somebody who knows that his days of supreme power are about to end. He, of course, is not going to accept that it's his fault. It's the fault, obviously, of the Democrats, who are all communists. It's the fault of the Republicans, who didn't live up to his leadership. The fault of everybody but him."

With the end of his power approaching, Trump's first impulse, Krugman said, is to leave his name and imprint "everywhere." He pointed to reporting by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, two New York Times journalists, who revealed that Trump "spends most of his time thinking about his construction projects and trying to leave his mark on everything in Washington."

"What I don't think we're fully appreciating even about those projects is that there isn't a whole lot of actual construction," Krugman said. "There's a lot of starting of stuff, but so far it's been mostly destruction, mostly tearing stuff down. We don't have a triumphal arch, but we have a hole where the ballroom is supposed to be. We have just a lot of damage having been done to our nation's capital and to the iconic structures that were supposed to define, symbolize who we are as a country. The scale of the destruction is really quite amazing."

Noting a photo of the White House grounds marred by a combination of ballroom and UFC cage match construction, Krugman added: "Basically, Trump has left, so far, wreckage in his wake."

The changes that did not involve demolition also drew criticism. "Even the things which have not involved tearing stuff down, the gilding of statues, the horrific redecoration of the White House, is surpassingly ugly," Krugman said. "That's partly because Trump has terrible taste, but it's also, I think, a clear sign of aggression. He's saying, oh yeah, you're going to give me a 33 percent approval rating? Well, I'm going to make the nation's capital as ugly as I can in this little time as I possibly can[.] How much more will be coming?"

Krugman closed with a grim warning: "Bear in mind that Trump hates America. He hates the values on which America was built. He hates democracy. He hates rule of law. He hates all of the things that are what we're supposed to be about as a nation. But increasingly it looks as if he just plain hates this country because it doesn't love him. How much damage will he do? How much damage can he do? I don't want to make a specific prediction, but I'm worried. And don't say that he won't do that or he can't do that. Those have been famous last words again and again over the past decade. So this is going to be even worse, even uglier, I think than most people imagine."