Economist and former New York Times opinion writer Paul Krugman has called for a post-Trump “deMAGAfication” of America, and left no mystery about the comparison he was making. “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 Two in Germany.” Krugman remained vague about the nature of this “thorough purging,” but said it should include “not just the MAGA ideology, but the whole structure of hugely unequal power, hugely unequal wealth that made this horrific moment possible.”
Today’s left – secular, post-Christian, postmodern and postcolonial, untethered from faith, tradition or national feeling – has few moral intuitions other than “Do not be Hitler.” The end result of such a worldview, naturally, has been to make Hitler omnipresent in political life. Nazism lurks in the soul of every politician one dislikes and every political reversal is a step towards a second Kristallnacht or a new Auschwitz.
Nixon, Bush and even Mitt Romney drew farcical comparisons to Hitler in their time, but the age of Donald Trump has sent hysterics to new, permanently elevated heights. Two weeks after the 2020 election, DNC member David Atkins said his party needed to “deprogram 75 million people” who had voted for Trump, evoking Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan as direct comparisons. In a 2022 speech, Joe Biden characterized MAGA as “semi-fascist.” Krugman’s bluster shows that more and more progressives are perfectly fine dropping the “semi.” But is it bluster? Perhaps not. If the Democrats do win in 2028, round two of deMAGAfication is likely to be far more extensive than the first. Despite the chatter in November 2020, and despite the shock of January 6, 2021, the initial pass at a post-Trump lustration fell well short of what might have been.
Counterintuitively, January 6 was a significant reason why. The Capitol incident was so jarring and visceral that any general “reckoning” for MAGA was immediately diverted into a nationwide manhunt, the largest in American history, aimed at tracking down any person involved in the Capitol intrusion. Ultimately, more than 1,500 people were punished. But the mob inside the Capitol were not the generals of the MAGA movement, or even its foot soldiers. Their cultural and political influence was negligible, and in fact only grew thanks to their prosecution. The Biden DoJ took nobodies and made them into martyrs. The other post-2020 purge was focused on Trump himself. There were half a dozen criminal and civil cases brought against Trump. Yet far from consigning Trumpism to oblivion, these legal efforts ensured his return in 2024.
The only serious push at what could be considered a “deMAGAfication” of American life was online, where tech censorship reached its peak intensity in the first two years of Joe Biden. Amazon and Apple destroyed the Parler app on the flimsy grounds that J6 participants had used it. Thousands of social media accounts were purged on ideological pretexts. But this is where a black swan event intervened: Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and abolition of nearly all speech controls instantly undid what had become a powerful, nominally private information-control apparatus. The facts above suggest a second round of deMAGAfication will be significantly more formidable. There will not be another J6 to get the left fixated on chasing down a few temporary Capitol occupants. Instead, they are far more likely to turn their ire on major leaders of the Trump administration – Democrat leaders are already priming the base to expect it. In March, Illinois Governor and 2028 aspirant J.B. Pritzker said a “Project 2029” for Democrats should include criminal cases against every senior Trump official leading the administration’s deportation efforts, and produced a list of seven people who warrant a probe.
Twenty years ago, a handful of fringe Democrats talked about investigating George W. Bush for war crimes over Iraq. Today, the enthusiasm for prosecuting Pete Hegseth for air strikes on drug boats is significantly higher – and may well lead to an actual indictment. The left’s flirtation with “abolish the police” in 2020 was mercifully brief. Its passion for the “abolish ICE” movement is far more sustained. Tim Walz has labeled ICE a “modern-day Gestapo.” Gavin Newsom has called them a secret police. Pritzker says ICE is “disappearing” people like in Nazi Germany. Rashida Tlaib has dubbed them the agents of a “fascist police state.” Should Trump follow through on giving blanket pardons to his chief allies, the obvious pivot will be to more sweeping kinds of institutional destruction. The end result won’t be a rebalancing to pre-Trump norms. It will go further: the total elimination of America’s ability to enforce its immigration laws within its own territory.
The left sees itself as an occupying force battling an insurgency that once crushed, remains submissive
And then there will be the reckoning with President Trump’s powerful business allies. Musk is Public Enemy #2 in the left’s headspace. The new deMAGAfication regime will not only look to destroy X (or force the return of mass censorship), but also Tesla and SpaceX, for the crime of being vastly successful companies that allowed Musk to back Trump with impunity. Palantir and Anduril, both booming defense contractors – and both deeply entwined with Trumpworld – could become targets as well. And if some of America’s most innovative new firms are annihilated in the process? Well, that is the price of “denazification.”
Traditionally, much of this would be clogged up in American courts. But Democrats seem poised to abolish the Senate filibuster and immediately expand the Supreme Court. Kamala Harris, still exploring a possible third run for president, has already mooted the idea. Other Democrats, such as New Jersey congresswoman Analilia Mejia, have suggested the party should indict conservative justices on the Supreme Court. The aim is clear: create a judicial rubber stamp for everything the party’s base demands.
Will this work to deliver Democrats their dreamed-of total hegemony? Don’t bet on it. Like most obsessions, the denazification kink says far less about its target than it does about its proponents. The left no longer sees itself as one ideological half of a cohesive country, sharing power with rivals. Instead, it sees itself as a sort of occupying force, battling against a native insurgency that, once finally crushed, should stay submissive.
The attempt under Biden ended in fiasco, creating Project 2025 and a far stronger MAGA movement than ever before. What would a second attempt bring?
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