Nobel Prize Winner Paul Krugman examines the Republican election of Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House and other acts by Trump and the Trump-dominated GOP.

Excerpts

• “There are no moderate Republicans in the House of Representatives.”
• "...what Republicans think in the privacy of their own minds isn’t important. What matters is what they do — and every single one of them went along with the selection of a radical extremist.”
• Johnson is accurately noted as a proponent of election denial. “The term 'election denial' is a euphemism that softens and blurs what we’re really talking about.

“Trying to keep your party in power after it lost a free and fair election, without a shred of evidence of significant fraud, isn’t just denial; it’s a betrayal of democracy.”

“Johnson isn’t just someone who wants to legalize discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. Americans and ban gay marriage; he’s on record as defending the criminalization of gay sex.”

Johnson is also on record as favoring radical cut backs in programs that benefit the average American. He once served as chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group that devises policy proposals. The budget proposal the committee released for 2020 under his chairmanship calls for the evisceration of the U.S. social safety net — not just programs for the poor, but also policies that form the bedrock of financial stability for the American middle class.

“So Mike Johnson is on record advocating policies on retirement, health care and other areas—like food stamps—that would basically end American society as we know it. We would become a vastly crueler and less secure nation, with far more sheer misery.”