Paul Krugman:

'I don’t claim to understand the whole story. But one thing is clear: The Orwellification of the G.O.P. didn’t start with Trump. On the contrary, the party has been moving in that direction for years; the mind-set Trump is exploiting was already well in place before he burst on the scene.

Consider the claims of Trump and his allies that evidence of his collusion with Russia — not “alleged” collusion, because there is no longer any real doubt — is a hoax perpetrated by the “deep state.” Where have we seen something like that before? In Republican attacks on the evidence for climate change.

Fifteen years have passed since Senator James Inhofe suggested that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” This was and is an even crazier claim than the assertion of Trump and company that all of the tweeter in chief’s woes are the product of a vast deep-state conspiracy; it’s not far short of Pizzagate or QAnon territory. To take it seriously you have to believe in a vast international conspiracy involving thousands of scientists, not one of whom dares speak out.

Yet this paranoid fantasy has in effect become the official position of the G.O.P.'

Read the article here.

Absolutely, we have been moving in the direction of Trump for years if not for decades. One wonders if we have ever moved into another direction. The hallucinatory theory turns out be soothing to many, again and again.

As Henry Miller wrote: 'Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death.
There is no escape. The weather will not change.

It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.'