The United States may never recover from how Donald Trump and his administration have carried themselves, a Nobel Prize winner has warned.

Whether the U.S. is capable of clawing back its global standing is yet to be seen, but economist Paul Krugman believes Trump will have fundamentally changed how the world views the country. Writing in his Substack, the award winner warned that the world will no longer rely on the U.S., particularly when it comes to defense.

He wrote, "Trump constantly insists, in speeches and social media posts, that he took over a weak, despised nation and restored its international reputation. This is clearly something that matters a lot to him and his sense of self-worth. It’s also the total opposite of the truth.

"A stunning poll from Politico — just released, but taken last month — confirms what I and other observers strongly suspected: America is now widely despised, despised like nobody has ever been despised before.

The US is no longer a democracy. One of the most credible global sources on the health of democratic nations now says this outright. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University reaches the alarming conclusion in its annual report, that the US is hurtling towards autocracy at a faster rate than Hungary and Turkey.

“Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country,” says Staffan Lindberg, founder of the institute.

Since 2012, Lindberg has led his small group of researchers in Sweden to become the world’s leading source for analysis of the health of global democracy. In their latest report, published on Tuesday, they conclude that the US, for the first time in more than half a century, has lost its long-term status as a liberal democracy. The country is now going through a rapid process of what the report’s authors call “autocratisation”.

“For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years, for Vučić in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year,” Lindberg says.