Learning from a Mentally Ill President - PAUL KRUGMAN

 I followed Paul Krugman when he had a column in the New York Times. For years, he was the reason I had a subscription to the New York Times. There are only a few people highly skilled in international economics and macroeconomics who speak plainly and directly without haughtiness. 

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Learning from a Mentally Ill President

We need to deal with the powers and system that put him in power and keep him there

PAUL KRUGMAN

MAY 31, 2026

Transcript

The President of the United States is mentally ill, but everybody knows that. So while we should continue to focus on this degeneration taking place in front of our eyes, we should also, beyond that, ask what we can do about the powers, the interests, the system that put this horrifying person in a position of power.

Hi I’m Paul Krugman. First video update in a while.

It’s May 31st. If you have been following some of the news you may know that Trump’s mental deterioration, which has been obvious for quite a while, got even more extreme in the past few days. Tellingly, the things that are really driving him into more obvious dysfunction are things that are blows to his ego. I was especially struck — I was rattled actually — by his reaction to the wave of artists canceling out on the self-glorifying concert series he’s holding on the mall.

So, if you haven’t seen it, here’s what he said on Truth Social: That artists are “getting the yips” and

I am thinking about bringing the number one attraction anywhere in the world the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the greatest president in history, Donald J. Trump.

Oh my god. I would not want to trust this guy alone in a room, let alone running the world’s formerly greatest power, although he’s doing a lot to run that into the ground.

Okay, but we knew that, right? It’s not really a surprise to find out that he has lost his mind, what was left of it. And yet, he is in power. People who did a lot to put him in power did so, knowing this — the billionaires who contributed vast sums of money to his campaign, the Supreme Court which gave him immunity back in 2024 — they all knew who they were doing this for. They understood what they were doing. Now, maybe, even they are getting a bit of cold feet as as he goes over the edge and as we’re starting to see in Iran and elsewhere what happens when you have a lunatic running the United States, a lunatic who has far more power than a previous president because all of the normal institutional safeguards have been short-circuited or dismantled.

Still, they are continuing to support him, and they are continuing to do so not just in concrete ways, but verbally, which matters. They continue to cover for him.

Just the other day, Jeff Bezos — who is not an idiot; he has to know what he’s looking at — but he said, oh, Trump is much more mature than he was in his first term, which is obviously a complete lie. That is not what Jeff Bezos thinks. And it’s telling you that he is still providing cover.

The Supreme Court, although it’s been knocking back a few things, is for the most part continuing to give Trump treatment that it would never have accorded, not just to any Democratic president, but to any previous Republican president.

Okay, this is not coming out of thin air. These people — I’m not talking about Trump but people who are empowering him — are not stupid. Some of them are weak but they are also acting because they think there’s something in it for them.

All of this at some level is about money and power for people beyond Trump. And it’s made possible by the fact that there is so much money in the hands of a few people, many of whom turn out, not too surprisingly, to be terrible, insensitive, anti-democratic people themselves.

Obviously, we need to defang Trump as much as possible and make sure that neither he nor anybody who follows in his footsteps has power after the next two elections. But beyond that, we really need to do a thorough purging of the United States. We need a deMAGAfication. 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 II in Germany.

And it’s not just the MAGA ideology, but the whole structure of hugely unequal power, hugely unequal wealth that made this horrific moment possible.

It’s not going to be easy, and maybe it’s not going to be doable, but we have to try because this is a nightmare. This is a nightmare beyond, I think, even the worst fantasies of progressives, beyond the worst fantasies of conservatives who still have a conscience. (There still are plenty of those, but they’re no longer MAGA.)

This has to be turned around and we should not, above all, whitewash or forget this moment. This is where a lot of forces in America have been leading and if we don’t do something beyond just getting rid of Trump, it’s going to happen again.

Have a good rest of your weekend.

"Paul Robin Krugman (/ˈkrʊɡmən/ ^ⓘ KRUUG-mən;^[4][5] born February 28, 1953)^[6]is an American economist who is the Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was a columnist for The New York Times from 2000 to 2024.^[7] In 2008, Krugman was the sole winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to new trade theory and new economic geography.^[8] The Prize Committee cited Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic distribution of economic activity, by examining the effects of economies of scale and of consumer preferences for diverse goods and services.^[9]

Krugman was previously a professor of economics at MIT, and later, at Princeton University from where he retired in June 2015, holding the title of professor emeritus there. He also holds the title of Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics.^[10] Krugman was President of the Eastern Economic Association in 2010,^[11] and is among the most influential economists in the world.^[12] He is known in academia for his work on international economics (including trade theory and international finance),^[13][14] economic geography, liquidity traps, and currency crises.

Krugman is the author or editor of 27 books, including scholarly works, textbooks, and books for a more general audience, and has published more than 200 scholarly articles in professional journals and edited volumes.^[15] He has also written several hundred columns on economic and political issues for The New York Times, Fortune and Slate. A 2011 survey of economics professors named him their favorite living economist under the age of 60.^[16] According to the Open Syllabus Project, Krugman is the second most frequently cited author on college syllabi for economics courses.^[17] As a commentator, Krugman has written on a wide range of economic issues including income distribution, taxation, macroeconomics, and international economics. Krugman considers himself a modern liberal, referring to his books, his blog on The New York Times, and his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal.^[18] His popular commentary has attracted widespread praise and criticism.^[19]

On December 6, 2024, New York Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsburyannounced that Krugman was retiring as a Times columnist;^[20] His final column, titled 'Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment,' was published on December 9, 2024.^[21] Afterwards, Krugman began publishing a daily newsletter on Substack.^[22][23] The newsletter, titled "Paul Krugman," publishes most content for free while offering some exclusive items to paid subscribers. Krugman's wife, economist Robin Wells, serves as his editor for the newsletter. By mid-2025, the newsletter was reaching 350,000-450,000 readers per post. Krugman wrote there that he left the Times because his editors began to discourage him from writing columns that might "get some people (particularly on the right) riled up."^[24]”

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Paul Krugman