Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
This gap between what Trump is doing to this country and the world on one side and his megalomaniacal trivial obsessions on the other is really jarring and unnerving to witness. Paul Krugman has been writing really well on his excellent Substack about both sides of this divide, so we’re talking to him about how to make sense of it all. Paul, nice to have you back on.
Sargent: Exactly. So let’s start with the easy stuff. At 4:32 in the morning, Donald Trump posted this:
Paul, Trump is very angry that he’s not getting more worshipful praise for the world-historical triumph that was his ceasefire with Iran, which basically just put a stop to the disaster he created. So we might as well start here. What did you think of the, quote-unquote, deal?
The hawks saying, why is Trump giving in, why isn’t he following up on his victory—but there was no victory. This is actually the best you could do given how the war has gone. In fact, he should have made this deal about a week in when it became clear that the whole premise of his enterprise was not going to work.
Krugman: Of course. He could have just done nothing—that would have been better. And going back in time, he could have kept that Obama agreement, which was doing a much better job of containing Iran.
Sargent: Well, they’re all in the same information bubble. Trump did another missive that was in all caps, saying this:
OK, Paul. He got nothing significant on Iran’s nukes and our country is weaker, less safe, and less respected. But I think we should step back. He’s making a bigger argument there, isn’t he? It’s that in every way the nation is booming, strong, and leading decisively in the world. What do you make of that bigger argument?
But leaving that aside, the economy—it’s not booming. We basically have had slower job growth than we did in the last two years of Biden, and basically flat unemployment. So that’s not great. It’s not a catastrophe, it’s not great. Real wages are lower than they were when Trump took office because we’ve had a lot of inflation.
Sargent: He corrupts everything. It just seeps into every last corner of public life, basically.
So this kind of the-president-is-a-comic-book-hero thing is something that appears to go along with modern Republican governance. But of course, it’s reached a level of absurdity with Trump, both because of the extremeness of the cult of personality and because the reality is that—there has to be a better way to put it, he’s a f-ck up, basically—everything Trump touches turns to crud. And so it’s really insane.
On the one hand, it’s the sheer nakedness of the demand for adulation, which is just completely crazy. Somebody who’s sunsetting very plainly in plain sight, who knows he’s on his way out and is desperate to sort of have something that he can call a legacy. That’s what we see there.
Krugman: And in some ways especially to MAGA country. But yeah.
Krugman: Yeah. I mean, I’m not a psychologist, but it’s my understanding that when you’re sundowning, when you’re in this dissociation that does, among other things, tend to come with age, you in some ways become more like yourself. Those aspects of your personality that were disagreeable and unpleasant and dysfunctional, but which you were able to at least police when you were still more there, now just come out. It’s a little bit like getting drunk.
Sargent: Indeed. You had this video where you went very big picture, kind of assessing where we really are right now. I want to try to summarize your argument briefly. Basically it’s that the United States is no longer seen by our allies and much of the world as an indispensable nation. Our military can’t do what we thought it could—can’t force smaller countries like Iran to do our bidding, or Trump’s bidding. That due to Trump’s tariff fiascos, we have less leverage in trade wars than we thought. That China has unexpected leverage over supply chains and important goods and important resources. That in part due to our abandonment of Ukraine, our onetime allies are looking past us to a post-American world. Etc, etc. Is that the basic argument?
And that’s part of what’s happened in Iran as well. It turns out that if there was one thing we thought America really had, it was, well, we had the world’s greatest military and we had the world’s best weapons and nobody else could manage without us. And well, it turns out that we were completely flat-footed in the face of Iranian drones and that Ukraine is holding its own without American weapons.
Sargent: Is this inexorable decline, do you think? Can it be turned around?
But then there’s a lot that has obviously been made much worse by Trump screwups. And what the world now has to suspect, even when Trump is gone from the stage, is, well, then who’s the next guy? And how do we know that we won’t have another Trump-like figure? Does an agreement with America mean anything, since we’ve just seen an American president rip up every agreement that we had? Does a threat from America mean anything, because we’ve just seen that same guy cave totally? And after all, this guy was—sorry to say—elected fairly by the American people. So what does that say about America?
Sargent: Well, I want to highlight another aspect of our self-inflicted wounds. You brought up Spain as an example of a country that weathered the energy shock from Iran well because it’s transitioning to renewables quickly. Here’s another area where Trump has set back our country tremendously. He’s on two fronts trying to strangle the transition to clean energy in every way he can. It’s like a whole-of-government approach to strangling the clean energy transition.
Krugman: Well, yeah. On Wednesday, the Interior Department announced that it was paying another $765 million to an energy company not to build wind farms. We’re actually not only refusing to follow pro–green energy policies, but actually spending taxpayer money to block it. The Pentagon is using spurious national security concerns to block development of wind farms. So this is an aggressively anti–renewable energy administration. I will be talking shortly on Substack about the motivations.
But then on top of that, the U.S. is—we are basically alone. Everyone else is marching towards an energy transition, and we’re trying to go back to coal. And to the extent that countries might have wanted to rely on us a bit, it’s actually—even more than oil—it’s liquefied natural gas. And there was a possible future we seemed to be heading for in which, at least to a certain extent, the world would be relying on U.S. LNG as at least a transitional source of power on the way to the green revolution.
Sargent: Well, Trump’s focused on the important things here. At 2:51 a.m. he went on a rampage about his ballroom. He insisted it’s coming along brilliantly and effectively demanded more adulation for how great it’s going to be—it’s going to be outfitted with all this powerful military security, et cetera. Then he raged about the legal travails he’s still facing over this, even though he tore down the White House East Wing unilaterally and probably illegally.
What’s striking to me here, and you wrote about this, is just this kind of relentless desecration and degradation of everything. He’s desecrating the ways in which our capital is supposed to embody small-r republicanism. He’s turning it into a crass imperial court, basically.
So yeah, I actually live in New York, not too far from—there’s, along Riverside Drive along the West Side of Manhattan, a series of monuments. There’s Grant’s Tomb, there’s the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, and so on. And they’re all very impressive. They’re kind of like Washington, D.C. in a way.
And now we have Trump gilding everything, wanting to erect a gigantic arch of triumph in the capital, and filling the reflecting pool with algae—which is just showing that the gods have a sense of humor.
It’s always all about him, no matter what. There’s no sense of obligation on their part to function as real leaders or statesmen who care about the nation and its future and have a conception of what’s in the interests of the American people.
Krugman: Well, it’s about them, but I think the real question is what has happened to us—or at least to the Republican Party, but I think maybe it’s even broader than that—that this can happen. I remember there was a time when people used to think of Marco Rubio as a sort of reformist Republican, “reformicon,” whatever. And now here he is walking around in oversized shoes because Trump bought them for him and he’s afraid to take them off, and acting as a lickspittle for all of this crazy ego demonstration. My God.
Sargent: Well, let me just close out this way. It’s my feeling a little bit that Democrats, while they’re functioning more as an opposition than maybe they were at the outset of Trump’s second term—when they were clearly snakebit and just terrified, and on some level Democrats had widely concluded that Trump had put his finger on some sort of real popular sentiment that everybody missed. I think that was never true. He won by a point and a half and it was at a time of inflation and post-COVID shock and so forth. But that’s where Democrats were.
Should Democrats be making a bigger argument? What might something like that look like? Some kind of argument which essentially says, let’s be real about what this guy is doing to us? An argument that says, let’s face reality about what this man and his movement have done to our country, and really setting forth a new direction. Is there some way to do that for Democrats?
And look, one of the happiest things politically that’s happened in the world was the overturn of the Orbán regime in Hungary, which was very much something that MAGA people viewed as a role model: This is how you subvert a democracy. And it turns out that yeah, but with enough people, mad enough, you can flood across all of the barriers they’ve created. And the central theme of the Magyar campaign was corruption. These guys are corrupt.
Sargent: Yes, and I like the idea of using corruption to sort of open the door to an argument about moral corruption and degradation, which I think people sense is happening. The reflecting pool and the algae, the tearing down of the White House East Wing and the replacement of it with a ballroom, the arch—those are things that really resonate for people. And I think it’s because of what we’re talking about here.
I’d point out, by the way, just to close out, that the Magyar campaign was also about what this man, Orbán, and his movement, Orbanism, did to us. Look what he did to us. And that seems like—you’ve been writing about what Donald Trump is doing to us. And it seems like some Democrats need to step up and grab that mantle in some way, I guess.
Sargent: Paul Krugman, thank you so much for writing your Substack. I learn from it all the time, really. I’m not exaggerating. I learn from it every day. And Paul, thanks for coming on with us.
Krugman: Well, thank you.
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