Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman warned the damage from President Trump’s failed war in Iran — and his broader approach to governing — will outlast his presidency, leaving the U.S. diminished on the world stage for years to come.
In an interview with The New Republic’s Greg Sargent on his “Daily Blast” podcast, Krugman dismissed Trump’s claims of victory in Iran as detached from reality.
“Iran won,” Krugman said. “Iran is in a much stronger position and the U.S. in a much weaker position than before the war started.”
Krugman called the resulting ceasefire deal “vastly inferior” to the Obama-era nuclear agreement Trump abandoned during his first term, adding that the conflict cost lives, depleted weapons stockpiles, and exposed the limits of American power.
“He could have just done nothing — that would have been better,” he said.
The conversation centered on a series of early-morning social media posts in which Trump demanded credit for the outcome and touted economic gains. Krugman pushed back point by point, noting that job growth has actually been slower than in the last two years under Biden, with unemployment essentially flat and real wages lower due to inflation accumulated since Trump took office, and he argued stock market gains reflect a global rally rather than anything specific to Trump’s policies.
“The stock market is up, no question about that,” Krugman said. “Although the stock market rose a lot under Joe Biden, too, Trump would like you to put that down the memory hole. Stocks are up, by the way, around the world. There’s a stock market boom. I haven’t checked the numbers lately, but I believe that they’re up substantially more outside the United States than inside the United States.”
Krugman framed Trump’s behavior as part of a broader pattern of decline, arguing the war revealed that the U.S. could not impose its will on a “third-rate military power” and that American allies increasingly understand they don’t need Washington — citing Ukraine’s continued resistance despite a U.S. cutoff of arms and funding. He warned this erosion of credibility is not easily reversible.
“There’s a lot that has obviously been made much worse by Trump screwups,” Krugman said. “What the world now has to suspect, even when Trump is gone from the stage, is who’s the next guy? 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?”
“We don’t get that back,” he added. “It took generations to build the reputation of America. You don’t get that back unless you give us three generations of good governance from here on in.”
Krugman was equally blunt about Trump personally, describing him as someone living through a kind of public unraveling.
“If you look at some of those late-night tweets, the tweets we’re talking about here, you kind of get hit by a real dose of somebody in very steep mental decline,” he said. “It’s sort of two-layered. 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 have something that he can call a legacy. That’s what we see there.”
“But at the same time, you also see him completely detached from the reality of what he’s actually done to us,” Krugman added. “What he’s done to you and me, to liberal America, to blue America, even to red America, even to MAGA country.”
Krugman highlighted the administration’s renovation of the National Mall’s Reflecting Pool — drained, repainted and resealed, only to be overtaken again by algae — as an almost literary metaphor.
“Everything Trump touches turns to crud,” he said.
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