Economist Paul Krugman: Why 'crackpots and fools' are crucial to Trump’s strategy

Economist Paul Krugman during FIDES 2023 at the Windsor Hotel in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on September 25, 2023 (A.PAES/Shutterstock.com)

Hannah Arendt, a German political philosopher/historian who was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1933, famously coined the term "the banality of evil." Arendt is also remembered for the phrase "crackpots and fools," who she believed were quite useful to authoritarians — as they don't like having too many "competent" people around.

Arendt was 69 when she died in New York City on December 4, 1975. Half a century after her death, in a Substack column published on October 2, 2025, liberal economist and former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman explains why Arendt's "crackpots and fools" concept is relevant to Donald Trump's second presidency.

Trump, according to Krugman, makes a point of surrounding himself with "crackpots and fools" — from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to E.J. Antoni, who was Trump's pick to head the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In late September, the Associated Press reported that the Trump White House was withdrawing the Antoni nomination.

"America is no longer a fully functioning democracy," Krugman warns. "In the good old days of Richard Nixon, the Republican Party had the conscience and backbone to standup to Nixon's attempt at autocracy. William Rehnquist, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, recused himself from U.S. v. Nixon because of his close prior association with Watergate conspirators. Can you imagine (Justice Samuel) Alito or (Justice Clarence) Thomas having any such sense of fairness and duty? But like all authoritarian regimes, America's autocracy is being run by malevolent incompetents."

According to Krugman, the "hacks" in the second Trump Administration vividly illustrate "Arendt's Law."

"Hannah Arendt argued that authoritarian regimes don't want competent people, who might sometimes take a stand on principle," Krugman explains. "They prefer 'crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.' My case in point…. (is) E.J. Antoni…. While there are many competent conservative economists, Antoni isn't one of them."

Krugman continues, "He is, instead, stunningly, Stephen-Moore-level incompetent, with a toxic history on social media. Trump's choice of Antoni proved Arendt's dictum: crackpots and fools are likely to be more loyal than people who actually know something. The same logic surely explains the appointment of the hapless Hegseth."

Paul Krugman's full Substack column is available at this link.

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