'Post-MAGA era' is here as big business breaks with Trump: Nobel economist

US President Donald Trump attends a Hispanic Heritage Month reception in the East Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., US, September 30, 2026. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

There are major signs that big business is breaking with President Donald Trump over the chaos sown by his agenda. This is according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who explained on Thursday why the actions of one of the country’s most prominent financial figures suggest that the “post-MAGA era” is here.

“On September 28th, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, one of the most prominent, most successful financial figures in the United States, published an article in the Wall Street Journal titled, ‘The Hell with Trump, Let’s Go Back to Globalism,’” said Krugman. “Okay, that’s a lie. That wasn’t what the article was titled, but it was, in effect, what it said. And it was a very interesting message to be coming at this moment in time. I think Dimon’s op-ed can be viewed as a harbinger of a big shift in the business community’s political positions and its attitudes that may be coming in the very near future — in effect a bet that Trump and MAGA in general are going to be in the rearview mirror, not too far from now.”

As Krugman explains, Dimon is an “extraordinarily successful financial leader” and a “very, very smart political operator” who has managed to stay on good terms with administrations from both parties. After the 2024 election, he neither joined the “cavalcade of business leaders rushing to prostrate themselves at Trump’s feet,” nor did he end up on his list of enemies. But now, says Krugman, he’s calling to repair the Western alliance and rebuild ties with Europe to confront the rising power of China, proposing that the best way to achieve that is by forging a free trade agreement between the United States and the European Union.

“That’s quite something,” asserts Krugman. “That’s a very un-MAGA position to take. You want to bear in mind that, first of all, we’re currently under a government of people who do not at all believe in the virtues of free trade. In fact, are extremely hostile to globalism. Certainly don’t believe in binding international agreements. Maybe they want agreements that bind other countries, but not them. And they are also not of the mind that we have a lot of shared values with the democratic governments of Europe. The MAGA position, if anything, is that they like the anti-democratic forces in Europe. J.D. Vance essentially campaigned for Viktor Orban in Hungary. Trump officials have been quite clear that they have sympathy for the AfD in Germany. So if we have common values with some Europeans, the Europeans with whom they have common values are neo-Nazis. And Trump’s de facto support for Putin in his invasion of Ukraine has been alarmingly clear over the past two years.” But now Dimon is rejecting that, and Krugman argues that it suggests he believes Trump and MAGA are on their way out.

According to Krugman, the economic benefits of Dimon’s free trade idea are actually not all that drastic. Europe only exports roughly three percent of its production to the US, and before Trump’s second term, the two entities were practically on a free trade basis anyways. But in Krugman’s estimation, “Dimon believes that the process of negotiating towards a free trade agreement would in itself help to improve politics. That it would be a signal that the ultra-nationalist, anti-democratic, often anti-European policies of theTrump era are behind us. So he’s looking forward to the day when we can start to try to repair some of the immense damage that has been done to our international relations during the Trump years.” With the writing on the wall for the Republican midterms, Dimon thinks the time for “rebuilding an alliance” is near. “He thinks that this is possible,” concludes Krugman, “and that it’s worth positioning himself and his institution for a post-MAGA era.”

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