U.S. President Donald Trump looks on as he speaks to members of the media aboard Air Force One en route to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., March 29, 2026.
Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman left no room for U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent to hide in a blistering Friday night fact check on MS NOW.
Bessent recently promised that high inflation and rent prices would soon go down in a Newsmax in a Thursday interview, after first blaming immigrants for the price increases.
“The laws of supply and demand still work when you take illegals out of the workforce, working class wages go up. When you send them back home, rents go down,” Bessent said.
Oh, no, said Krugman.
“This is really Trump's economy,” Krugman quickly corrected. “There's never been in my lifetime a case of this dramatic — a set of, you know, blatantly irresponsible policies that are directly making life worse for the great majority of Americans.”
“It's amazing that these guys can be boasting about jobs,” Krugman added. “The reality is that in the last year of the Biden administration, America gained about 100,000 jobs a month. Under Trump, so far, it's a little over 30,000 a month. So we've had a real we've sort of fallen off a cliff in terms of job creation. So, this is not a great economy for anybody except, you know, a handful of people who are have bought the right stocks.”
The Trump economy, he added, “favors wealth over work.”
“This is an economy that's been great for the oligarchs, for a handful of people. Really, it’s no longer the 1 percent. We're really talking about the 0.01 percent. A few hundred people are the ones who've done really well in this economy. And sure, they're the people that get to talk to Trump. So, he probably hears from them that ‘things are great.’ But what about the 99.9 percent who are not doing so good?”
He emphasized that unlike many presidents before him, Trump has no one to blame but himself and his policies for the mess now facing Americnas, and threatening Republicans in November.
“Oh, you know, there's an old truism among economists, which is that presidents get too much blame and too much credit because they don't have that much control over what happens to the economy,” said Krugman. “Now, Trump has broken that, if you're going to go and start a war that blocks one of the world's major shipping points for energy, if you're going to impose massive tariffs.”
“You know, in previous troubled times you couldn’t blame the presidents [catching the responsibility] for the economy. The economy of 2022 was not really Biden’s economy. That was global. It wasn't mostly things he did. And so on down the line. Even the Great Depression wasn't really Herbert Hoover’s fault, although his response was pretty bad. But this is Trump’s economy.”