U.S. President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump, UFC CEO Dana White and other guests stand inside the Octagon at UFC Freedom 250 on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 15, 2026.
Few people are as knowledgeable about the history of finance and money as Paul Krugman, and according to the Nobel Prize-winning economist, there is a 130-year-old theory that may help the world understand what motivates President Donald Trump and much of the wider MAGA movement.
According to Krugman, “In his classic book The Theory of the Leisure Class — published in 1899, at the apogee of the Gilded Age — Thorstein Veblen famously argued that much of the behavior of his era’s elite was driven not by the desire to enjoy life but by the desire to impress others.” With this in mind, he points to Trump’s Sunday birthday cage match on the White House lawn.
“The match and the events that surrounded it — especially the press conference with UFC fighters, shown above, held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial — were a desecration of America’s capital, whose monuments and buildings have always endeavored to represent small-r republican virtues,” writes Krugman. “The whole affair was an affront to the values on which this nation was founded and also unspeakably vulgar. That last criticism may strike some readers as elitist and trivial. Yet the vulgarity that is the hallmark of Trump and his surrounding circle of oligarchs is a symptom of something not at all trivial: The collapse of social norms.”
The norms matter, asserts Krugman. While “the theory of the leisure class” might explain Trump and MAGA elites’ desire to impress via wealth, one key difference between the Gilded Age of yesteryear and that of today is that back then, members of the upper class “didn’t solely aim to display their wealth. They also tried to appear respectable. There were surely many private affairs and betrayals we will never know about. But the important point is that the super-wealthy of that era presented to the American public an image of being responsible members of society.” In other words, they endeavored to uphold societal norms.
“In addition to modeling upstanding behavior, the extremely rich of the Gilded Age were expected to have, or pretend to have, some virtues that were part of the aristocratic ideal, including a sense of noblesse oblige displayed by good works,” Krugman elaborates. ”Today’s oligarchs, by contrast, have largely given up on the old norms of social and individual responsibility. They give very little money to good causes and their vulgar taste reflects their in-your-face attitude towards the public. In our current hyper-Gilded Age, extreme vulgarity and the decline of philanthropy are really different aspects of the same phenomenon: the rise of an elite so disconnected from ordinary Americans that it feels no need to even appear to be honorable.”
The result, says Krugman, is not merely garish but has consequences, as “in a real sense we are living in the midst of a reenactment of the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, not a second American Gilded Age… there are some obvious parallels. While the causes of the decline of republican government and Rome’s eventual transition to one-man rule were doubtless complex, there is broad consensus among historians that a key factor was the emergence of extreme inequality. A handful of men became incredibly wealthy from the spoils of Rome’s eastern conquests, and their wealth and power eventually became too great for the rules of constitutional, republican government to contain. Sound uncomfortably familiar?”
According to Krugman, the death throes of the Roman Republic went on for years as “politicians declared their rivals enemies of the state, deployed violent gangs to disrupt the rule of law, established temporary dictatorships, and more,,, And during this long twilight of constitutional government, one of the ways the extremely wealthy and powerful sought both to demonstrate their wealth and to curry favor with the mob was by sponsoring gladiatorial games.”
With all this in mind, Krugman arrives at a dire conclusion, writing, “The vulgarity of the Trumpian elite isn’t in itself that important. But it’s a symptom of a collapse in values and norms that, unless confronted and reversed, may herald the end of the American experiment.”