U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a press conference at a NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands June 25, 2025.
According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, the Iran war “debacle” has “clearly broken” President Donald Trump, and as a result, the commander-in-chief has “given up governing” to focus exclusively on his true priorities: “rage and revenge.”
The latest evidence of this is tthat Trump has tapped Bill Pulte as the acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI), a role that is vital to the country’s national security apparatus. As Krugamn writes, “The word ‘acting’ is crucial. The statute creating the position of DNI explicitly requires that the appointee ‘shall have extensive national security expertise.’” Pulte has none. A home building baron and current head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, he has zero background in intelligence.
“But pointing out that Pulte is unqualified for his new job doesn’t convey the extent to which Trump is trolling America with this new appointment,” says Krugman. “For Pulte isn’t merely unqualified for a sensitive national security position. He’s unqualified, intellectually and morally, for any government position. All he has are the qualifications that matter to Trump: he is a shameless lackey and willing hitman for Trump’s vendettas.”
Part of what brought Pulte into Trump’s orbit where the “thousands of nasty political posts” he spewed onto social media in recent years. His family’s background in residential construction garnered him an appointment as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, but according to Krugman, “His real job has been weaponizing the agency as a tool against Trump’s perceived enemies — weaponization that is being investigated by the Government Accountability Office as a potential misuse of authority. Pulte confected false claims of mortgage fraud to try to push out Lisa Cook, the only black woman on the Federal Reserve Board. He has leveled similar trumped-up charges against Letitia James, New York’s Attorney General, and several Democratic politicians. And he pushed groundless fraud accusations against Jerome Powell, the former Federal Reserve chair, who stood in the way of Trump’s attempt to politicize monetary policy.”
That Pulte has turned out to be a “bumbling hatchet man” whose efforts have been entirely ineffective is besides the point, says Krugman. “For Trump, willingness to engage in unethical behavior is all that matters.”
Even so, Krugman expresses surprise that Trump would select someone with such vanishing experience considering the fact that, at the very least, the president “sees wars only as ways to enrich himself and distract from his domestic woes,” and to that end, one would think he’d want accurate intelligence.
“But Trump appears to have given up on governing,” asserts Krugman, “even governing aimed at consolidating his own power and legacy. He wants to punish everyone he imagines has wronged him but has lost all interest in making the government work, even for nefarious purposes. So he don’t need no intelligence, just someone who will indulge his rage. And that will be Pulte’s job.”
While Krugman warns that the Republican Party and its megadonors are still working hard to corrupt American democracy, dismantle the country’s scientific community, and consolidate power for billionaires, he concludes that “Trump himself is, at this point, little more than a festering ball of anger and hate.”