Nobel economist: Trump waging a 'billionaire’s war at everyone else’s expense'

During Thursday morning, March 12 appearance on MS NOW's "Morning Joe," Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) offered a scathing critique of President Donald Trump's decision to go to war with Iran. Murphy described the war as an "epic disaster" that has "gone off the rails," noting that the conflict has spread to a long list of countries and that Iran's new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is even more of a hardline Islamist than his father, the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Blistering criticism of Trump's Iran policy is also coming from liberal economist Paul Krugman. In a column posted on his Substack page on March 12, Krugman warns that the war is having terrible economic consequences — and he argues that "billionaires" are largely to blame.

"It becomes clearer with each passing day that the people who took us to war with Iran had and have no idea what they're doing — that they're adolescents who think they're playing video games while thousands die and the world careens toward economic crisis," Krugman laments. "The New York Times reports that Trump officials dismissed warnings that attacking Iran could disrupt world oil supplies…. Amid the bloody shambles, one big question is, who put The Gang That Couldn't Think Straight in power?"

Krugman continues, "In an immediate sense, Trump was put over the top by low-information voters — defined by G. Elliott Morris as voters who don't know which party controls Congress. But the groundwork for the MAGA takeover was laid well before by the Roberts Supreme Court and by right-wing billionaires that the Court enabled."

During the United States' 2024 election, Krugman notes, "big money swung hard right" — including Elon Musk, leader of SpaceX, Tesla and X.com (formerly Twitter) and a huge donor to Trump's campaign.

"To a large extent, billionaires bought themselves a government friendly to their interests," Krugman observes. "Trump and company have granted many items on the tech broligarchy wish list, from tax breaks to deregulation to promotion of crypto and unregulated AI. But why the abject incompetence? Couldn't billionaires find political allies who wouldn't plunge the country into a potentially disastrous and historically unpopular war without considering the risks? I have two tentative answers."

Krugman continues, "One is that no, competent allies weren't available. Money buys a lot of influence, but to actually take over the U.S. government requires more than money — it requires politicians who are utterly corrupt…. My second answer is that the vast wealth of tech billionaires has made many of them unconcerned with the little people's lives — and deeply unpatriotic."

With his Substack columns, Krugman often makes his points by embedding a music video. And for his March 12 column, the Nobel-winning economist posts a video of the group Lake Street Dive covering Daryl Hall & John Oates' 1977 hit "Rich Girl."

"So if you want to understand how this country has degenerated to such a state, how we can be spending nearly $2 billion a day attacking Iran without a clear endgame in sight, while children go without healthcare, nursing homes are understaffed because their workers have been deported, home electricity bills skyrocket due to data centers, consider who benefits and who isn't hurt," Krugman writes. "This is a billionaire's war, waged at everyone else's expense."