Britain's King Charles and U.S. President Donald Trump raise a toast during a state dinner for the King and Queen Camilla at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 28, 2026.
According to Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, President Donald Trump didn’t start the modern “Gilded Age,” but over the course of his administrations, he’s presided over an explosion of inequality that surpasses the era of the robber barons. Now, Krugman believes a backlash is already building that could result in “genuine populism.”
As Krugman explains, “America used to be a middle-class society. But income and wealth disparities began rising rapidly during the Reagan years, and by the late 80s many observers began drawing parallels between the new era of inequality and the Gilded Age.” Now, however, “We are living through something much worse. The tech bros make the ‘malefactors of great wealth’ called out by Theodore Roosevelt look benign by comparison.”
This is because economic inequality that began soaring 40 years ago and was exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2008 — which allowed the rich to begin pouring massive sums of money into elections — has resulted in a level of wealth concentration at the top that is unparalleled in history. Says Krugman, “The growth in wealth concentration is even more extreme if we look at the very, very top. Gabriel Zucman, one of the world’s leading experts on wealth and income inequality, argues that the concentration of wealth is now much higher than it was at the peak of the Gilded Age.”
And unlike the robber barons of yesteryear, the tech billionaires of today show “little inclination to give back to society by devoting a significant part of their wealth to good works,” with the likes of Elon Musk and Pete Thiel giving almost none of their money to philanthropy, and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos not doing much better. More importantly, however, “is the fact that their wealth has brought great political power, arguably more than the robber barons ever possessed — power that they abuse on an epic scale.”
For example, while JD Vance has always been unpopular in his home state of Ohio, he managed to win his Senate campaign only because Thiel buried his populist Democratic rival under a flood of PAC money. Or in the case of Musk, he was given direct access and control over significant parts of government, power he used to not only benefit his own companies, but to end foreign aid that experts say will kill hundreds of thousands and perhaps even millions of impoverished people around the world.
With all this in mind, writes Krugman, “The big political question going forward is whether there will be a significant backlash against the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small number of mean-spirited men. I believe that there will be such a backlash, indeed that it is already starting, and that there is a political opening for some genuine populism if politicians have the courage to take a stand.”
Polls show there is political hunger for such a change, with an overwhelming majority of Americans — except, notably, MAGA Republicans — considering economic inequality to be a major problem. At the same time, anger over Trump’s corruption is on the rise and is an increasingly big problem for Republicans going into the midterms.
Krugman says that the super-rich have attempted to dismiss such backlash as a “radical, left-wing, anti-centrist position,” the numbers don’t support such a suggestion, as polling has shown that even self-described moderates and many conservatives — the vast majority of Americans overall — hold populist views.
While he notes that any politician who harnesses that majority anger against the rich is sure to face a “tidal wave of lavishly funded venom,” the fact is that there is a major opportunity for leaders willing to fight back against the tech robber barons of today.
