This is a email from renowned economist Paul Krugman….PLEASE READ AND DIGEST
The Apotheosis of Willful Ignorance
All of this was predictable and predicted
May 13, 2026
The so-called experts ridiculed Donald Trump’s claims during the 2024 campaign that he would bring grocery prices down on Day One and cut energy prices in half.
The so-called experts said that Trump’s tariffs would raise consumer prices while failing to bring back manufacturing jobs.
The so-called experts warned that Trump’s attack on Iran would lead us into a quagmire and cause a global energy crisis.
The so-called experts said that Trump’s contempt for international agreements and his threats to friendly nations would undermine the world’s trust in America, and that we would find ourselves without allies when we needed their help.
The so-called experts were completely right.
Right now inflation is surging; manufacturing employment is down; the Strait of Hormuz remains closed; and Trump is traveling to Beijing as a supplicant, in effect begging China for help getting out of his Iran mess.
But it would be foolish to expect Trump and his minions to learn anything from their humiliation.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; scornful of compromise and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
Why does the right hate expertise?
The rejection of science, like so much of the U.S. political landscape, has a lot to do with the influence of the fossil fuel industry. Warnings about climate change threatened that industry’s profits,
anti-democratic movements have an inherent distrust of expertise, of anyone who knows what they are talking about. Experts can’t be trusted, because they might think independently.
The Trump administration isn’t a full-on totalitarian regime, at least not yet, but its instincts obviously run in that direction. The degradation of the federal government’s competence, the gutting of American science, and the epically bad judgment that led to Operation Epic Fury are all part of the same story.
So how will Trump and his party respond to their string of high-profile policy failures, from Iran to inflation? Trump may find a way to accept defeat in the Persian Gulf while claiming victory, although that’s looking harder by the day. But there’s no reason to believe that policymaking will get any better, that the experts and the grownups will be let back into the room. The beatings — and the willful ignorance — will continue until morale improves.