Nobel economist rips Trump officials as 'stupid grifters'

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is facing calls to resign following what Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) describes as having "misrepresented the extent of" his "relationship with" the late billionaire financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Lutnick, during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, February 10, acknowledged that he had lunch with Epstein even after he had been convicted of sex crimes.

Lutnick, however, testified, "I have nothing to hide. Absolutely nothing."

In a scathing Substack column posted the following day, liberal economist Paul Krugman points to Lutnick as a glaring example of the type of people President Donald Trump's second administration is attracting. And he stresses that Trump loyalists aren't necessarily "evil masterminds," but rather, "stupid, amoral grifters."

"There's a longstanding tradition in American politics of what Richard Hofstadter famously called the paranoid style — a way of thinking that sees conspiracies lurking everywhere," Krugman explains. "MAGA World is particularly riddled with conspiracy thinking, from George Soros and Jewish space lasers, QAnon and the Great Replacement Theory, to Italian satellites hacking into voting machines to deliver the 2020 election to Joe Biden. But these are far-fetched fantasies. The truth is far more banal and shocking."

Krugman continues, "There are people in positions of great power in the U.S. government engaged in evil conspiracies against everything that is good and decent. Their conspiracies are far more extensive and damaging than almost anyone imagined. But there are no evil masterminds behind this. Only amoral, stupid grifters like Howard Lutnick…. The only waves he has made are a result of his exceptional combination of stupidity and offensive tone-deafness."

Lutnick, Krugman argues, "sits at the intersection of not one, but at least two ugly conspiracies" — one involving the cryptocurrency Tether and a "money laundering" case, the other involving Epstein.

"Lutnick has, in the past, vehemently denied having any association with Jeffrey Epstein, insisting that he severed all contact with the pedophile ringleader in 2005," the economist laments. "But even the highly limited, extremely redacted release of the Epstein files — everything we've seen reeks of a major coverup — shows that he was flat-out lying. Not only did he stay in close contact with Epstein, the two men appear to have gone into business together…. In any previous administration, Lutnick's naked conflicts of interest and his Epstein lies would have led to his immediate departure…. While MAGA World's fantasy villains like George Soros are brilliant and subtle, MAGA's real villains are uncouth and dim-witted. Yet they carry out their sinister schemes in broad daylight."

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