“A lot of people” who voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election “are going to get brutally scammed” when the president-elect returns to the White House next week and enacts his “really radical” and “terrible” economic policy ideas, economist Paul Krugman predicted on Tuesday.
Trump’s plan “to raise tariffs but cut taxes on high income” will batter working-class voters, Krugman told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent on “The Daily Blast” podcast. And the effect of Trump’s vow to deport millions of undocumented immigrants will have an even worse effect on the economy, he added.
The returning president “appears to have an extremely regressive economic program in mind, one that really will effectively redistribute income away from working-class voters to the top,” and there appears to be a lack of Wall Street “heavyweights” who could “steer him away” from his most destructive instincts, Krugman said.
Sargent noted how a “fairly large” swathe of Trump’s base is actually made up of small business owners. “Aren’t those people going to get brutally scammed by tariffs here?” he asked Krugman.
Krugman, who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2008 and left his longtime opinion columnist gig at The New York Times just last month, agreed.
“A lot of people are going to get brutally scammed,” he said, noting that some local business owners are possibly “the most fervent MAGA types out there.”
“Small business people are the people that he’s all through his life hired as contractors and then not paid, right?” he added. “Scamming people like that is what his whole life has been around.”
Listen to the full episode here:
