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COMMENTARY PAUL KRUGMAN live video ... Mehdi Hasan talks with Paul Krugman PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEO Original article: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/paul-krugman-on-tariffs Original article: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/live-with-mehdi-hasan Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess
Live with Mehdi Hasan ... A recording from Paul Krugman and Mehdi Hasan's live video Paul Krugman and Mehdi Hasan Mar 06, 2025 Thank you Molly Knight, kathleen Lingo, Frank Fariello, Marty Neumeier, Andrew North, and many others for tuning into my live video with Mehdi Hasan! Join me for my next live video in the app. Transcript I'm Mehdi Hassan. I am here with Paul Krugman, and we are going to be talking a lot about what is going on in America right now and in the economy right now. Lots of people are joining. Thank you all for joining. Paul's here. It's an honor to be here with Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate, is now joined Substack. I've already been on Substack for a year now with Zeteo. We're coming up to our anniversary. Thank you to Zeteo subscribers who are joining. Thank you to Paul subscribers who are joining. If you're not subscribed to either of our Substacks, please subscribe today. I'm looking forward to this conversation for a while, partly because the economics of the moment are coming to the fore. Paul, we've talked a lot in media right now about Donald Trump from all sorts of angles. But the economic angle, which is supposedly why he won, is now coming back to the forefront. We are focused much more on tariffs. There's talk of an impending recession. The doge cuts are kicking in pretty harshly. Unemployment. A lot to discuss. I want to start with tariffs, Paul. What do you make of Donald Trump today saying, all right, I'm going to pause the Canadian-Mexican tariffs again? Yeah. First of all, it's kind of like Monty Python, run away, run away. Brave Sir Robin. Two months in a row now, he said, this is absolutely it. It's happening. And then pulled back, presumably, I don't know, probably the market. But here's a weird thing to say. In some ways, maybe we're having tariffs and maybe we aren't. It's worse than actually just doing it. Because, you know, a 25% tariff on everything from Mexico and Canada is disastrous. It's catastrophic because there isn't a U.S. economy. There's a North American economy. Our manufacturing bases are so closely integrated that disrupting that is terrible. But suppose that you're a business executive, you know, manufacturing, you're an auto executive, and And you're trying to make plans. And there's one set of plans that, you know, if it's going to be a world of high tariffs, okay, that's miserable, but we can start to plan around that. We can, you know, start to rearrange our whole production structure for that. If it's not going to happen and we're going to maintain this, you know, free trade agreement that we signed, you know, agreements are supposed to matter. Well, we have already planned for that. If we don't know which it is, what do you do? Yeah. Among other things, a lot of what you do is nothing. You don't invest. You don't build. You just sort of put everything on ice, which is one of the reasons that we're suddenly starting to talk about recession. Not quite there predicting it, but if you had to ask, what is the biggest single factor right now? It's this incredible spike in uncertainty because Donald Trump, his word is good for about 30 seconds. 30 seconds is generous, Paul. Generous estimation there. Sometimes he switches statements within the same sentence. But you're right. He screws people over. He's unreliable. The chaos, you know, it's always about the chaos. The first term, you know, something I said last year to a lot of people was, in this country, we have the memory of a goldfish, right? We can't remember beyond a few seconds ago, let alone last week or five years ago. His first term was defined by chaos, the pandemic. We're coming up to the five-year anniversary of COVID. It's not that he's a right-wing ideologue like an Orban who's got a horrible vision that he executes. It's that he's all over the place, as you say. Is it tariffs? Is it not tariffs? Just out of interest on the tariffs front, you are an economist who's obviously taught about this subject. He's got people around who are economists, some more qualified than others. Do they believe the shit that he says about, oh, tariffs, the foreigners will pay, you won't have to pay? Is there anyone on his team who actually believes this is an economically viable way of running the country? I think there's basically one person. There's this guy, Peter Navarro. Yes. They basically went on a search, apparently, on Amazon Books to find... who actually hates China as much as we do. And the rest, I don't... I'm not sure that they actually are even honest enough with themselves to say that this is nonsense. But no, this is all about saying yes to the boss. There is nobody, even... I mean, there are people who are anti-free trade and want... some you know want a strategic trade policy and all kind of this and um canada my god i mean you try to think they're on on no front is canada a bad actor here canada has done nothing wrong the only reason we have a trade deficit with canada is because they sell us cheap oil and electricity and how that is somehow subsidizing them is a mystery no one can understand. But that's how it works in Trump's mind. So, no, I mean, but, you know, there are some economists who are kind of protectionist, who are also smart. I think they're wrong, but they're kind of smart and their people are people who do international trade law. And a lot of people expected those people to be in the administration. Bob Lighthizer, that's not a name. And Lighthizer is not in the administration. And I think the reason is almost certainly that actually knowing what you're talking about is a disqualification for serving with them. Well said. I also like to say yes to the boss. That's the epitaph on every Trump cabinet secretary, surely, on their career. Yes to the boss is what it's all about. The way they do those sycophantic North Korea-style cabinet meetings is still rather displaceable. Thank you all for joining, those of you who are joining us. We've already crossed 3,000 people in the chat watching live. Appreciate you all. I'm Mehdi Hassan. Paul Krugman's here. We're both on Substack. If you're not subscribed, Please do. We're talking about the Trump economy. We're talking about this political moment that we're in. We just talked about tariffs. It's interesting, as you said, there are some people who believe in using tariffs strategically. As you know, people on the left have talked about using it to protect certain domestic industries. But this is not that. And by the way, am I right in saying that the energy tariffs on Canada are still in place, right? He's only lifting some of the tariffs under USMCA. Well, I thought that the energy was covered by the USMCA. is actually NAFTA, just renamed, is a free trade agreement, which doesn't literally mean free trade and everything, but more or less, it's suddenly saying, okay, we're not going to have tariffs on the stuff that obeys the agreement which was already in place, which is what I just ripped up. But no, I mean, energy is actually going to be... If this comes back, energy is actually going to be one of Canada's weapons against us because... The Premier of Ontario has already said that he's going to put a tax on exports of electricity to the US. Mr. Ford, the aptly named Mr. Ford. Isn't it interesting that, as you know, you were at the New York Times. I do want to talk about the Times briefly later. But you were at the Times. I was at MSNBC. Liberal media, forget conservative media, liberal media was all over gas prices. right during the Biden first term. There were reporters parked outside gas stations with the highest prices. And it'll be interesting to see what happens with gas prices and what the Canadian role will be under Trump. As inflation rises, we've talked about egg prices, but the gas prices could be really deadly. Let me throw the obvious question to you that I'm sure a lot of people in the chat have. And we'll try and ask some questions if you've got some. I see Jenny Duncan from New Zealand says she's just joined. We've got a global audience here today. Jenny says she's a fan of both of us. Thank you, Jenny. And thank you to the other 3.6K in the chat. Let's just cut to it, Paul. Recession. A lot of talk of recession. My colleague Grace Blakely at Zeteo wrote a piece a week ago rather prophetically saying more and more people are asking about a recession. Every day now we're getting more and more pieces talking about the R word. We've had, I think, the Atlantic Fed talking about negative growth in quarter one of this year. We've got Bloomberg reporting on the lowest consumer confidence level since 2021. Where do you stand on the recession debate? Well, the Atlantic Fed, it gets really technical. They have a model, and they're using the model, but we're pretty sure that that's a quirk. What's actually happened is that their numbers are really distorted by a rush of companies hoarding stuff trying to get ahead of the tariffs. So that's probably a fluke. It's probably not actually negative growth in the first quarter. And we probably are not in a recession yet. And for what it's worth, the International Monetary Fund wants to study how good are economists at forecasting recessions. And the answer is that my profession has absolutely zero value. It wouldn't take that. But look, if you look at the various – the combination of things that we're doing, they're all – it's basically – it's a stagflationary set of policies. On the one hand, you have the tariffs, which are – even the threat of tariffs is inflationary. And by the way, tariffs on steel and aluminum have gone in. One thing I learned, I had a conversation, which will appear on my own Substack in a couple of days, with Mary Lovely at the Peterson Institute, and they're applying the steel and aluminum tariffs to basically anything. made of steel and aluminum or the containers. So lawn furniture is suddenly jumping in price and those tariffs have happened. So while some of this stuff has been postponed for another month, so you have the inflationary impact of tariffs and there is an inflationary impact even of anticipated tariffs as companies stockpile and start to raise prices to get ahead of things. At the same time, you have the uncertainty weighing on business, weighing on consumers. I'm actually shocked. I thought that consumer confidence would stay high for a few months just because Republicans... what Republicans, what we've seen from the data, are they cheer if a Republican is president and they boo if a Democrat is president, almost independent of the economic situation. So we thought, I thought, that the consumer confidence numbers would stay high for at least a little while, but things have been sufficiently crazy. There's sufficient evidence that these guys have no idea what they're doing. That it's gotten through, actually in some ways CEOs, so they seem to be the last people to figure it out, but the general... The American public has already seemed to be catching on that, oh my God, we have people who don't know how to drive at the steering wheel. No idea what they do. I think you've said that twice in this conversation before. I think it sums up really this idea of the chaos, the incompetence. In January 2017, Paul, I wrote a column for the New Statesman magazine. When the first Trump administration came in and I said, this is a cackistocracy, right? Government by the worst people. And they are the worst people, not just in terms of their personal character, the likes of Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr., but also their competence levels, the Tulsi Gabbards and the WWE woman they've put in charge of the Department of Education before they shut it down, according to the Wall Street Journal. So yes, incompetence plays a huge revel here. And you don't trust Trump when there's economic downturn. You don't trust him in a pandemic. You don't trust the people around him. Whatever grownups in the room we had in term one are not around in term two, as some of us predicted they wouldn't be. And that makes everything a lot more kind of high risk when we're evaluating the risks coming our way. Let me ask you one more thing about the tariffs, which is, we talked about who actually believes in it, Navarro, etc. What about this idea that it's just another grift and just another corruption exercise from the Trump administration, because he's going to use it not for economic purposes, but for political and financial purposes to grant exemptions to those companies who give him money? Well, that's certainly a possibility. It's one thing you can do. I mean, US law gives the president enormous discretion on tariffs. And so if you start to go in, there were reasons for that, but they never imagined Donald Trump as president when they wrote the law. And one thing you can do is grant exemptions. And we know that during his first term, in fact, look at who got exemptions. They tended to be Republican connected firms. So this is going to happen. But I think it's probably you're giving them too much credit if you think that it's all about that. This is really that Donald Trump personally, and this is very much just him. It's not even an ideological movement. Mostly, it's just mostly Donald Trump. has this sense that he knows that the world is taking advantage of us, and it's a zero-sum game, and every time we buy something from abroad, we lose. And so most of it is probably there, and it's probably real. Most of it is probably actually going to happen, because I'd be very curious to see how he reacts over the next few days, but he backed down again, But now everybody's saying, look, he backed down, and that's going to, you know, can his ego handle that? And so, my God, you know, world's greatest nation, and we're worried about the fragility of the president's ego, but that's where we are. And so I don't think this is, if you think that this is a systematic effort, that's probably just giving way credit, which doesn't mean that there can't be also a lot of grift and corruption and and just systemic danger as well as just plain chaos. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting you go about the world's greatest nation and ego, because of course, that is fundamentally what drives Trump. People try and read into what is the MAGA ideology and what is driving him and the left behind. And fundamentally, no one wants to say, you know, the emperor's got no clothes. This is a guy who is just driven by impulse and narcissism, a thin skin, ego, grievance, petty grievances, And that's true of Donald Trump as well, because it applies to us perfectly as well. And so in some ways, we've got the country being run by two guys who have the same fragile ego. I think Musk is probably smarter about matters here. So, yeah, I mean, this is incredible how much, really, in a way, we should fire all the economists and hire psychiatrists instead to understand our economic goals. Well, it's funny you should say that because Bandy Lee, who was a professor of medicine and psychiatry at Yale, edited a book called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump during his first term, where she got a bunch of psychiatrists to kind of go through the different problems that Trump has and why it's so dangerous. And at the time she was poo-pooed, she was dismissed, you can't diagnose from afar. Yale came after her. Turns out years later, we find out that John Kelly, General Kelly, who was Trump's chief of staff, went quietly to a bookstore in D.C., bought a copy of Bandy Lee's book, brought it back to the White House so he could make sense of his boss. Yeah, no, this is... No, I understand. This has been... I remember the days when if you... I said, you know, criticized George Bush. You were, people said, oh, it's Bush derangement syndrome and you're crazy. And so, you know, diagnosis from afar has a bad history, but it really is. This is clearly trying to model U.S. economic policy. in 2025, is trying to model the mind of a very strange guy, all kinds of hang-ups. Which is, again, coming back to the actual economy, to people's livelihood, to the cost of living, to job prospects, is really, really bad. So it's interesting you mentioned George W. Bush. There was a famous line from J.K. Galbraith when he said, I think he said it in the context of George Bush, that when I look at George Bush, I yearn for Ronald Reagan. And I reused it years later and said, when I look at Donald Trump, I yearn for George W. Bush. And I just wonder, given Alyssa Slotkin gave her response to the Trump speech in Congress for the Democrats and got criticized for invoking Ronald Reagan in the Cold War, I'm just wondering, A, where you situate Trump amongst presidents, because you've seen a lot, a lot of bad ones, more than I have. And the other question I had was, in relation to Reagan is, when we talk about Ronald Reagan, this was this guy who wanted to drag the government into a bathtub and drown it, wanted to cut the size of government, cut regulations. Are Trump and Musk doing what Reagan always wanted to do over two terms on steroids in two months? Well, to some extent. Now, I mean, look, I was actually in the Reagan administration, believe it or not. I was sub-political level, but I was the senior international economist at the Council of Economic Advisers, along with the senior domestic economist, a guy named Larry Summers. So I started And there were a lot of very strange people. I mean, people now, you know, they've prettied it up, but there were a lot of very strange and pretty incompetent people under Reagan. But each successive Republican president makes the previous one look like a paragon. And And there was a certain basic level of at least most people had some competence, some obedience to rule. I mean, there's this thing called the GATT, but there's a set of rules that govern international trade. The U.S. actually founded it, and I was in meetings in 1982 where some really dumb proposal would come out of the Commerce Department. And the person from the U.S. Trade Representative's Office would say that would be a violation of the GATT. End of story. We did not. The U.S. had honored its agreements. These days, no one would even say such a thing because they don't care. So at some level, yes, we started down this road. Reagan sent us on the road to where we are now. We forget just how shocking it was that we made that turn. But we're many, many miles further down that road now. So it looks like a golden age in comparison. So it's interesting that we have Musk on the scene. We talk about Reagan changing the rules of the economy, exploding inequality, greed is good era. Today, we have Elon Musk literally running the government. There's a headline on CNN saying Republican lawmakers are asking Musk, please, can we vote on doge cut? They're asking, please, sir, the unelected bureaucrat who Trump told us it was an end to the age of unelected bureaucrats. You have this unelected, unvetted guy Elected officials are saying, please, sir, can we make a vote? I just wonder, you remember a few years ago, there was a Princeton study that came out suggesting the US was an oligarchy, caused a lot of controversy, got a lot of headlines. I mean, are we living through a real life oligarchy in the sense that the richest man in the world controls our government without any Senate confirmation, vetting or anything? What do we call this? Well, yeah, I mean, it's still an oligarchy that depends upon the acquiescence of Donald Trump. So, you know, Musk has his role because Donald Trump, at some level, knows that he doesn't know how to do this job. And so he's relying on Musk. But yeah, and the whole thing, I mean, that whole thing. at the front row at the inauguration. This was American oligarchy in practice. Now, we're not fully there. Votes, well, votes can still matter. We'll find out, I guess, in next year whether people who win elections actually get to take office. But, you know, we're pretty far down the road, although it's both an oligarchy and, as you say, a catacostocracy. So it's not as, I mean, there are some very wealthy people people who are not as chaotic, who don't run around waving a chainsaw and behave like Elon Musk. But it's pretty scary. But again, there's this kind of weird mix of, yes, the world's richest man has immense power, is engaged in enormous self-dealing. You know, he's basically saying, I'm going to replace the air traffic control system and give the contract to myself. And and at the same time, has absolutely no idea what he's doing is sending these 19 year old kids in who are saying, I don't think I understand. Fire that guy without any understanding of what. What the government does, what its role is, how do you tell whether a role is crucial? And so they suddenly discover that they've accidentally fired the people who keep our nuclear weapons secure. So, you know, it is this mix of, yeah, the super rich have enormous power and are also enormously ignorant and irresponsible. So we've got almost 6,000 people, about to cross 6,000 people watching live. Appreciate you all being here. Hope you're subscribed to Zeteo and to Paul Krugman's sub stack. Great to have you all here from all over the world, people from Norway and Ireland and New Zealand and across the United States. Lovely to see you all here. Taz says he's a big fan of Zeteo. Appreciate you, Taz. Paul, let me ask you this. On the subject of government, you wrote a lot of New York Times columns. Even when I lived in the UK, I read your columns religiously. You made the case for government in a humane and a strategic way. You know, the Republicans have jumped on this big government boogeyman for a long time. It was Ronald Reagan to go back to Reagan. You know, the worst words you can hear is I'm from the government and here to help you. It was Bill Clinton who said the era of big government is over. Today, when we talk about Doge and what they're doing to government. They are hiding it in that classically Republican picture of we're trying to make government smaller, more efficient. And when you poll the American public, they like the idea of smaller government in abstract. But when you asked about specific programs, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, they love them. How do liberals, progressives, in terms of messaging, you write for a living, how do they bridge that gap? How do they make that case for government without sounding like big government communists? Well, you made the case for programs. I don't know anybody who is for big government. I know a lot of people who are for small government. They think that just smaller is better. I don't know anybody who thinks that bigger per se is better, but all of the things that we do are popular, are important. In some ways, Reagan set the stage for the disasters that are on Because one of the things that's happened is Doge, Donald Musk's thing. By the way, I think the scariest words now in the English language is, I'm from SpaceX and I'm here to help. But the... They're operating on the premise that the federal bureaucracy is bloated and full of unnecessary people, and we can just get rid of lots of people, and no one will notice the difference. And the reality is that we've been starving just the basic operations of government, Reagan. The federal government has been consistently understaffed, underfunded, in the basic stuff. Most of the money is going for Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, but the... the sort of operational stuff from air traffic control to fighting forest fires to securing our nuclear weapons, all of that has been the subject of decades of penny-pinching. So you go in and you think that these government offices are full of people sitting around doing nothing and state-of-the-art equipment, and what you actually have is harried, overworked, dedicated civil servants with antiquated machinery and software that nobody under the age of 60 knows how to program in. The whole thing being held together with paperclips and rubber bands. And then you have these kids coming in and saying, oh, let's just fire a bunch of people. And there's a real risk that, you know, that serious stuff is going to break. I mean, that Social Security... I'm hearing conflicting stories, but there's certainly a possibility that some people may not get their Social Security checks because there's been enough degradation already of that agency. And then you say, oh, I'm going to go to my old Social Security office and fix that. But the office has been closed because they've been closing a bunch of offices. So I'll call them on the phone, but they fired all these people. And so stuff is going to break quite fast. And these people just don't know that they really have... completely delusional notion of this bloated fat government. Basically, as soon as they started trying to cut away the fat, it turned out they were cutting deep into muscle. Yes, because as you say, there is not that much fat. There hasn't been a massive growth in government or government sector payrolls and employment in recent years. Someone points out in the chat, breaking things is the goal. Someone else reminds us, another of the commenters, there's now six and a half thousand of you watching. Somebody else, I didn't catch the name. reminded me of the famous Tea Party placard, Paul, keep your government hands off my Medicare, which was a classic. And you're right that no one is in favour of big government, but I do think Democrats, the Labour Party in the UK, centre-left parties, need to find a language that makes the case for government as a force for good in people's communities, in people's healthcare, for example, is a classic example in this country where the private sector clearly can't do it and has failed. On Musk and Doge, How much damage... You talk about cutting into muscle. How much damage can Doge do before, A, it's too late, and B, the public really, really wake up, beyond just angry town halls? Well, it may already be too late to avoid a lot of damage. So it's not just... I mean, even if they were to recall all of the people who've been laid off, and they're having trouble. They laid off some of these crucial people, and immediately... froze them out of their government email accounts. So when they said, okay, oops, that was a mistake. Let's contact them and get them back. They don't know how to reach them. It's that stupid. And just think about the morale issue. The U.S. government pays. If you're kind of a blue-collar worker in the U.S. government, you are reasonably well-paid because it's union. But college-educated, highly skilled people earn far less in the U.S. government than they would in the private sector. They do those jobs because they think they're important. They do those jobs. A lot of it is really a sense of civic duty and patriotism. Now you've had this guy coming in and saying, you're all worthless. Give me five bullet points that explain what you did last week. And if you can't give a convincing explanation, you're fired. What do you think that does to morale? What do you think that does to the ability to get them to do the work? And that's not something you can turn around, really. It's not something you can turn around as long as Elon Musk is anywhere close to government, and probably as long as Donald Trump is anywhere close to it. So we're going to experience degraded capacities. And I don't know what's going to break first, whether it's going to be the worst forest fires ever, whether it's going to be that a depleted weather service is failing to provide warnings of hurricanes, whether it's going to be planes crashing. But this is... There's a lot to be said for markets, a lot to be said for the dynamism of the profit motive, but it has to operate within a framework where sort of the basics are provided, and government is what does that. And we're rapidly undermining it. I mean, the next time we get a sane administration, it's going to probably take them years to put the pieces back together again. My worry is that the Democrats are so cautious, cowardly, unable to exercise mandates when they get them, is that the Republicans have rightly calculated that they've just moved the Overton window when it comes to the federal government. And there's not going to be another LBJ or FDR coming down the track or even a Joe Biden. And therefore, when the next Democrats get in, if they get back in, they will just work from the new GOP baseline. They won't reconstruct USAID in the way it was before. They won't bring back the Department of Education or the Department of Veterans Affairs. I think that is the Republican calculation. And seeing the Democrats as I've seen the Democrats for many years, I don't blame them for thinking that. I think it would be very hard for a Democratic president to come back in and not just rebuild but bring everything back to what it was. And the status quo, as you pointed out, was already penny-pinching, right? We had Build Back Better, which was supposed to expand the government in good ways, give seniors free dental. And we didn't get Build Back Better. We got the Inflation Reduction Act. Thank you, Mancinema. And that's my worry. Here, let me ask you an obvious question. I'm sure many people in the chat have, and I'm sure you've been asked many times, but I'll ask it too. If you were advising the Democrats, what would you tell them to be doing right now? I would say, you know, confront, confront. Look, We still have rules that make it – Republicans have got a razor-thin majority in the House and enough crazy people who will – who really think that all government is bad and won't vote to approve – to keep the government going. So the Democrats have, we cannot, we cannot actually pass a continuing, Republicans can't pass a continuing resolution without Democratic votes. Um, I'm not quite sure what's happening with the debt ceiling, but I probably can, um, Can't raise that without Democratic votes. And the Democrats have to stop saying, OK, we're going to be responsible and not allow this catastrophe. You guys, you own it. You broke it. You don't get any votes from us. You at least restore the Constitution, unless you restore rule of law. I mean, and I think a lot of Democrats think, oh, the public will blame us. I think that's vastly. I mean, the voters who are paying attention will understand what they're doing if they take a tough line. And voters who don't are, you know, people who don't follow the news, they don't understand the division of powers. They put, you know, they think the president controls the price of eggs. And so the idea that Democrats should be afraid because they'll be blamed. Yeah, I think centrist opinion writers will lecture the Democrats. And I have to say, if there's one thing, I would have said this even before, but I would definitely say now is one thing Democrats should do is stop listening to New York Times columnists. Well said. Well said. Although there's a couple they can list too. I like Jamel Bowie. But you're right overall in terms of centrist opinion writers and the kind of, yes, the lazy consensus. You saw that. I'm sure you saw that Politico piece, Paul, about Democratic consultants having a retreat in Virginia and saying, we need to go to gun shows and stop taking small dollar donations. Those are the people who have cost Democrats multiple elections and they should never be allowed near a Democratic politician ever again. We have over 7,000 people watching live. We love independent journalism. I am going to talk to you about journalism since you made the pivot there. Before I do, I've just got to say the irony of Elon Musk leading the charge against the size of federal government when, according to The Post recently, what, $30 billion he got in government contracts. Tesla, SpaceX would not exist today without government subsidy. Just the irony, the hypocrisy, the shamelessness. I run out of words for it. A lot of people in the comments are agreeing with you, Paul. Confront, confront, confront. They're saying Al Green, a hero of the week, Democratic congressman from Texas, who just got censured, by the way, folks, and 10 Democrats voted to censure him. Kill me now. Paul, before we wrap up, we want to finish at 5.40. I do want to ask, you mentioned New York Times columnists. You left the New York Times after many years there. You wrote about it. You've done interviews about it. You said some of the editing... and intrusions into your columns made your life hell, robbed them of color and life. I got to ask a question as I read you saying this and others have said similar things. Why? What is it that drives that centrist, cautious angle at the New York Times? Is it ideology? Is it a fear of competitors? Is it just a kind of lazy way of always having done things? You know, we make jokes about the New York Times headlines, sanitizing Trump or sending reporters to diners. And I don't just want to make this about the Times, the Post, the Times, all of them. What is it about them that allows them to do this? Well, I think the world used to be very different. There used to be an establishment and you had to sort of, you know, you established an establishment consensus and the major media organizations were part of that. And they felt the need to be cautious and be euphemistic because that would have gotten you kind of excluded from the club. And that even made some sense once upon a time. But that was decades ago. And I don't think they've caught up. I mean, I just think that, look, there was once a competition to find the world's most boring headlines. Which turned out to have been a column in the New York Times that was titled Worthwhile Canadian Initiative. But there was a time when you could actually publish stuff like that. And people listened because this was the New York Times, which was the voice of the establishment. What happens now is that I think the biggest thing is simply that a lot of people at these major media organizations still have instincts that come from a time when being respectable. Whereas the fact of the matter, you know, when we've got Elon Musk waving around a chainsaw, when we've got Steve Bannon as a serious policy influence, this is not how it works. And you have to take up... What was happening to me? I never got forced to put out something under my name that said something I didn't believe, but everything got flattened. All of the color leached out. And I knew that that's... people just skip right past it. And so here we are. And I don't know what works politically, but I do know that this is not working. We're not going to go back to the days when Everett Dirksen and LBJ would shake hands on a deal and do sensible stuff. It's going to be a very contentious world, and it's going to be scary, but... If you try to make, you know, I would say particularly I think the major media organizations do, I think, believe still that if only they're sufficiently even-handed that they can actually get big audiences out there in MAGA land, which is crazy. So a couple of things in response to that. One is, you mentioned decorum. Jim Himes, one of the Democrats who voted to censure Al Green, in his statement, he said, you know, we still have to care about decorum and civility. I'm like, what world are you living in? As Shannon Watts, the gun control activist, tweeted, democracy dies in decorum. Like, we're not in that age. Trump gave a speech in which he called the Democrats radical left lunatics. He called Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas. He called Biden the worst president in history. what decorum are we talking about here? And so I'm fascinated that people are still kind of really stuck in, I don't know what age or era they are stuck in. They're not in 2025 right now. The other point I wanted to make to you was about the media and about how worried are you when you see ABC settling the $15 million for Stepanophilus, even though they would have won in court, there's talk of CBS settling this ridiculous $2 billion lawsuit that Trump brought over their editing of a Kamala Harris interview. Jeff Bezos, obviously, we've talked about Zuckerberg paid out also a settlement. How worried are you about major media organizations in this country just rolling over for Trump? Very much. I mean, I have tomorrow on South Texas, you'll see my me finish my conversation with Kim Shapley, who was... was on this from long before because she was covering Hungary and the death of democracy there. And one of the very first things that Orbán did in Hungary was to intimidate and control the media. And so this is one of the key elements of the playbook for democracy turning into autocracy. And no, it worries me a great deal. Now, what's happening right now is that still, even at each of these organizations, the reporting is still pretty good. Although the key fact tends to be in paragraph 17, but still, I do worry that that will go too. And no, that's one of the biggest concerns I have. And by the way, you and I can do, we can do opinion, we can do some stuff, but there's still a lot of reporting that needs to be done by people on the ground receiving a regular salary. And We still need the New York Times. We still need the Washington Post. And so this does scare me a lot. 100%. When I left MSNBC and set up Zeteo, one thing I didn't do is, you know, I'm critical of mainstream media coverage, corporate media coverage. I'm on the left. But I'm not, you know, Tucker Carlson, when he launched his media network, his mantra was, corporate media is dead. Come join us. You know, the whole burn it to the ground. My view is they do some stuff still well, including, as you say, reporting, investigative reporting, Not everyone on Substack or on independent media can do what The Times or Post do. It's sad to me to see The Post losing a lot of really good reporters who are jumping ship because they've seen what Bezos is doing to the paper. And they're hemorrhaging talent every day. That is not good for democracy, clearly, if you don't have strong investigative journalism. One point you mentioned earlier that I got to jump on. You said... A lot of these legacy media organizations think that if you can be balanced and have balanced coverage, you can bring everyone along, which is, A, outdated. One problem I always have with The Times, I don't know what your view of this is, and with liberal media in general, is their definition of balance is to give conservatives jobs, right? Whether you're MSNBC or CNN hiring ex-Republicans, never Trump Republicans, whatever it is, whether you're at The Times making way for various conservative columnists whose names you know, right? But I didn't see Bernie Sanders supporters on the pages of The Washington Post or New York Times op-ed. There's never a kind of bow of the head to, what about the left of the country? I don't see it. Well, that's true. I mean, look, the Times roster, I actually like. I'm sad that some of the people who were actually let go. But sure, try to imagine someone as far to the left as Mark Thiessen. appearing on the pages of any major U.S. newspaper. It just wouldn't happen. And so, yeah, it's always, we need to accommodate the extreme right. You know, for a while there, they were kind of, the never-Trumper right was mostly what, certainly what the Times was hiring. But, yeah, it's already, in fact, wildly unbalanced. Overton-Window, basically, it would be a... pretty close to the AFD in Germany and still be part of the media. You can't be, basically, I think maybe even to the left of AOC, maybe even AOC herself is still considered extremely, from a European standpoint, a normal social Democrat. I was the most left-wing person at MSNBC before I left. Now it's probably Chris Hayes. Last question to you. I ask this to a lot of people these days, and I ask myself this question. In these dark times where things look pretty bad and probably will get worse before they get better, if they get better, how do you keep hope alive, Paul? Oh, you partly trust that lots of stuff, you know, history takes turns. And if you had... been looking at the state of America in 1932, what would you have imagined was the future? You would have taken it very seriously, the possibility that we were going to go down this, you know, that fascism would come to America. If you were, look, Poland, one of the things I talk, now there's, it's still, it's not secure, but Poland appeared to be heading right down the Hungary path. And at least for the moment, they've stepped back from the brink. They have decent people wanting, you know, it's kind of weird to be talking to Americans and saying, take hope from Poland. But it's true. I think that their anthem is Poland is not yet lost. Well, Poland is not yet lost. And that does show you. I mean, there are victories. And I've actually been very heartened by this. the way that Europeans are responding to the Trump abandonment of Ukraine, it almost looks as if the remaining major democracies are starting to step up and maybe we can take inspiration from them. Well said. I mean, I look at Bangladesh and the developing world, where they just toppled a 15-year military-backed government, student-led, in a matter of weeks. Very good points there. By the way, we do have someone in the chat who just said they are in Kyiv. So thank you, Ukrainians, who have joined us today. From all over the world, 8,000 of you right now are watching live. And I've got to say to 8,000 of you, If all 8,000 of you are not subscribers to Zeteo and to Paul Krugman, then shame on you, 8,000 people tuning in to watch live. I'm kidding. We do need your support. A free press is not free, as I often say. So please do support what we're doing. Paul, it's always a pleasure. I hope we can do this again soon. Okay. Great to talk to you. Take care. Thanks, everyone. Bye-bye.

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