'Brutally scammed' Trump voters will be the losers under his policies: Nobel Prize winner

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman believes that President-elect Donald Trump's economic policies are likely to leave many of the people who voted for him significantly worse off financially than they are right now.

In an interview with The New Republic's Greg Sargent, Krugman wrote that Trump's twin policies of tariffs and mass deportations were going to hit many of his own voters while at the same time making the country as a whole poorer.

"A lot of people are going to get brutally scammed," Krugman said. "Those are his most fervent supporters. It is, in fact, probably the local business elites are the most fervent MAGA types out there, more so even than the working class, but that doesn’t mean that Trump cares about their interests. Small business people are the people that he’s all through his life hired as contractors and then not pay, right? Scamming people like that is what his whole life has been around."

The former New York Times columnist said that this sort of "scam" would be particularly obvious when it comes to Trump's vows to lower grocery prices.

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"After having spent the entire campaign saying I’m going to bring the price of groceries back down to what it was, then basically just a couple of weeks after the election, he said, Oh, getting prices down, that would be very hard," he wrote. "But what I find interesting is judging with the surveys, they haven’t gotten the memo. He said that not on Fox, I think, but he said it, but they still think he’s going to do what he promised during the campaign. So the scam is there is no plan."

Krugman also said that Trump was likely to face political headwinds in his economic policies because, despite his campaign rhetoric, he's inheriting a strong economy from President Joe Biden with low unemployment and inflation that has fallen below three percent.

However, he thinks that Trump could do swift and severe damage to the economy with his economic policies.

"The rules that surround international trade, the rules that Trump is ripping up, they were created by America because we thought that that kind of world was a better place for us to thrive," he wrote.

"We’ve been pulling ahead on technology, but an administration that’s extremely hostile to universities and education is going to undermine that source of advantage as well. Basically all the things that make America exceptional — and we are really exceptional— all of those things are just happen to be the things that Trump wants ... Trump wants to turn the clock back to 1896, and that’s not good for the U.S. economy."