President Donald Trump is on the brink of burnout from his "descent into rage-madness," Nobel Prize-winning economist turned political commentator Paul Krugman wrote for his Substack on Wednesday — and is at risk of being rendered irrelevant to the very movement he created.
The president, wrote Krugman, cannot ever admit he led America into disaster with the Iran war, "but the debacle has clearly broken him. So we are now saddled with a president who has given up governing, but will maintain his grip on power wherever he can. And his power will be exclusively focused on rage and revenge."
The clearest example of this, wrote Krugman, is his nomination of extreme partisan loyalist Bill Pulte as Director of National Intelligence, despite having no qualifications other than a history of trying to dig up dirt on Trump's political enemies.
"While his former role in his family’s business may have led to his appointment as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, his real job has been weaponizing the agency as a tool against Trump’s perceived enemies — weaponization that is being investigated by the Government Accountability Office as a potential misuse of authority," wrote Krugman. In short, Pulte is little more than "a bumbling hatchet man" whose repeated "attempted lynchings" have gone nowhere.
The upshot of hiring someone like this for a critical national security role in the middle of a backfiring war, wrote Krugman, is that the president "appears to have given up on governing — even governing aimed at consolidating his own power and legacy," and has been reduced to nothing more than a "festering ball of anger and hate."
All of this comes at a moment when Republican lawmakers have signaled discomfort with Pulte's appointment and Democrats are threatening to tank the re-authorization of executive spy powers in response.
