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THE MAD KING’S MADNESS DEEPENS  
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Paul Krugman
January 9, 2026
Paul Krugman Substack
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_ For Trump, ICE’s violent lawlessness is a feature, not a bug.
Sending armed, masked, poorly trained, and out-of-control thugs into
blue cities is, in effect, a war on Americans, just as January 6th was
a war on American institutions. _

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Things are not going well politically for Donald Trump. The polls show
him underwater on every major issue
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these are fake, it’s clear that he knows better. He recently
lamented
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that the Republicans will do badly in the midterms and even floated
the idea that midterms should be canceled.

And as January 6th 2021 showed, Trump simply can’t stand political
rejection. He will do anything, use any tool or any person at his
disposal, to obliterate the sources of that rejection.

So as we head into the 2026 midterm season, the best way to understand
U.S. policy is that it’s in the pursuit of one crucial objective:
Propping up Trump’s fragile ego.

What was the motivation for the abduction of Nicolás Maduro? It
wasn’t about drugs, which were always an obvious pretense. By
Trump’s own account it wasn’t about democracy. Trump talks a lot
about oil, but Venezuela’s heavy, hard-to-process oil and its
decrepit oil infrastructure aren’t big prizes. The Financial Times
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that U.S. oil companies won’t invest in Venezuela unless they
receive firm guarantees. One investor told the paper, “No one wants
to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire
foreign policy of the country.”

The real purpose of the abduction, surely, was to give Trump an
opportunity to strut around and act tough. But this ego gratification,
like a sugar rush, won’t last long. Voters normally rally around the
president at the beginning of a war. The invasion of Iraq was
initially very popular
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But the action in Venezuela hasn’t had any visible
rally-around-the-flag effect. While Republicans, as always, support
Trump strongly, independents are opposed:

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And now the story of the moment is the atrocity in Minneapolis, where,
on Wednesday, an ICE agent killedRenee Nicole Good by shooting her in
the head.

Trump and his minions responded by flatly lying about what happened.
But their accounts have been refuted by video evidence
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which show an out-of-control ICE agent gunning down a woman who was
simply trying to get away from a frightening situation. Yes, MAGA
loyalists will fall into line, preferring to believe Trump rather than
their own lying eyes. But public revulsion over Good’s murder and
Trump’s mendacity are high and growing.

A president who actually cared about the welfare of those he governs
would have taken Good’s killing as an indication that his
deportation tactics have veered wildly and tragically off course. He
would have called for a halt of ICE actions and made sure there would
be an objective and timely federal investigation into this national
tragedy.

But for Trump, ICE’s violent lawlessness is a feature, not a bug.
Sending armed, masked, poorly trained, masked and out-of-control armed
thugs into blue cities is, in effect, a war on Americans, just as
January 6thwas a war on American institutions. In effect, Trump would
rather savage his own people than be held accountable for his actions.

So in Trump’s mind, Renee Nicole Good’s murder is at most
collateral damage, in service to his insatiable need to dominate and
feel powerful -- so insatiable that he is attempting to create an
alternate reality, claiming that that Good ran over an agent
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although there is irrefutable video evidence that she didn’t.

And when one set of lies doesn’t work, he switches tactics –
changing the topic, deflecting, and spouting even more lies. Thus,
just hours after Good’s death, Trump proclaimed that he was seeking
a huge increase in military spending:

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It’s a near certainty that Trump’s assertion that he arrived at an
immediate 50% increase in the military budget after “long and
difficult negotiations” is yet another lie. There’s been no
indication whatsoever that a massive increase in defense spending was
on anyone’s agenda before he suddenly posted about it on Truth
Social.

So what was that about? Given the timing, it’s clear that Trump’s
announcement was yet another exercise in self-aggrandizement, as well
as an attempt to grab the headlines away from Good’s killing. But
what’s also important to realize from Trump’s announcement is that
he is now clearly conflating the size of the US military with his ego.
Evidently the sugar rush of Maduro’s capture has left him wanting
more and more military validation, particularly as his poll numbers
tank.

So here’s a warning to the US military: if you continue to indulge
the sick fantasies of this man, he will drag this country into more
and deeper international morasses to feed his need for glory. Do what
Admiral Alvin Holsey, an honorable man, did – stand down and refuse
an illegal order. Here’s a warning to the Republicans: if you
continue to allow this man to perpetrate war against his own people
with impunity through the actions of ICE, you will be remembered as
cowards and hypocrites. Here’s a warning to all his other enablers:
if you do not do something to stop this madman, you will go down in
history as traitors to this country.

And here’s a warning to those directly perpetrating Trump-directed
atrocities: He will not be in power forever, and I expect and hope
that you will be held accountable, personally, and prosecuted to the
full extent of the law.

_I [Paul Krugman) am an economist by training, and still a college
professor; my major appointments, with some interim breaks, were at
MIT from 1980 to 2000, Princeton from 2000 to 2015, and since 2015 at
the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. I won 3rd prize
in the local Optimist’s club oratorical contest when in high school;
also a Nobel Prize in 2008 for my research on international trade and
economic geography._

_However, most people probably know me for my side gig as a New York
Times opinion writer from 2000 to 2024. I left the Times in December
2024, and have mostly been writing here since._

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