# Learning from a Mentally Ill President

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/learning-from-a-mentally-ill-president
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/learning-from-a-mentally-ill-president.md
Podcast: [Paul Krugman Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924)
Published: 2026-05-31T18:54:00+00:00
Episode link: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/learning-from-a-mentally-ill-president
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/199987619/f6323e620da5273bc5107fdee6078313.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/episodes/learning-from-a-mentally-ill-president
Duration seconds: 372

## Resource

Transcript The President of the United States is mentally ill, but everybody knows that. So while we should continue to focus on this degeneration taking place in front of our eyes, we should also, beyond that, ask what we can do about the powers, the interests, the system that put this horrifying person in a position of power. Hi I’m Paul Krugman. First video update in a while. It’s May 31st. If you have been following some of the news you may know that Trump’s mental deterioration, which has been obvious for quite a while, got even more extreme in the past few days. Tellingly, the things that are really driving him into more obvious dysfunction are things that are blows to his ego. I was especially struck — I was rattled actually — by his reaction to the wave of artists canceling out on the self-glorifying concert series he’s holding on the mall. So, if you haven’t seen it, here’s what he said on Truth Social: That artists are “getting the yips” and I am thinking about bringing the number one attraction anywhere in the world the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the greatest president in history, Donald J. Trump. Oh my god. I would not want to trust this guy alone in a room, let alone running the world’s formerly greatest power, although he’s doing a lot to run that into the ground. Okay, but we knew that, right? It’s not really a surprise to find out that he has lost his mind, what was left of it. And yet, he is in power. People who did a lot to put him in power did so, knowing this — the billionaires who contributed vast sums of money to his campaign, the Supreme Court which gave him immunity back in 2024 — they all knew who th…

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## Transcript

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