FRANK: Paul Krugman made a striking statement!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2026

When he did, a cable star noticed: Should Paul Krugman have said what he recently said?  

We can't necessarily tell you! But for reasons which may be instantly obvious, we were intrigued by the first thing he said in the six-minute video he posted on his Substack site.  

That said, we doubt the accuracy of one part of what the Nobel laureate said.  You can watch the full video on YouTube simply by clicking here. 

Here's the way Krugman starts:   

KRUGMAN (5/31/26): 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 before our eyes, we should also, beyond that, ask what we should do about the powers, the interests, the system that put this horrifying person in a position of power.  

That's the way Krugman started.  We focus on this video because of something he said just a bit later, at the five-minute mark.

That said, is it true? Is it true that the sitting president is mentally ill? Also, is it true that that "everybody knows that?"

As we've repeatedly said, we're inclined to assume that the initial statement is true—but we regard "mental illness" as a conceptually complex term whose parameters are barely understood within this underdeveloped, immature part of our nation's public discourse. 

As we've repeatedly said, we'd like to see (carefully selected) medical specialists asked to discuss that particular claim, but our major journalists have agreed that no such discussion will ever happen.

Beyond that, there's no guarantees that journalists would be able to find medical specialists who were up to the task of producing a clear discussion. There's no guarantee that our journalists would know what questions to ask or would know what tone to adopt in the process of asking their questions.

Meanwhile, how about this. Does everyone know that the president is mentally ill? 

In the most literal sense, the obvious answer is no. If we're talking about "everyone" of a certain professional class, we used to assume that our mainstream journalists believed in the likelihood of some such unfortunate state of affairs, but we have recently come to doubt even that.

Everyone knows he's "mentally ill?" It isn't clear what the claim about the president would even mean, let alone whether the claim is actually accurate. And no:   

Meanwhile, everyone doesn't even believe that the president is mentally ill. For millions of people out in the land, this thought has never occurred.   

That's the way the Krugman tape starts, but that isn't why we're discussing his video statement. We're discussing it because of what he later said—because of the later statement which formed the backbone of the opening segment on last night's Gutfeld! program.   

Greg Gutfeld littered his presentation with the usual insulting / Biden deathwatch / misogyny-adjacent jokes. (Does Sarah Jessica Parker look like a horse? She does on the Gutfeld! program. Greg Gutfeld persistently teaches boys and young men to behave this way toward women.) 

The program's host hides behind several beards, but he's a version of loathing unchained. That said, this is the later statement by Krugman on which Gutfeld's monologue focused at the start of last night's show:  

KRUGMAN: Obviously, we need to de-fang Trump as much as possible, and make sure that neither he, nor anybody that follows in his footsteps, has power after the next two elections. 

But beyond that, we really need to do a thorough purging of the United States. We need a de-MAGAfication, and that is— I am not going over the top by using a word that is very similar to the de-Nazification that we pursued successfully after World War II in Germany.  

And we need something—it's not just the MAGA ideology, it's the whole structure of hugely unequal power, hugely unequal wealth, that made this horrific moment possible.  

It's not going to be easy, but—and maybe, it's not going to be doable—but we have to try, because this is an absolute—this is a nightmare.  

As you can see by clicking here, Gutfeld's producers played videotape of the first half of that presentation. In his monologue, Gutfeld focused on the allusion to deNazification—an allusion which may have made the nightmare in question worse.  

Should Krugman have said what he said? We wouldn't have said anything like it ourselves—and during the Gutfeld! segment, amid the standard name-calling and the standard ugly jokes, Kat Timpf made an accurate presentation about statements of this general type:  

TIMPF (6/2/26): The way that Trump and Trump-backed candidates have won so many elections is specifically this stuff. This is the kind of stuff that motivates people, by saying that people who voted for him are Nazis. People say, "Well, I'm not a Nazi," and that drives them to further support this point of view.

GUTFELD: Right.

TIMPF: So not only—I would say the kindest way to say it is, it's ridiculous. But also, what is he suggesting? You could say he's implying some things that are a little worse than ridiculous.

But again, he's just getting in his own way. All language like this does is make Trump supporters support Trump more than they did before they heard him say that. 

GUTFELD: Yes, exactly 

AUDIENCE: [Cheers and applause]

TIMPF: See? There you go!

What might it have seemed that Krugman was suggesting or implying with his call for "a thorough purging of the United States?" However the statement was intended, it could have sounded various ways to various people. 

Did he mean to say that people who support Trump are Nazis? Not necessarily, but a person could easily think that it sounded a bit like that.

What would a thorough purge of the nation be like? During his six-minute video, Krugman made little attempt to explain, leaving us with no real idea.

But it's surely true that statements like this may tend to harden existing tribal support for the president in question. In the process, such presentations may lessen the chance that we'll ever be able to find a path "back out of all this now too much for us," the path the Frost poem once sought.

Has our nation fallen into a place "now too much for us"—a place from which we won't be able to extricate ourselves? That, of course, remains to be seen—but in the book he wrote in the last year of his like, Barney Frank talks about some of the ways the liberal world may be making recovery less likely.  

Frank's book will generate zero interest. Exactly nothing will change after it's published this fall.  But even as the ugly insults and the gonzo behavior continue to flow from vehicles like The Five, what was this celebrated liberal / progressive figure even talking about?  

At this point, the answer isn't entirely clear. Tomorrow, we'll try to say.   

Tomorrow: What he told Jake Tapper