# In Front of Trump's Nose

An episode of [Paul Krugman Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1877144831), 15 Mar 2026, 5:07.

Audio: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/191032156/a633596a398b021dd9d44ec91b97c0c1.mp3

People in power can keep insisting that things are going great, never mind reality — until they can’t. Get full access to Paul Krugman at paulkrugman.substack.com/subscribe

## Transcript

[0:00] SPEAKER_00: George Orwell saw all of this coming.
[0:04] SPEAKER_00: Hi, Paul Krugman with an update at about noon on Sunday.
[0:12] SPEAKER_00: Like everyone paying any attention, I'm very focused on the war.
[0:19] SPEAKER_00: which is going badly.
[0:21] It's enough that I'm a little concerned about how it's going to
[0:25] disrupt daily life,
[0:27] SPEAKER_00: even for those of us who are,
[0:29] SPEAKER_00: by most measures,
[0:30] SPEAKER_00: extremely insulated from all of that.
[0:33] SPEAKER_00: This is looking really, really bad.
[0:36] SPEAKER_00: How did this happen?
[0:39] SPEAKER_00: Now, we talk a lot about
[0:42] the specifics of trump and we talk about the motivations of
[0:47] people involved but
[0:49] what is really striking gets all of us is how utterly utterly
[0:54] unprepared the
[0:56] administration was for the kind of obviously at least possible
[1:01] consequences of
[1:02] SPEAKER_00: going to war in the persian gulf how could they have been so blind
[1:10] SPEAKER_00: Well,
[1:12] if you look at what the rhetoric that Donald Trump uses and
[1:19] continues to use even
[1:20] SPEAKER_00: in the face of all of this,
[1:22] one thing that always strikes you is how he continues to insist
[1:27] that everything is
[1:28] SPEAKER_00: going great and everything is going according to plan.
[1:32] SPEAKER_00: So just on Thursday, he said, once again, I think he's used the words
[1:38] SPEAKER_00: exactly the same words many occasions,
[1:40] SPEAKER_00: but he said in a speech,
[1:42] SPEAKER_00: inflation is plummeting,
[1:44] SPEAKER_00: incomes are rising,
[1:45] SPEAKER_00: the economy is roaring back,
[1:47] SPEAKER_00: and America is respected again.
[1:50] SPEAKER_00: Now, as we all point out, none of that is true.
[1:57] SPEAKER_00: Inflation is not plummeting.
[1:59] SPEAKER_00: In fact,
[1:59] SPEAKER_00: the latest numbers show it ticking up,
[2:02] SPEAKER_00: which was not what people expected before Trump took office.
[2:09] SPEAKER_00: The economy is definitely not roaring back.
[2:13] SPEAKER_00: Now,
[2:14] the last growth numbers were probably artificially weak because
[2:18] of the effects of
[2:19] SPEAKER_00: the shutdown,
[2:20] SPEAKER_00: but it's not a roaring economy.
[2:22] Job growth has been virtually zero for the past year,
[2:26] so this is not a great economy.
[2:29] And this persistent delusion that America is not respected
[2:33] because Trump is there,
[2:35] which
[2:37] I'm probably going to write about that so I don't want to spend
[2:40] too much time on
[2:41] SPEAKER_00: it,
[2:41] SPEAKER_00: but it's utterly,
[2:42] SPEAKER_00: utterly not true.
[2:43] Of all the things he just said,
[2:44] that's probably the most at odds with reality.
[2:48] SPEAKER_00: We have probably never been as
[2:51] SPEAKER_00: despised, held in contempt as we are right now.
[2:56] But what strikes me about all of this is that Trump has been
[3:01] able to keep peddling
[3:06] SPEAKER_00: this fantasy about how well things are going on his watch.
[3:10] And although polls say that the public isn't buying it,
[3:13] the consequences for
[3:15] this kind of delusional thinking have been,
[3:19] for him so far,
[3:20] pretty minimal.
[3:20] SPEAKER_00: It's kind of,
[3:22] SPEAKER_00: you can keep on doing,
[3:24] SPEAKER_00: keep on claiming that things are going great,
[3:26] and certainly nobody immediately around him is going to tell
[3:29] him that it ain't so.
[3:31] SPEAKER_00: And so I found myself thinking about an essay of George Orwell's.
[3:38] SPEAKER_00: Now, I've read a lot of Orwell over the years, and there's the,
[3:44] SPEAKER_00: There are many great oral writings.
[3:46] SPEAKER_00: It's not just 1984 and Animal Farm.
[3:49] But he had an essay just written shortly after World War II
[3:53] ended called In Front
[3:54] SPEAKER_00: of Your Nose about people's capacity to delude themselves.
[4:00] SPEAKER_00: And there was a line in there.
[4:04] SPEAKER_00: in which he talked about this,
[4:06] SPEAKER_00: how even when things are very much not what you said was going to happen,
[4:10] SPEAKER_00: you can keep on telling yourself,
[4:12] SPEAKER_00: particularly,
[4:13] SPEAKER_00: of course,
[4:13] SPEAKER_00: if you're a person in power,
[4:14] SPEAKER_00: a person surrounded by sycophants,
[4:17] SPEAKER_00: which we're seeing at a drastic level for Trump,
[4:22] SPEAKER_00: that you can just keep on telling yourself.
[4:26] SPEAKER_00: about how things are going,
[4:28] maybe even persuade some people to believe them until at some
[4:32] point you can't.
[4:33] SPEAKER_00: And here is the line from Orwell.
[4:36] He said,
[4:36] the point is that we are all capable of believing things which
[4:40] we know to be untrue.
[4:42] SPEAKER_00: And then when we are finally proved wrong,
[4:45] SPEAKER_00: impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.
[4:49] Intellectually,
[4:50] it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time.
[4:54] The only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief
[4:59] bumps up against solid
[5:00] SPEAKER_00: reality,
[5:01] SPEAKER_00: usually on a battlefield.
[5:04] SPEAKER_00: I think I'm just going to leave it there.

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