There’s a longstanding tradition in American politics of what Richard Hofstadter famously called the paranoid style – a way of thinking that sees conspiracies lurking everywhere. MAGA-world is particularly riddled with conspiracy thinking – from George Soros and Jewish space lasers, QAnon and the Great Replacement Theory, to Italian satellites hacking into voting machines to deliver the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
But these are far-fetched fantasies. The truth is far more banal and shocking.
There are people in positions of great power in the U.S. government engaged in evil conspiracies against everything that is good and decent. Their conspiracies are far more extensive and damaging than almost anyone imagined. But there are no evil masterminds behind this. Only amoral, stupid grifters like Howard Lutnick.
During Trump 47’s first year, Lutnick, the Commerce secretary, was an omnipresent spokesman for Donald Trump’s policies, a constant presence on TV, especially the Sunday talk shows.
He was not impressive in that role. Unlike Scott Bessent, he lacked any hint of gravitas. He doesn’t have Pete Hegseth’s hair. Moreover, Lutnick’s Trump boosterism has been consistently and embarrassingly incompetent.
The only waves he has made are a result of his exceptional combination of stupidity and offensive tone-deafness.
Thus he promised to revive U.S. manufacturing by bringing back “the work of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws.” Lutnick, a billionaire, dismissed concerns about chaos at the Social Security Administration by saying that his mother-in-law wouldn’t complain about a missed check. He gave a Europe-bashing speech to a private dinner at Davos so offensive that Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, walked out.
And in Congressional testimony today, Lutnick admitted that he visited Epstein Island, but said that he did so with his wife, nannies and children, and asserted that “We left with all of my children.”
It would be tempting to dismiss Lutnick as a buffoon. Yet despite his intelligence deficit, he sits at the intersection of not one but at least two ugly conspiracies.
Before joining Trump’s cabinet, Lutnick ran the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald — presenting a huge potential conflict of interest that he claims to have ended by turning the business over to … his sons. Cantor Fitzgerald, in turn, is intimately linked to Tether, a cryptocurrency that is highly profitable because it has become a favorite channel for money-laundering by international criminals.
Nor was money-laundering through cryptocurrency the only criminal conspiracy to which Lutnick was, at the very least, adjacent. Lutnick has in the past vehemently denied having any association with Jeffrey Epstein, insisting that he severed all contact with the pedophile ringleader in 2005. But even the highly limited, extremely redacted release of the Epstein files — everything we’ve seen reeks of a major coverup — shows that he was flat-out lying. Not only did he stay in close contact with Epstein, the two men appear to have gone into business together.
But, at this point, who could possibly be surprised? The more we learn, the more pedophilia and criminal use of cryptocurrency look related, even like different aspects of a single conspiracy. Epstein, it turns out, was a major early investor in the crypto industry. In the backrooms of MAGA-land, passing around under-age girls is a lot like passing around insider crypto deals.
In any previous administration, Lutnick’s naked conflicts of interest and his Epstein lies would have led to his immediate departure. But Trump 47 is using his position to massively enrich himself, and whatever the Justice department is hiding, what we already know about Trump’s personal history is damning — “Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Lutnick may be under wraps for a while, but don’t expect him to resign. Pushing him out would be a tacit admission that huge conflicts of interest, family business that enables crime and association with sexual predators are bad. Oh, and let’s not forget jaw-dropping stupidity. Not going to happen.
While MAGA-world’s fantasy villains like George Soros are brilliant and subtle, MAGA’s real villains are uncouth and dim-witted. Yet they carry out their sinister schemes in broad daylight. For all they need to flourish is utter shamelessness, along with the backing of a corrupt administration and a corrupt political party.
So it’s worth remembering Hannah Arendt’s observations about the architects of Hitler’s genocide, which led her to coin the phrase “the banality of evil”. As Arendt noted, the horrors of Nazism were not inflicted by brilliant geniuses, but through the normalization of thoughtless, amoral behavior that eventually turned into evil. Thus while Lutnick appears on the surface like a dim-witted backroom grifter, he is a warning of something far more sinister and malign lurking below.
Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former professor at MIT and Princeton who now teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. From 2000 to 2024, he wrote a column for The New York Times. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.
Reprinted with permission from Paul Krugman.
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