Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said on Thursday that major signs point to big business breaking with President Donald Trump over the chaos sown by his agenda, pointing to the actions of one of the country's most prominent financial figures as evidence that the "post-MAGA era" is here.

In a post on his Substack blog, Krugman — who won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of trade patterns — centered his argument on a September 28 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, which Dimon has led since 2005.

"On September 28th, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, one of the most prominent, most successful financial figures in the United States, published an article in the Wall Street Journal titled, 'The Hell with Trump, Let's Go Back to Globalism,'" Krugman wrote. "Okay, that's a lie. That wasn't what the article was titled, but it was, in effect, what it said. And it was a very interesting message to be coming at this moment in time. I think Dimon's op-ed can be viewed as a harbinger of a big shift in the business community's political positions and its attitudes that may be coming in the very near future — in effect a bet that Trump and MAGA in general are going to be in the rearview mirror, not too far from now."

Krugman described Dimon as an "extraordinarily successful financial leader" and a "very, very smart political operator" who has maintained good relations with administrations of both parties. After the 2024 election, Dimon neither joined what Krugman called the "cavalcade of business leaders rushing to prostrate themselves at Trump's feet," nor did he land on the president's list of enemies.

In the op-ed, Dimon calls for repairing the Western alliance and rebuilding ties with Europe to confront the rising power of China, proposing that the best way to achieve this is a free trade agreement between the United States and the European Union. No such pact exists today: the last major attempt, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, was launched in 2013 and stalled without a deal being concluded.

"That's quite something," Krugman wrote. "That's a very un-MAGA position to take."

He argued that the current administration does not believe in the virtues of free trade, is "extremely hostile to globalism," and rejects binding international agreements — "maybe they want agreements that bind other countries, but not them." Nor, he added, does it believe the United States shares many values with the democratic governments of Europe.

"The MAGA position, if anything, is that they like the anti-democratic forces in Europe," Krugman wrote. "J.D. Vance essentially campaigned for Viktor Orban in Hungary. Trump officials have been quite clear that they have sympathy for the AfD in Germany. So if we have common values with some Europeans, the Europeans with whom they have common values are neo-Nazis. And Trump's de facto support for Putin in his invasion of Ukraine has been alarmingly clear over the past two years."

Dimon's rejection of that stance, Krugman argued, suggests the banker believes Trump and the MAGA movement are on their way out.

The economist also cautioned that the direct economic gains from Dimon's free trade idea would be modest. Europe exports only roughly three percent of its production to the United States, and before Trump's second term the two economies were already operating on what was practically a free-trade basis.

But in Krugman's assessment, "Dimon believes that the process of negotiating towards a free trade agreement would in itself help to improve politics. That it would be a signal that the ultra-nationalist, anti-democratic, often anti-European policies of the Trump era are behind us. So he's looking forward to the day when we can start to try to repair some of the immense damage that has been done to our international relations during the Trump years."

With the writing on the wall for the Republican midterms, Dimon thinks the time for "rebuilding an alliance" is near.

"He thinks that this is possible," Krugman concluded, "and that it's worth positioning himself and his institution for a post-MAGA era."

How the November 2026 midterm campaign unfolds — and whether other corporate leaders follow Dimon in publicly positioning for the period after Trump — will be the near-term markers for Krugman's case that the op-ed is an early sign of a broader shift in the business community's politics.

This article originally appeared on Alternet.