Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argues that a single legal concept — the "presumption of regularity" — captures the systemic damage President Donald Trump's "bad faith" governance is inflicting on the United States, as the administration's pattern of falsehoods produces cascading policy failures and internal dysfunction.

In a recent Substack post, Krugman observes that Trump has been publicly and privately lashing out at his own appointees. "Lately Donald Trump has been raging against several of his own appointees," he writes. Trump has publicly raged at D.C. Attorney Jeanine Pirro for acknowledging that the Reflecting Pool failure stemmed from shoddy work by his chosen contractors, and for dropping charges against David Hearn and individuals described as saboteurs. He has raged at RFK Jr. for failing to more forcefully advance the unsubstantiated link between vaccines and autism. And according to the Washington Post, Trump has privately raged at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for misleading him about the state of U.S. munitions, which have been critically depleted by his war on Iran.

While these incidents may appear to be a string of unrelated "presidential tantrums," Krugman contends they share a common root: "what happens when a government operates entirely in bad faith, never telling the truth about what it is doing or why. Inevitably, officials in such a government don't merely lie to the public: they lie to each other too. As a result, they can't govern effectively, even in the pursuit of evil."

At the center of Krugman's analysis is the legal doctrine known as the "presumption of regularity." "Legal scholars have a term of art, the 'presumption of regularity,' which means that one assumes that the government is generally honest when undertaking legal proceedings," he explains. Historically, when the Justice Department brought charges, the presumption held that there was a legitimate basis. "In other words," Krugman writes, "that they aren't simply a vindictive prosecution of one of Trump's perceived enemies. When DOJ succeeds in securing an indictment from a grand jury, the historical presumption has been that government lawyers secured that indictment honestly, presenting the grand jury with complete and accurate information."

Under "Trump II," Krugman argues, this presumption is no longer tenable — and courts have begun to agree. Judges in a number of recent cases have demanded information about what the government presented to grand juries or dismissed charges outright due to clear evidence of vindictive prosecution. "At this point the Trump administration's word is worth nothing, or less than nothing," he writes, echoing concerns detailed in The Atlantic's reporting on DOJ-judiciary tensions.

Krugman extends the same framework across a range of policy areas. After Trump's initial wave of tariffs was ruled illegal, he advanced a new justification "that literally nobody believes" — that targeted countries are not doing enough to combat slave labor. He has cut SNAP benefits under the stated rationale of preventing fraud, which Krugman says is widely understood as opposition to government food assistance. His administration has denied FEMA aid to blue states, offering various explanations, only for it to later emerge that Trump was punishing states that did not vote for him. The throughline matters because each reversal or explanation change forces agencies, courts, and the public to treat official statements as potentially unreliable rather than routine. "It's all being done in sneeringly bad faith," Krugman states.

This cycle of deception has produced mounting disasters, Krugman says. Trump's war on Iran has proven costly on multiple fronts — economic, military, diplomatic, and strategic. "One obvious question," Krugman writes, "is why Trump didn't move much sooner to conserve interceptor missiles etc., either by calling off the whole war or at least by calling off actions that used up already depleted stockpiles of weapons like ATACMs."

Krugman attributes much of the failure to "deranged Trump syndrome — his pathological inability to admit failure, which has led him to double down even as he runs out of ammunition." But he suggests a contributing factor was that Trump may not have known the severity of the situation because Hegseth allegedly told him the munitions problem had been "fixed." Hegseth, in turn, has blamed his deputy. Krugman proposes that the deputy may also have lied, as the U.S. military has undergone what he calls a "Putinization" in which "nobody wants to tell Hegseth things he doesn't want to hear."

"It's liars all the way down," Krugman declares. "This is an administration in which to serve is to abase yourself constantly, rendering fealty to Dear Leader, lying to your colleagues and lying to the American people. And if this administration doesn't like the official government reports that are detailing the many disasters it has caused, it just quashes them."

Krugman closes with a stark warning: "Americans should be prepared for more chaos and mendacity, because we are governed by people who, just like Trump, are unwilling to acknowledge the truth. Unfortunately, things can get worse — and they probably will."