I feuded with Paul Krugman years ago; I exposed lies in his New York Times columns 20 or so times, and he didn’t like it. But I moved on, and haven’t read anything he has written in a long time.
Yesterday, Krugman went on an anti-Trump rant on his Substack page:
In one article published earlier Sunday, the economist described most of the [Trump] tariffs as “clearly illegal.”
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He also ripped Trump for reversing “90 years of tariff reductions.”“Not to be coy about it, what I’ll argue in today’s post is that Trump’s trade war should be seen as part of a package of policies that amounts to class warfare — class warfare against middle and lower-income Americans in favor of the affluent, especially the top 10% of the income distribution,” he wrote.
Trump took offense, responding on Truth Social:
Trump is basically correct, I think. Krugman has been predicting economic doom as a result of Trump’s policies for nearly a decade, and has been consistently wrong–as, to be fair, he has been on most things.
Most notoriously, during the 2016 election campaign Krugman predicted a “global recession with no end in sight” if Trump won. Following Trump’s victory, Krugman wrote, “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.” But the economy boomed during Trump’s first term, until the covid shutdowns struck, and financial markets achieved record highs, as they have again during his second term. That recollection is no doubt what prompted Trump’s Truth.
But is Krugman really a deranged bum? Remember that Trump called him a “Trump Deranged BUM.” And Krugman has, indeed, suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome for a long time. So I assess Trump’s characterization as true.
The other thing I want to emphasize is the tiredness of Krugman’s attack on Trump: Trump represents the rich, making war on the working class and the middle class. While at the same time, clobbering his Democratic opponent with working class and middle class voters. Krugman and other Democrats think that those voters are too stupid to understand their own interests. But the rest of the world has moved on. The GOP is now the party of the working class, primarily for economic reasons that Krugman pretends not to understand.
This is one of the striking political phenomena of our time. Democrats have been unable to adjust to the new reality; they don’t have a vocabulary for it. Their best demographic is people with incomes over $200,000, but they talk like they are the party of Joe Hill. We touched on this in my Sky News appearance last night, and it is a theme to which we will often recur in the days to come.
