Paul Krugman: Trump is appealing to aggrieved white men by lying to them

The collision "between demography and Obama derangement" will doom the GOP for generations to come

Published April 29, 2016 12:52PM (EDT)

Paul Krugman                              (Reuters/Brendan Mcdermid)
Paul Krugman (Reuters/Brendan Mcdermid)

Paul Krugman devoted his Friday New York Times column to discussing the sorry state of the 2016 presidential election, which he determined should give rise to a new cliché: "It ain’t over until Carly Fiorina sings."

He argued that the primaries are essentially over, "definitively on the Democratic side, [and] with a high probability on the Republican side," so that now is a fine time to evaluate how exactly it is America gave itself these two candidates. "Personalities surely played a role," he said, before praising Hillary Clinton for her "resilien[ce] under pressure, a character trait notably lacking on the other side."

Krugman further noted that

Both parties make promises to their bases. But while the Democratic establishment more or less tries to make good on those promises, the Republican establishment has essentially been playing bait-and-switch for decades. And voters finally rebelled against the con.

What Donald Trump has been doing is telling the base that it can order à la carte. He has, in effect, been telling aggrieved white men that they can feed their anger without being forced to swallow supply-side economics, too...

Read the rest at the New York Times...


By Scott Eric Kaufman

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Donald Trump Elections 2016 Paul Krugman Supply-side Economics Tax Cuts