Paul Krugman: Donald Trump's ignorance isn't unique — he's just clumsy at communicating the GOP message

This "nonsense is widely popular in his party," Krugman argued, Trump's simply terrible at lip-servicing it

Published May 9, 2016 12:23PM (EDT)

 Paul Krugman at The Commonwealth Club (<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/commonwealthclub/7257359946" target="_blank">Commonwealth Club</a>/Creative Commons License)
Paul Krugman at The Commonwealth Club (Commonwealth Club/Creative Commons License)

In his Monday New York Times column, economist Paul Krugman argued that Trump's bumbling on the issues isn't him being a historically terrible candidate, but merely him "doing a clumsy job of channeling [the] nonsense widely popular in his party."

He noted that the reaction to Trump being the presumptive nominee stirred "amazed horror and horrified amazement" among those in the economics community, given that he's basing his fiscal policies on his own life, on in which "in which he has done very well by running up debts, then walking away from them."

However, Krugman added,

it’s also true that much of the Republican Party shares his insouciance about default. Remember, the party’s congressional wing deliberately set about extracting concessions from President Obama, using the threat of gratuitous default via a refusal to raise the debt ceiling. And quite a few Republican lawmakers defended that strategy of extortion by arguing that default wouldn’t be that bad, that even with its access to funds cut off the U.S. government could “prioritize” payments, and that the financial disruption would be no big deal...

Read the rest at the New York Times...


By Scott Eric Kaufman

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Donald Trump Economics Elections 2016 Paul Krugman Paul Ryan