Trump’s ‘MAGA fantasy’ crashes and burns
TOM BOGGIONI
In
a scathing column for the New York Times, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul
Krugman lectured rustbelt workers who voted for Donald Trump based on a vague
promise to “Make America great again” — and who are now finding out the erratic
president has no idea what he is doing.
In
a scathing column for the New York Times, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul
Krugman lectured rustbelt workers who voted for Donald Trump based on a vague
promise to “Make America great again” — and who are now finding out the erratic
president has no idea what he is doing.In a column titled, “When MAGA Fantasy Meets Rust Belt Reality,” Krugman was brutally blunt about some Trump voters right from the beginning.
“For
many supporters of Donald Trump, MAGA was basically a promise to return to the
good old days of raw racism and sexism. And Trump is delivering on that
promise,” he wrote before turning to embattled American workers who bought into
Trump’s promise of more and better manufacturing jobs.
“It
was a promise to restore the kind of economy we had 40 or 50 years ago — an
economy that still offered lots of manly jobs in manufacturing and mining,”
Krugman recalled.
“Unfortunately for those who trusted Mr. Art of the Deal, Trump never had any idea how to deliver on that promise. And even if he had a clue about policymaking, he couldn’t have changed the long-term trajectory of our economy, which is moving steadily away from making physical stuff and toward providing services.”
“Unfortunately for those who trusted Mr. Art of the Deal, Trump never had any idea how to deliver on that promise. And even if he had a clue about policymaking, he couldn’t have changed the long-term trajectory of our economy, which is moving steadily away from making physical stuff and toward providing services.”
“Why
was the vision of revived manufacturing nonsense? Talking about what Donald
Trump doesn’t know is, of course, a vast task, since his ignorance is both
broad and deep,” he wrote before weaving together how trade deficits and
ill-considered tariffs can have a devastating impact on manufacturing job
creation.
“Trump’s
angry reaction to auto plant closings is a reminder of his third big policy
misunderstanding: He believes that you can run the economy by yelling at
people,” he wrote. “Why is he wrong? It’s not just that businesses have learned
to discount his threats. More important, our economy is too big to make policy
by singling out individual companies and ranting.”
Krugman
conceded that Trump might actually have believed that he could rebuild U.S. manufacturing
in a global economy, but added that that belief can likely be attributed to the
Dunning-Kruger effect: which posits “inept people are often confident in their
abilities, because they’re too inept to know how badly they’re doing.”
He
then offered a warning for Republicans looking to hold onto Midwestern
manufacturing states in 2020 if Trump runs for re-election.
“But
the real question isn’t whether Trump will ever realize that he doesn’t know
how to MAGA. It’s whether and when his supporters will figure it out,” he
concluded.
You
can read the whole piece here.