I saw this Daily Beast piece an hour after reading Paul Krugman's latest Substack today, a master work in which he pretty much decimated Heritage Foundation hack economist Stephen Moore -- who, coincidentally, appeared with Trump last week to praise his "strong" economy.
What’s Moore’s problem? I don’t know and I don’t care. The interesting question is why someone so incompetent — apparently he can’t even copy numbers correctly — has consistently failed upward. Trump even tried to put him on the Federal Reserve Board in 2019, and might have succeeded if Moore hadn’t also turned out to be a grotesque misogynist and a deadbeat dad who had been held in contempt for failure to pay child support.
Looking at the trajectory of Moore’s career, it’s hard to escape the impression that the political movement with which he is aligned — MAGA at this point, but his rise predates Trump — sees his surreal incompetence not as a liability but as an asset. After all, you never know when a competent economist, especially one with a good professional reputation, might balk at being asked to say ridiculous things.
Well, there you go. Since we know by now how his tattered brain works, my guess is that Trump, who already tried to appoint him in his first term, was probably thinking of replacing the Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell with... Stephen Moore. Because he's on TV! He has a lot of hair! People recognize his name!
Here's what Trump had to say in one of his man-baby tantrums on Truth Social, via the Daily Beast:
“Paul Krugman of the New York Times has been predicting Doom and Gloom ever since my great election success in 2016. In other words, he has been wrong for YEARS, as ALL markets have been hitting new HIGHS, and are now higher than ever before,” Trump posted just before midnight ET on Sunday. “People stayed out of the ‘BEST MARKET IN HISTOY’ [sic] because of this Trump Deranged BUM. Sue them!”
In response, Krugman told the Daily Beast he is “flattered” by the attention from Trump. “He must think people are listening,” Krugman added. “I might add ‘Deranged BUM’ to my profile.”
[...] In his Aug. 5 Substack newsletter, Krugman condemned Trump for firing Erika McEntarfer as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the agency reported the U.S. added only 73,000 jobs in July, far below expectations. Without offering evidence, Trump called the damning report “rigged” and politically motivated.
“Claiming that economic data you don’t like is fraud perpetrated by a deep state conspiracy has been standard practice on the right for a long time, going back to the ‘inflation truthers’ of the Obama years,” Krugman wrote.
