MAGA deals with brewing crisis 'by denying reality:' top economist

President Donald Trump and the GOP have an affordability crisis on their hands, and they are dealing with it — not by solving it, as a “normal” political party would do — but by “denying reality,” argues Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman.

After all, Trump promised to make prices drop on “day one.” He vowed to cut energy costs in half. That has not happened.

“He has instead presided over rising inflation — the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure is running almost a percentage point higher than it was when he took office — and his Iran debacle has caused a spike in gasoline and diesel prices,” Krugman writes.

Krugman points to several prominent Republicans who over the past few days have taken to the nation’s airwaves to claim that gas prices are falling.

CNN put the falsehoods in focus:

U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) on Thursday claimed “gas prices continue to come down.” CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale noted that “average gas prices in the US as a whole and in his home state of South Carolina had actually gone up over the last day, week, month and year, according to AAA data.”

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Dale found, “falsely claimed Thursday that gas prices are much lower now than they were ‘two years ago,’ when, he claimed, they were ‘$6.’ Thursday’s AAA national average, $4.30 per gallon, was actually higher, not lower, than the average two years prior, when it was $3.66 per gallon.”

One day earlier, CNN notes, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “falsely suggested” the average gas price in California was $8 per gallon right before the Iran war started. “The state average at the time was actually $4.64 per gallon, according to AAA.”

Krugman calls it “striking” that Republicans are “lying” by trying to create an “alternate reality” about a fact that most Americans can see on a daily basis, on “giant signs all around America,” namely, at the gas station.

So why do they, apparently, think these lies will work?

Krugman argues Republicans are pretending that President Donald Trump’s second term in office started during President Joe Biden’s term in office, “after the inflation surge of 2021-2022,” and not after what he calls the “immaculate disinflation” that followed.

Calling that effort “games with the timeline,” Krugman notes that it will not work: “That ship has already sailed (and sunk).”

So who is it for?

An “audience of one”: President Donald Trump, who, “swaddled in his Mar-a-Lago bubble,” doesn’t know that prices at the pump and inflation are up.

“Trump says that we have no inflation,” Krugman notes. “He recently insisted that inflation was 5 percent at the end of Biden’s term and took credit for falling inflation before he took office. So Republicans determined to say whatever he wants to hear — which means everyone still in the party — feel obliged to praise his inflation record, the facts be damned.”