Economist Paul Krugman: How Trump will make life worse for his own voters

25 March 2024

Liberal economist Paul Krugman has aggressively defended President Joe Biden's economic policies in his New York Times column, often emphasizing that the United States, under Biden's watch, has enjoyed its lowest unemployment figures in more than half a century.

But Krugman has also lamented the fact that many of Donald Trump's voters wrongly believe that he would be better for them on the economy — a subject the economist addressed during an appearance on The New Republic's podcast.

In the podcast, posted on March 25, Krugman told host Greg Sargent that pro-Trump voters have "amnesia" about the economic conditions the U.S. faced in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"He was given a lethal crisis," Krugman recalled. "He responded with denial, dereliction, fantasy solutions. And probably, thousands for sure — probably hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead because of Trump's bad response. And yet, somehow, that has been erased from a lot of people's memory. They don't remember how actually horrifying it was to watch the president of the United States sort of refusing to deal realistically with this public health crisis."

Krugman went on to lay out some ways in which he believes that a second Trump term would be bad for the 2024 GOP nominee's supporters economically, including the return of "Trump tariffs" that were "incompetent."

Krugman told Sargent, "I get really annoyed at the way everybody now calls Trump a populist. Because he hasn't actually done anything you would call populist in the normal sense…. He basically outsourced actual policy to ideological hardline right-wing Republicans in Congress. So, what you actually got from the Trump Administration might as well have been a Paul Ryan Administration plus tariffs."

Sargent noted that Trump is "floating cuts to Social Security" and has "threatened to repeal Obamacare," asking Krugman, "Wouldn't these policies sell out Trump's blue-collar white base perhaps as much or more than any other demographic?"

READ MORE: How Trump ends Social Security

Krugman responded, "Oh, sure…. The people who really depend on this stuff, whether it's Social Security — blue-collar workers, that is their retirement plan. They don't have pensions. They don't have significant 401ks. What they have is Social Security.…. Medicare is their retirement health care…. Food stamps are a prime source of support in a lot of the American Heartland for less educated workers."

The New York Times columnist continued, "So, these are the people who would really be very badly hurt by the Republican study committee agenda, but they don't seem to know it. They don't know that that's what a second Trump Administration would mean to them.

Listen to Greg Sargent's full New Republic interview with Paul Krugman at this link.

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