‘He was lying’: Nobel laureate Paul Krugman breaks down Trump’s anti-working class agenda

When President Donald Trump defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, some Democrats hoped that he would at least have a Nixonian streak on economics: President Richard Nixon, as right-wing as he was, favored universal health care and supported elements of the New Deal and the Great Society. But Trump, for all his pseudo-populist rhetoric, has gone out of his way to attack the United States’ social safety net — and liberal economist Paul Krugman, in his New York Times column, emphasizes that Trump hasn’t delivered on his economic promises of 2016.

“One thing many people forget about the 2016 election is that as a candidate, Donald Trump promised to be a different kind of Republican,” Krugman recalls. “Unlike the mainstream of his party, he declared, he would raise taxes on the rich and wouldn’t cut programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that ordinary Americans rely on. At the same time, he would invest large sums in rebuilding America’s infrastructure. He was lying.”

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, Krugman notes, “was absolutely standard modern Republicanism: huge tax cuts for corporations, plus tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy” — and Trump “came very close to passing a health care ‘reform’ that would have imposed savage cuts on Medicaid, eliminated protections for those with pre-existing conditions and taken away health insurance from more than 30 million Americans.” Continue reading.