Donald Trump is declaring victory in his trade war with China.
Of course he is. He always claims victory, even — in fact, especially — when he loses.
Remember the 2018 midterm elections? You’d have thought Republicans had won every seat and exacted punitive damages from Democrats who’d had the temerity to run against them. Continue reading
Responding to the conventional wisdom that Republican lawmakers defend President Donald Trump because they are afraid of his wrath — mainly expressed via Twitter attacks — Nobel Prize-winning economists Paul Krugman claimed it goes beyond cowardice and into something much deeper — the fear of losing power over Democrats.
In a series of tweets on Thursday morning that highlighted reporting in USA Today that Republicans in Kentucky are searching for ways to overturn the voting on Tuesday and hand the governorship back to ousted Matt Bevin, the NYT columnist said the GOP no longer cares about what is right or legal.
“Seeing a lot of pieces about why GOP politicians are standing behind Trump even though they know he grotesquely abused power and betrayed US interests. Usually framed in terms of primary challenges, etc. But is this overthinking?” the columnist suggested.
View the complete November 7 article by Tom Boggioni from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.
The Trump White House shocked the U.S. military and the defense community over the weekend with an announcement that U.S. forces, which have been working with Kurdish-led forces in northeastern Syria, will be pulling out — a decision that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wholeheartedly agrees with. And economist and veteran New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman has three theories on the matter — all of which he asserts paint a troubling picture of Trump.
Monday on Twitter, Krugman posted, “So, did Trump just betray the Kurds because (a) He has business interests in Turkey, (b) Erdogan, being a brutal autocrat, is his kind of guy, (c) His boss Vladimir Putin told him to. Remarkable that all three stories are perfectly plausible.”
Trump, to be sure, has had very friendly relations with Erdogan. Prior to Erdogan’s presidency, Turkey was among the most liberal and democratic countries in the Islamic world. But it has taken an increasingly authoritarian turn under Erdogan, who Trump has repeatedly praised. Trump has been highly critical of long-time NATO allies like Germany and the U.K., but in 2018, he gave Erdogan a friendly fist bump and exalted him as the NATO member who “does things the right way.”
View the complete October 7 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.
Despite the fact that some of the most aggressive military expansions and escalations have occurred under Democratic presidents — from Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II to Lyndon B. Johnson in Vietnam and Barack Obama in Afghanistan — Republicans have repeatedly insisted that they have the market cornered on patriotism and love of military. But economist and veteran New York Times journalist Paul Krugman, in a blistering column this week, stresses that “Republican superpatriotism” has always been a “fraud” — and that is more obvious than ever in the Trump era.
“Republicans have spent the past half-century portraying themselves as more patriotic, more committed to national security than Democrats,” Krugman explains. “Richard Nixon’s victory in 1972, Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 and George W. Bush’s victory in 2004 — the only presidential election out of the past seven in which the Republican won the popular vote — all depended in part on posing as the candidate more prepared to confront menacing foreigners.”
But under President Donald Trump, Krugman stresses, many Republicans are more than happy to look the other way while Trump engages in “foreign entanglements” that clearly aren’t in the United States’ best interests — for example, reports that Trump tried to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
View the complete September 24 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.
Democracies don’t necessarily cease to be democracies because of violent coups. In some cases, authoritarians are voted into office. And veteran New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, in a September 9 piece, cites the United States as one of the countries where democracy is being undermined.
Krugman opens his column by discussing the Steven Levitsky/Daniel Ziblatt book “How Democracies Die” and some of the countries in which authoritarians were voted into office — for example, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russia under Vladimir Putin and Hungary under Viktor Orban.
“Bit by bit,” Krugman explains, “the guardrails of democracy were torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of the ruling party — then were weaponized to punish and intimidate that party’s opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes.”
View the complete September 10 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.
After rising on Tuesday, stocks tumbled on Wednesday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 700 points on news that major European economies might be headed for recession.
At home, American analysts and investors have been spooked by President Donald Trump’s ongoing trade war with China, which has raised uncertainty about future investment and clearly triggered broader fears about macroeconomic stability. Looming over these worries is the fact of the inverted yield curve: 10-year bonds are now offering lower interest rates than 2-year bonds, a sign that investors are scrambling for somewhere safe to keep their money long term.
Economist Paul Krugman argued Wednesday that, while the world doesn’t appear to be facing a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis, the risk of a recession is indeed rising. And despite his boasts about his economic performance, Trump himself appears to be driving at least one major factor in the increased risk, while the GOP blocks potentially countervailing measures.
View the complete August 14 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.
As president of the United States, Donald J. Trump has preached a right-wing brand of populism that often echoes Patrick Buchanan’s nationalist and protectionist themes and utter contempt for “elites” — and Trump’s rally in Orlando, Florida on Tuesday made it clear that he will be hitting those themes aggressively in his 2020 reelection campaign. But economist Paul Krugman, in a New York Times column published this week, outlines the many ways in which Trump’s “populism” is a cruel joke that only hurts the working class Americans he is claiming to look out for.
Krugman recalls that when Trump was running for president in 2016, he famously declared, “I love the poorly educated.” And Trump, Krugman notes, “sounded as if he might be a European-style populist, blending racism with support for social programs that benefit white people.”
Krugman unfavorably compares Trump to far-right Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, pointing out that Orbán talks like a populist yet has “promoted crony capitalism on a grand scale.” But at least Orbán, Krugman asserts, has offered “a bit of actual populism” and policies that “offer some benefits to the little guy” — whereas Trump hasn’t even done that much. And so many of the things that Trump has done as president, Krugman complains, have been terrible for the working class.
View the complete June 19 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.
In a column for the New York Times, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman claimed that an unfettered Donald Trump is setting the stage for a second Great Depression — only this one will be much worse.
Noting that Trump’s plan to slam Mexico with tariffs “will reduce the living standards of most Americans, destroy many jobs in U.S. manufacturing, and hurt farmers,” Krugman said that is the least of our problems.
“Trump says that ‘TARIFF is a beautiful word indeed,’ but the actual history of U.S. tariffs isn’t pretty — and not just because tariffs, whatever the tweeter in chief says, are in practice taxes on Americans, not foreigners. In fact, it’s now a good bet that Trump’s tariffs will more than wipe out whatever breaks middle-class Americans got from the 2017 tax cut,” Krugman wrote.
View the complete June 4 article by Tom Boggioni from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday inadvertently called attention to a scathing New York Times column written by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.
In an angry tweet, Trump wrote that “Paul Krugman, of the Fake News New York Times, has lost all credibility, as has the Times itself, with his false and highly inaccurate writings on me.” Trump also wrote that Krugman “is obsessed with hatred, just as others are obsessed with how stupid he is.”
Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump
Paul Krugman, of the Fake News New York Times, has lost all credibility, as has the Times itself, with his false and highly inaccurate writings on me. He is obsessed with hatred, just as others are obsessed with how stupid he is. He said Market would crash, Only Record Highs!
In his latest column, Krugman argued that the Republican Party has shown it is completely devoid of ethics and only wants to hold and maintain power.
View the complete April 23 article by Brad Reed with Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is best known for his economic analysis and his advocacy for broadly left-wing policies. But in his time as a public thinker, he’s also become a trenchant critic of the right wing, and in a new column Monday, he skewered the conservative impulse to be outraged about the most trivial and absurd perceived affronts.
As Exhibit A, Krugman pointed to the following bizarre outburst from Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), who has been one of President Donald Trump’s most vigorous protectors:
Devin Nunes✔@DevinNunes
At restaurant tonight waitress asks if we want straws. Says she has to ask now in fear of “THE STRAW POLICE”. Welcome to Socialism in California!
“If this seems like a weird aberration — he wasn’t even denied a straw, just asked if he wanted one — you need to realize that rage explosions over seemingly silly things are extremely common on the right,” wrote Krugman. “By all accounts, the biggest applause line at the Conservative Political Action Conference — eliciting chants of ‘U-S-A, U-S-A!’ — was the claim that Democrats are coming for your hamburgers, just like Stalin.”
View the complete March 12 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.
