Before anyone has a cow, he makes absolutely clear in his New York Times column that he does not hold Trump in any kind of positive regard. In the middle of the column he writes
So am I saying that Mr. Trump is better and more serious than he’s given credit for being? Not at all — he is exactly the ignorant blowhard he seems to be. It’s when it comes to his rivals that appearances can be deceiving. Some of them may come across as reasonable and thoughtful, but in reality they are anything but.
Rather, his focus is on how Trump breaks from traditional Republican orthodoxy on some economic issues, and how those attacking him from that orthodoxy, for example Jeb!, are missing the boat. Writing in the context of Bush finally attacking Trump, Krugman notes:
Strange to say, however, Mr. Bush hasn’t focused on what’s truly vicious and absurd — viciously absurd? — about Mr. Trump’s platform, his implicit racism and his insistence that he would somehow round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and remove them from our soil.
Instead, Mr. Bush has chosen to attack Mr. Trump as a false conservative, a proposition that is supposedly demonstrated by his deviations from current Republican economic orthodoxy: his willingness to raise taxes on the rich, his positive words about universal health care. And that tells you a lot about the dire state of the G.O.P. For the issues the Bush campaign is using to attack its unexpected nemesis are precisely the issues on which Mr. Trump happens to be right, and the Republican establishment has been proved utterly wrong.
Please keep reading.
Krugman revisits the kinds of attacks offered during the last Presidential campaign by Mitt Romney and then looks at the economic record. The statistics he cites should be familiar to people here
- Republicans said letting Bush tax cuts expire and adding taxes through ACA would be job killers, but instead unemployment has continued to drop
- Romney promised to lower unemployment to <6% by the end of 2016, and yet it is now already 5.1%, compared to the 7.7% when Obama took office, lower than it ever got under the "Sainted: Ronnie Reagan (my use of quotes).
It is not that Krugman thinks the economy is doing great, because we have not achieved full employment and wages have remained stagnant,
But the economy has nonetheless done far better than should have been possible if conservative orthodoxy had any truth to it. And now Mr. Trump is being accused of heresy for not accepting that failed orthodoxy?
Heresy perhaps to the traditional players of the Republican party, including their moneymen, including the Koch brothers and most of the other members of the billionaire class. Bush's economic policy is emblematic of what they believe, about which Krugman writes
his actual economic platform, which relies on the magic of tax cuts to deliver a doubling of America’s growth rate, is pure supply-side voodoo.
The brief paragraph that immediately follows those words is what most caught my attention:
And here’s what’s interesting: all indications are that Mr. Bush’s attacks on Mr. Trump are falling flat, because the Republican base doesn’t actually share the Republican establishment’s economic delusions.
Let me step away from Krugman for a moment. Yes, it is true that due to demonization and lack of understanding a good chunk of the Republican base can be riled up by misrepresentations of the Affordable Care Act, aka "Obamacare" - think of death panels, that it will represent a loss of your current health care plan (which may in fact be because it provides inadequate services for the premiums paid), that somehow it is socialism (even though health insurers get massive increases in profits), and so on. And yet when people experience itthey begin to become convinced of its benefits. Some who opposed ACA recognized that once the benefits were beginning to accrue, it would represent a similar shift away from their "philosophical" approach to the issue that it would no longer serve to motivate the masses.
But what is even more relevant is the populist strand that Trump has touched because of whose taxes he is willing to raise - people in hedge funds. Many ordinary Republican base voters respond as strongly to that as do Democratic base voters to somewhat similar rhetoric from Bernie Sanders (although I am no way equating Trump with Sanders). There is a widespread sense across the country that the economic playing field is tilted too much towards the financial elites, and that politicians are too beholden to them. That neither Trump nor Sanders has as of yet blessed a SuperPac also plays into this.
Krugman notes that in the kind of attacks made by Jeb!'s team, they still seem to think that pointing out Trump's "heresies" on such matters will be enough to take him down. And yet -
But Mr. Trump, who is self-financing, didn’t need to genuflect to the big money, and it turns out that the base doesn’t mind his heresies. This is a real revelation, which may have a lasting impact on our politics.
Here I note what many at this site have opined for some time - that a politician willing to go after the tilt towards the financially well off might well find a resonance that crossed otherwise partisan boundaries, because most Americans are well aware of how much they are being screwed while those at the top gain ever more income and wealth. That is part of why there was such early resonance for the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Yes, it is true that Trump is also tapping in to the darker and seamier side of American populism, the one that is anti- those perceived as outside the American consensus - the "Other" that can and has been defined at different points by race, ethnic origin ("No dogs nor Irish need apply"), religion, or nowadays sexual orientation.
Krugman notes that there are other (Republican) politicians who do not necessarily buy into the consensus on economics from which Trump deviates but who are not burdened by his anti-immigrant bias or his willingness to start a trade war, but that none of them is running for President. You note the word in () - Krugman does not use it in his final paragraph, but certainly he intends it, because I cannot believe that he thinks there is no one like that running for President, since obviously Sanders clearly would meet those criteria.
Let me repeat the paragraph that most caught my attention:
And here’s what’s interesting: all indications are that Mr. Bush’s attacks on Mr. Trump are falling flat, because the Republican base doesn’t actually share the Republican establishment’s economic delusions.
economic delusions - perhaps even the Republican base voter has a visceral understanding of economics that is better than Republican orthodoxy on the subject? If so, there could be a real potential for changing the way we do economics in this country.
Now wouldn't that be something?