Elections; 2024
POSTED BY: THG
UPDATED: Friday, November 21, 2025 00:12
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What Power Do the Independents Have Over Trump?
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Trump Dreams of Economic Disaster
By Paul Krugman | Jan. 11, 2024, 7:00 p.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/11/opinion/trump-biden-economy.html
Did Donald Trump just say that he’s hoping for an economic crash? Not exactly. But what he did say was arguably even worse, especially once you put it in context.
And Trump’s evident panic over recent good economic news deepens what is, for me, the biggest conundrum of American politics: Why have so many people joined — and stayed in — a personality cult built around a man who poses an existential threat to our nation’s democracy and is also personally a complete blowhard?
So what did Trump actually say on Monday? Strictly speaking, he didn’t call for a crash, he predicted one, positing that the economy is running on “fumes” — and that he hopes the inevitable crash will happen this year, “because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover.”
If you think about it, this isn’t at all what a man who believes himself to be a brilliant economic manager and supposedly cares about the nation’s welfare should say. What he should have said instead is something like this: My opponent’s policies have set us on the path to disaster, but I hope the disaster doesn’t come until I’m in office — because I don’t want the American people to suffer unnecessarily, and, because I’m a very stable genius, I alone can fix it.
But no, Trump says he wants the disaster to happen on someone else’s watch, specifically and openly so that he won’t have to bear the responsibility.
Speaking of which, when did Trump start predicting economic disaster under President Biden? The answer is before the 2020 election. In October 2020, for example, he asserted that a Biden win would “unleash an economic disaster of epic proportions.”
Now, everyone who makes economic predictions gets some of them wrong. I personally predicted a recession if Trump won in 2016, partly because markets seemed to believe that a Trump victory would be bad for the economy. But I retracted that call just three days after the election, acknowledging that I had briefly succumbed to motivated reasoning.
Trump, by contrast, has been predicting disaster under Biden for more than three years, without ever admitting that his predictions haven’t come true. What we’ve gotten from Trump instead is a series of desperate false claims about the state of the economy. No, the price of bacon isn’t “up five times” under Biden.
Some of these false claims fall into the category of: Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes? Last month, for example, Trump declared that gas costs “$5, $6, $7 and even $8 a gallon,” when there are big signs all around the country advertising gas prices a bit over $3.
Maybe he doesn’t get out much.
What Trump surely does do, though, is watch a lot of TV, which means that he’s aware that the stock market has gone up a lot lately. This clearly troubles him. Indeed, he’s apparently so rattled by stock gains under Biden that in a recent speech he managed both to dismiss those gains as irrelevant — just “making rich people richer” — and to claim credit for them: “The stock market is good because a lot of people think we’re going to win the election.”
If this sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is. Here we have a guy who spent much of his time in office bragging about a rising stock market suddenly declaring that stock gains are bad when someone else is in power, while insisting that he deserves credit for good things (or are they bad things?) that happen when he isn’t even running the country.
Does this matter? Trump may want an economic crash, but he doesn’t have any tools I’m aware of that could produce one. But as I wrote the other day, there’s a risk that pressure from Trump and his allies will lead the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates too high for too long.
Practical concerns aside, however, Trump’s flailing on the economy and the stock market deepens the mystery of his political appeal.
I hate saying this, but I do understand why millions of people are drawn to Trump’s
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The Case for Donald Trump
By Bret Stephens | Jan 11, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/11/opinion/columnists/donald-trump-ele
ction.html
Begin with fundamentals. Trump got three big things right — or at least more right than wrong.
1) Arguably the single most important geopolitical fact of the century is the mass migration of people from south to north and east to west, causing tectonic demographic, cultural, economic, and ultimately political shifts. Trump understood this from the start of his presidential candidacy in 2015, the same year Europe was overwhelmed by a largely uncontrolled migration from the Middle East and Africa. As he said the following year, “A nation without borders is not a nation at all. We must have a wall. The rule of law matters!”
Many of Trump’s opponents refuse to see virtually unchecked migration as a problem for the West at all. Some of them see it as an opportunity to demonstrate their humanitarianism. Others look at it as an inexhaustible source of cheap labor. They also have the habit of denouncing those who disagree with them as racists. But enforcing control at the border — whether through a wall, a fence, or some other mechanism — isn’t racism. It’s a basic requirement of statehood and peoplehood, which any nation has an obligation to protect and cherish.
Only now, as the consequences of Biden’s lackadaisical approach to mass migration have become depressingly obvious on the sidewalks and in the shelters and public schools of liberal cities like New York and Chicago, are Trump’s opponents on this issue beginning to see the point. Public services paid by taxes exist for people who live here, not just anyone who makes his way into the country by violating its laws. A job market is structured by rules and regulations, not just an endless supply of desperate laborers prepared to work longer for less. A national culture is sustained by common memories, ideals, laws and a language — which newcomers should honor, adopt and learn as a requirement of entry. It isn’t just a giant arrival gate for anyone and everyone who wants to take advantage of American abundance and generosity.
It said something about the self-deluded state of Western politics when Trump came on the scene that his assertion of the obvious was treated as a moral scandal, at least by the stratum of society that had the least to lose from mass migration. To millions of other Americans, his message, however crudely he may have expressed it, sounded like plain common sense.
2) The second big thing Trump got right was about the broad direction of the country. Trump rode a wave of pessimism to the White House — pessimism his detractors did not share because he was speaking about, and to, an America they either didn’t see or understood only as a caricature. But just as with this year, when liberal elites insist that things are going well while overwhelming majorities of Americans say they are not, Trump’s unflattering view captured the mood of the country.
In 2017, the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt joined this pessimistic perception with comprehensive data in an influential essay for Commentary. He noted persistently sluggish economic growth and a plunging labor-force participation rate that had never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. There was a rising death rate among middle-aged white people and declining life expectancy at birth, in part because of sharply rising deaths from suicide, alcoholism or drug addiction. More than 12 percent of all adult males had a felony conviction on their record, leaving them in the shadowlands of American life. And there was a palpable sense of economic decline, with fewer and fewer younger Americans having any hope of matching their parents’ incomes at the same stages of life.
Far too little has changed since then. Labor-force participation remains essentially where it was in the last days of the Obama administration. Deaths of despair keep rising. The cost of living has risen sharply, and while the price of ordinary goods may finally be coming down, rents h
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“Late Night” host Seth Meyers on Wednesday highlighted how Republican attitudes to the Constitution flipped following Donald Trump’s rise to power.
Meyers aired a montage of conservatives and even then-GOP candidate Trump himself in 2016 vowing to “bring the Constitution back” amid right-wing claims that then-President Barack Obama was acting like a dictator.
“Republicans used to pretend they cared about the Constitution,” noted Meyers, but “abandoned all that” with the emergence of Trump.
Meyers then aired a second supercut of Trump declaring multiple times and in various ways how he had the “absolute right” and “total authority” to do pretty much anything he wanted as POTUS.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Seth Meyer pretending to care about the Constitution and pretending that Democrats give a single fuck about the Constitution is the only joke he's ever told in his life.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:I stopped wondering why failures shout the loudest that they have a constitutional right to be an asshole.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Seth Meyer pretending to care about the Constitution and pretending that Democrats give a single fuck about the Constitution is the only joke he's ever told in his life.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I stopped wondering why failures shout the loudest that they have a constitutional right to be an asshole.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Seth Meyer pretending to care about the Constitution and pretending that Democrats give a single fuck about the Constitution is the only joke he's ever told in his life.
And I laugh every time you try to call me a failure.
You need me to be a failure because your warped world view depends on it.
Sorry not sorry I can't oblige you.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:Every person I know who voted for Trump will tell me with great pride that they are better than average. Smarter. Genetically superior. Patriotic. Endowed with commonsense. I stopped wondering why, with all those outstanding attributes, their lives have had so many sorrows that leave them infuriated at the unfairness of how they are treated at present. By voting for Trump, they are certain they will get treated as they think they have always deserved. Because I know them, I'm already certain they have always been treated the way they deserve.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
And I laugh every time you try to call me a failure.
You need me to be a failure because your warped world view depends on it.
Sorry not sorry I can't oblige you.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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So sad. So pathetic.
You think way too much about me buddy. The second I finish replying to another of your dumbshit posts and put my computer in sleep mode I don't think about you at all.
You are meaningless. You are nothing. You are a waste of carbon.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:To finish construction jobs, I have to deal with people like Trump and his Trumptards. Your psyches are fragile and your feelings of adequacy sink when criticized. You come to work hungover or you return from lunch drunk. Your wives and children don't give you the love you think you deserve. It is more tricky handling Trumptards than a class of well-adjusted kindergartners because Trumptards need major adjusting.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
So sad. So pathetic.
You think way too much about me buddy. The second I finish replying to another of your dumbshit posts and put my computer in sleep mode I don't think about you at all.
You are meaningless. You are nothing. You are a waste of carbon.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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