New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman attacked President Donald Trump after twisting data to make himself look better.
In a Monday column for his Substack, Krugman looked at some of the charts that his ally Stephen Moore brought to the Oval Office to verify some of his claims about the economy.
"What’s wrong with this picture?" he asks. "First, look at the chart. The second line claims that it shows 'medium income; — a term unknown to economics. Clearly, it was supposed to say median income. OK, speling misteaks hapen (sic). But not, usually, in charts prepared for a presentation by the President of the United States."
The numbers presented by Moore are wrong, he said, citing Jared Bernstein, who examined the charges and the data.
The larger problem for Krugman, however, is that Trump was standing there with Moore, "who may be the last person on the planet you’d trust to tell you the economic truth."
It isn't merely that Moore is a far-right ideologue, though he is, said Krugman.
"I don’t even mean that he’s a dishonest hack, although again of course he is. I mean that even among dishonest right-wing hacks, Moore stands out for his pathological inability to get numbers and facts right," the economist blasted.
He promised he wasn't being hyperbolic, citing a Columbia Journalism Review article that reported Moore being blocked from posting further editorials for one newspaper due to incorrect data that didn't pass a fact-check.
"What’s Moore’s problem? I don’t know and I don’t care. The interesting question is why someone so incompetent — apparently he can’t even copy numbers correctly — has consistently failed upward," asked Krugman. "Trump even tried to put him on the Federal Reserve Board in 2019, and might have succeeded if Moore hadn’t also turned out to be a grotesque misogynist and a deadbeat dad who had been held in contempt for failure to pay child support."
Krugman walked through the startling rise of Moore, remarking that even before Trump, conservatives saw "his surreal incompetence not as a liability but as an asset."
The reason Moore was there was to help spin Trump's narrative that everything is fine and the squeeze Americans are facing is imaginary. Meanwhile, Trump is underwater with voters on every issue.