Paul Krugman just wrote an op-ed praising Donald Truump for being 'right on economics'
Krugman previously derided the Republican real-estate mogul as a "belligerent, loudmouth racist with not an ounce of compassion."
But in a Monday op-ed in The New York Times, the left-leaning writer praised Trump's "heresies" from Republican orthodoxy when it comes to economic policy.
"So am I saying that Mr. Trump is better and more serious than he's given credit for being?" Krugman asked, making it clear that he is still not a Trump supporter. "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."
Trump surged to the front of the GOP pack based on his heated rhetoric towards immigration and other issues. However, Trump has taken a more populist approach towards taxes, trade, and healthcare policy. He supports hiking taxes on hedge funds, opposes the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, and once supported a single-payer healthcare system.
Krugman singled out former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) in particular for attacking Trump on these sorts of issues instead of going after the developer's "implicit racism and his insistence that he would somehow round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and remove them from our soil."
"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," Krugman wrote. "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."
Because Trump's supporters don't mind his ideological deviations from mainstream Republicans, Krugman argued, the billionaire has exposed a rift within the GOP.
"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," he wrote. "The influence of big-money donors meant that nobody could make a serious play for the G.O.P. nomination without pledging allegiance to supply-side doctrine."
Krugma added that Trump is free to ignore Republican elites and appeal directly to the party's base, which he said is apparently less conservative on economic policy than its donors.
"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," he wrote. "This is a real revelation, which may have a lasting impact on our politics."