This one is a bit dated, as I just stumbled upon it – but it’s still amusing.
Back in 2020, the economics Nobel laureate Paul Krugman penned a New York Times column in which he seemingly revealed that he doesn’t remember his own convictions.
“When Joe Biden is inaugurated, he will immediately be confronted with an unprecedented challenge… he’ll be the first modern US president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy. And no, Democrats never said Donald Trump was illegitimate, just that he was incompetent and dangerous” Krugman wrote.
There are countless examples one could point to as a rebuttal. The most obvious would be Hillary Clinton, who had called Trump an “illegitimate president” as recently as the past September (and it was a tune she’d been singing since immediately after the 2020 election). Former Clinton campaign adviser (and now Biden OMB pick) Neera Tanden took to twitter to spread conspiracies about Russian hacking in the aftermath of the 2016 election.
A week before Trump was sworn into office, the late John Lewis announced his boycott of the inauguration, adding “I don’t see this President-elect as a legitimate president.” Meanwhile, Rep. Jerry Nadler told CNN that while Trump was “legally elected,” non-existent Russian interference made his election “illegitimate.”
And there are plenty of other notable Democrats I could quote, but perhaps the most notable is Paul Krugman himself, who penned an article on December 12th of 2016 titled “The Tainted Election.”
In it he Krugman: “So this was a tainted election. It was not, as far as we can tell, stolen in the sense that votes were counted wrong, and the result won’t be overturned. But the result was nonetheless illegitimate in important ways; the victor was rejected by the public, and won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and grotesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law enforcement… nothing that happened on Election Day or is happening now is normal. Democratic norms have been and continue to be violated, and anyone who refuses to acknowledge this reality is, in effect, complicit in the degradation of our republic. This president will have a lot of legal authority, which must be respected. But beyond that, nothing: he doesn’t deserve deference, he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.“
While Paul Krugman isn’t good at debunking much of anything, he was at least able to debunk Paul Krugman.
