This morning he writes:
"The next big item on the G.O.P. agenda is taxes. Now, cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy may be an easier political lift than taking health insurance away from 30 million Americans. But Republicans still have a problem, because they’ve spent years posing as the party of fiscal responsibility, and they have no idea how to cut taxes without blowing up the deficit."
Of course they don't, because exploding government's income without lighting a deficit fuse is empirically, mathematically impossible. But when has the party's masking of radical fiscal recklessness with its traditional claims of conservative fiscal responsibility ever inhibited them? While Trump boasts about a soaring GDP, they'll bellow contradictorily about the need for tax cuts to "get the economy moving again" — and they'll do it with accompanying, stentorian fallaciousness about tax cuts paying for themselves, their tireless, Reaganesque Laffer scam.
Krugman adds that "the bill for cynicism seems to be coming due. For years, flat-out lies about policy served Republicans well, helping them win back control of Congress and, eventually, the White House. But those same lies now leave them unable to govern." While that is demonstrably true, Republican pols have also validated the most egregious menace to a healthy representative democracy. They have learned they can lie with extensive impunity; that democratic accountability, especially on tax policy, has steadily gone the way of the Studebaker.
Nonetheless, a fundamental shift in Republican politics has taken place — it has tied itself to Donald Trump. Now vastly unpopular, deeply distrusted and intellectually vapid, he is the face of the Republican Party, no matter how often he denounces his partisan colleagues. The GOP has been a cynical fraud for decades, yet its fraudulence has been plastered over by superior public relations, from the smiling, furtive visage of Ronald Reagan to the phony, down-home "toughness" of George W. Bush. Trump evinces nothing but incompetence and a transparent willingness to lie about everything — consequently, he is taking the party down.
Undoubtedly it will proceed will all its usual folderol about massive tax cuts and magical deficit-avoidance. But now its lies will be burdened by its chief spokesman. "[T]ax policy, like health care," observes Krugman, "will be hobbled by a legacy of lies." If hobbled it is, this time around the hobbling will be afflicted by Trumpian lies — which, paradoxically, are having the pleasant effect of restoring some level of democratic accountability.
Do I agree with Krugman's rather strong implication and now believe that Republican lies about yet more tax cuts will fatally hobble their passage? No. Blowing up deficits is what modern "conservatives" do, and they do it with remarkable unity. But daily this president further devastates his party's political credibility, and his unpresidential squalor will, in time, ineluctably doom the GOP on all manner of policy.