"A well-thought-out economic plan"

First, a quick housekeeping note of two excuses: 1) I post much later these days — which I regret and likely annoys you — but I'm on Pacific time now and therefore behind the rest of the country by up to three hours, and 2) while researching a post I often venture off into, at best, diaphonously related material; this morning, for example, a 1998, nearly 200-page Princeton University paper by Paul Krugman. Call me madcap if you like, but unlike Trumpers I've found that at least some primal knowledge of a subject is of rather considerable aid when talking about it.

In this case, Mr. Trump's magnificent economy, as campaign promised since 2022. Since January's coronation, however, his economic magnificence has hit a bit of a catastrophic bump on America's erractically driven, IED-tariff-mined, neofascistic road to serfdom. Year-to-date the S&P 500 index has punged by nearly 6% (pushing perilously close to a "correction" of 10% in February); the Dow has dropped by 3.6%; Nasdaq, 1.3%.

While that's a whole lot of 401(k) cash flushed down the ignoramus' golden toilet, stock markets are not the nation's overall economy. Competent economists know this. To illuminate part of my opening paragraph, this morning I ran across a five-year-old Krugman tweet making the point, for probably the hundreth time. That led me to a 10-year-old NYT Krugman column, which cited and consequently led me to his 27-year-old paper on liquidity traps — not really market-related and certainly time-consuming, but interesting.

Krugman's 2020 tweet, though, was of keen interest: a quote from then-Fox News blatherskite and college-history-majoring "economist" Larry Kudlow: "I have long believed that stock markets are the best barometer of the health, wealth and security of a nation."

Added Krugman, "They aren't, but still." Here it must also be added that Trump himself has long believed that stock markets are the nation's best economic barometer, as long as the markets are up, that is, and they're up only under one of his regimes.

But guess what? The professed Kudlowian wisdom we just read — his veritable womb-to-near-tomb conviction that markets tell all — comes with the selfsame qualification held by Trump, and just as easily nailed down. On the Monday of this week, as the markets were melting into a gelatinous vat of terror, Larry K. dispensed a trifle of asymmetrtic wisdom on his Fox Business show, filmed — where else? — in the Old Executive Office Building, opposite Trump's palace: "I’d kind of suggest people keep their powder dry and pay attention to a well-thought-out economic plan that will indeed make America great again."

That Mr. Kudlow is always wrong might at first seem peculiar, even preternaturally weird; why hell, if nothing else the law of averages dictate that he'd be right at least once. But then the hammer of re-epiphany drops. Lawrence Alan Kudlow is — as are all of Trump's "economists," far-right media mouthpieces and social-media influencers — a whore. He may charge a lot more than downtown, yet a whore he remains. In his 2015 NY Times column, Paul Krugman featured Jonathan Chait's portrait: "The interesting thing about Kudlow’s continuing influence over conservative thought is that he has elevated flamboyant wrongness to a kind of performance art."

To that, Krugman followed with this framing: "Maybe the right prefers guys without credentials because they really know how things work, although I’d argue that this proposition can be refuted with two words: Larry Kudlow." The Nobel Prize-winning economist then added these finishing touches: "LK’s greatest hits — his sneers at 'bubbleheads' who thought something was amiss with housing prices, his warnings about runaway inflation in 2009-10, his declaration that a high stock market is a vote of confidence for the president — but only, apparently, if said president is Republican."

And there you have it. Clowns like Kudlow and Stephen Moore, former "distinguished" fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Club for Growth president and Wall Street Journal editorial board member, are indeed flamboyantly wrong in their every economic "analysis." But they're more than that. They're insidiously wrong.

For at some elemental, even humanly essential level of mental functioning — no one can always and so honestly be mistaken about everything in his or her chosen profession, so to speak — each of these Trump-imposed-calamity-supporting peddlers of sheer bullshit knows that that's precisely what he's hustling under the streetlamps of electoral ignorance, which in turn perpetuates America's plague of reactionary politicians. Our national disease has by now become critical, it has reached the point of possibly terminal.

And those who cheer call themselves the "real Americans."