Nobel Laureate and Economist Paul Krugman, in his inimitable style and cutting-edge insights, has the following bite-sized and easy-to-understand analysis of trump’s policies. This analysis was apparently triggered by Pelosi’s statement about trump’s manhood thing yesterday.
Krugman breaks down trump’s policies into 3 simple groups —
- McConnell — GOP upward redistribution of wealth, deregulation, etc.
- Moolah — for himself
- Manhood — to satisfy his hollow ego and to project his macho-man image
Moolah policies are the distinctive things Trump does that seem most likely to be motivated by personal gain -- things like making excuses for murderous dictators who throw business to the Trump Organization. Emoluments seem to be driving a *lot* of foreign policy 3/
Manhood policies are Trump policies that are about Trump trying to look tough, even when there's no real constituency for his posturing. The wall, obviously; but also Tariff Man protectionism, which has few supporters and the markets hate 4/
Now, you might think there'd be a fourth category: things that Trump does because they're actually in the national interest. But I can't think of any examples fin/
There — we have a distillation of trump’s policies into three dirty flasks.
We can fit many of trump’s policies (anti-environment, anti-green-energy, climate-change-denial, anti-immigrant, trade, foreign policy with Russia, North Korea and Saudi Arabia, voter-suppression, attack on the media, ...) into these categories. But we get the picture.
Do you think framing complex polices into this simple language of a few categories is useful to help understand and to educate the electorate?
How do you think Democratic policies are grouped? How should they be grouped, framed and prioritized over the next two years (given Republican control of the Senate and WH) and beyond?