[The Soup Nazi]

Paul Krugman's NYT newsletter, July 7:

The Kudlow-Moore effect and the coronavirus

Covid-19 cases are surging. Pandemic response is clearly a presidential responsibility — indeed, Donald Trump repeatedly bashed President Obama for what he claimed was a botched response to Ebola (although only four people in the U.S. got it.) So what is Trump’s plan?

According to The Washington Post, it is to change the subject, and hope that Americans become numb to the continuing toll. Both Trump and state TV, aka Fox News, are spending less and less time talking about Covid-19 and more and more time talking about Confederate statues.

But why did Trump abdicate responsibility for dealing with the coronavirus? Leaders who have actually taken action have been politically rewarded, while Trump’s failure to confront the problem has led to a striking decline in his political fortunes; the Economist model, which gave him roughly even odds of re-election in early March, now gives him only a 10 percent chance.

The answer, I’d suggest, is that Trump can’t deal with real problems, and knows he can’t. Nor is he willing to hire and defer to people who can.

How did I reach this conclusion? Largely by looking at who he has hired and tried to hire in an area I know something about, economics. Call it the Kudlow-Moore effect.

Larry Kudlow is, of course, the chairman of the National Economic Council, in effect Trump’s chief economist. He’s also famous among those who follow such things for his remarkable track record of being wrong about everything, from his dismissal of those warning about a housing bubble as “bubbleheads” to his declaration a few months ago that the coronavirus was completely contained and wouldn’t inflict any economic damage.

Now, all of us get things wrong sometimes. But Kudlow is in a class of his own; as New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait memorably put it, he “has elevated flamboyant wrongness to a kind of performance art.” And he’s also notable because his solution to all problems is the same: cut taxes on rich people and corporations.

So who would want to listen to somebody with that record? Trump, obviously; but Kudlow didn’t come out of nowhere. He has long been the go-to economist for much of the Republican Party, along with Stephen Moore, who Trump tried to put on the Board of the Federal Reserve. Moore fell short, but not because of his inability to get facts right; he would probably be making monetary policy if he weren’t an alimony deadbeat.

So it’s not just a Trump thing. Republicans as a group seem to take their economic policy advice — and, as far as I can tell, policy advice in general — from people who have repeatedly demonstrated that they have no idea what they’re talking about. Why? I’ve speculated that it’s because their very hackishness makes them politically reliable. It’s obvious, by contrast, how much Republicans distrust someone like Anthony Fauci, who, precisely because he has an independent reputation, can’t be relied on to say what they want him to say.

But while you can trust incompetent hacks to toe the party line, one thing you can’t expect them to do is devise policy responses to a crisis they weren’t expecting.

Hence Trump’s policy paralysis. There’s nobody he trusts to be both competent and personally loyal, because those are, in a fundamental sense, incompatible traits. So he effectively decided early on not to even try to deal with Covid-19, and just brazen it through instead. Unfortunately, it’s not working, either for him or, more important, for the 130,000 and counting Americans who have already died.


Quick Hits

Hot spots are losing faith in Trump.

Many world leaders saw approval ratings rise in the pandemic, due to the rally round the flag effect. Trump, not so much.

Surprises happen, but Biden is in a much better position than Clinton was four years ago.

How did Texas get here?