Trump Calls Out New York Times Columnist Who Was Wrong About Claim of Global Recession

Zachary Stieber
By Zachary Stieber
April 23, 2019Politics
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Trump Calls Out New York Times Columnist Who Was Wrong About Claim of Global Recession
President Donald Trump talks to reporters as he leaves the White House in Washington, DC. on April 05, 2019. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump slammed New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who infamously predicted in 2016 that Trump’s presidency would trigger a global recession.

Trump took to Twitter to criticize Krugman after the columnist penned yet another anti-Trump column in which he tried to ignore the key findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which could not establish collusion between anyone in Trump’s campaign—or any other Americans—and Russians seeking to influence the 2016 election.

Mueller’s team found that three groups of Russians attempted to influence the election but those groups ended up having little impact.

The bombshells the Times and other media outlets touted since before Trump’s election, alleging his campaign conspired with Russians, never materialized.

NTD Photo
New York Times Opinion columnist Paul Krugman in a 2015 file photo. (Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for the New York Times)

Krugman called the focus on Mueller finding no collusion and not definitively establishing obstruction “spin” and said that the finding that some Russians tried to sway the election was huge. He also accused Republicans in general of lying about their policies, ignoring how vast majorities of Republican voters approve of the job Trump is doing.

“Mainly the GOP’s political achievements depend on identity politics—white identity politics. Exploiting racial resentment to capture white working-class voters, while pursuing policies that benefit only the wealthy, has been the core of the party’s political strategy for decades,” Krugman wrote. He later said of Trump, “All indications are that he really is a racist.”

Krugman’s supposed evidence was Trump’s tax cuts and his attempts to reverse the socialist “Obamacare” program. It wasn’t clear what link there was between those policies and racism. Some minority voters are increasingly supporting Trump, such as Hispanics.

Trump took to Twitter on April 23, the day after the column was published, and wrote: “Paul Krugman, of the Fake News New York Times, has lost all credibility, as has the Times itself, with his false and highly inaccurate writings on me. He is obsessed with hatred, just as others are obsessed with how stupid he is. He said Market would crash, Only Record Highs!”

Krugman wrote on election night that markets would “never” recover with Trump as president. “We’re very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight,” he wrote. Krugman has never explained how his dire prediction ended up being so wrong.

Trump then wondered if the Times would apologize to him for how wrong they’ve been about a number of topics, such as supposed collusion between his campaign and Russia.

“I wonder if the New York Times will apologize to me a second time, as they did after the 2016 Election. But this one will have to be a far bigger & better apology. On this one they will have to get down on their knees & beg for forgiveness—they are truly the Enemy of the People!” he wrote of the openly left and anti-Trump media outlet.

The Times took issue with Trump’s tweets, writing that the phrase “enemy of the people” “is just false, it’s dangerous.”

“It has an ugly history of being wielded by dictators and tyrants who sought to control public information,” the paper’s communication account wrote.

The paper’s opinion page took on Trump’s Krugman tweet, telling him that Krugman won a 2008 Nobel prize and “is a valued member of our team of opinion columnists.”

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