We had to rub our eyes a few times before we came to grips with the fact that pseudo-economist Paul Krugman — the poster child for TDS and Bidenomics infatuation in media/academia — is actually trying to make “Biden Derangement Syndrome” a thing.
Krugman blurted out yet another of his wild-eyed Substack takes August 27 in a piece simply headlined, “Biden Derangement Syndrome.” The unhinged wordsmith who tried convincing the world for months that Bidenflation was “transitory” snooted that “A clear indicator that Trump sycophants realize that they are caught in reality’s snare is how they respond to any question about current economic difficulties.”
That’s pretty rich coming from the same guy who browbeat struggling Americans who were fed up from Biden-era price spikes, “A lot of it is simply — a lot of people who say the economy is lousy —what they’re really saying is, ‘I hate the idea that a Democrat is president.’”
But now, Krugman is trying to shove all of that under the rug to accuse the GOP of being disingenuous, “Their first sentence almost always contains the word ‘Biden,’ as they make the false claim that things were worse under Joe Biden, or that Biden somehow caused all of our current problems (including high gas prices and depleted munitions), or that Biden left an economy in shambles.” But Krugman did this very thing when he tried to pin the inflationary crisis — caused prominently by Biden’s own stimulus policies — on Trump’s trade actions in a July 2021 New York Times column: “What’s the current state of the U.S. economy? A quick summary might be ‘booming with bottlenecks.’ And some of those bottlenecks reflect the mess created by Donald Trump’s trade policy.”
Inflation was running hot at a 5.4 percent clip at the time. Even more damning is that Krugman also tried to make “Trumpflation” a talking point just a couple of weeks after Trump started his second term. Talk about a pot calling the kettle black!
Of course, it had nothing to do with the unprecedented levels of government stimulus Biden injected into the U.S. economy that even caused former Obama National Economic Council director Larry Summers to sound the alarm bells, right? In March 2022, MIT Distinguished Professor of Finance Deborah Lucas even attributed much of the inflationary pressures of the Biden era to government fiscal and credit policies. “First: These policies likely had, and are still having, an enormous impact on aggregate demand and on household and firm savings,” she wrote. In fact, Krugman was singing a very different tune on inflation September 2023, when he actually tried to argue that “In fact, there’s a good economic case to be made that a temporary burst of inflation was just what the doctor ordered.” The average rate of inflation for the year 2022 was 8.0 percent.
But people daring to comparisons now of the current economic situation to the disaster Biden and company inflicted is verboten, eh Krugman:
Call it a bad case of Biden derangement syndrome, a desperate and utterly transparent attempt to shift the blame for the gratuitous mess that Trump and his minions have made.
Look up the word “hypocrite” in the dictionary and you’ll probably find a picture of Krugman there.
Krugman, of course, couldn’t let himself look completely brain dead, and had to concede, “Yes, America — along with most of the world — did experience surging inflation in 2021-2022, during the Biden administration.” However, he then dismissed it completely: “But inflation then proceeded to fall significantly, a case of ‘immaculate disinflation’ – a drop in inflation without a recession.”
Immaculate disinflation??? What a way to sugarcoat the fact that consumer prices spiked 21.5 percent throughout Biden’s term. He even butchered the meaning of the term “disinflation” when he claimed January 9, 2024, that 2023 was the year “inflation plunged,” and that was just two days before the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that consumer prices increased to a 3.4 percent annual rate from its 3.1 percent November low. Inflation wasn't going south. Sloppy word choice or disinformation? You decide.
For context, MRC Business just released a study with CNSNews using BLS data to calculate the five-month average annual consumer price inflation rate spanning the entirety of the Iran War to date (March-July 2026) and juxtaposed it to the same period during 2022 (March-July). This year, it's currently 3.6 percent. During the same period in 2022 under Joe Biden, with no war underway, the inflation rate averaged a whopping 8.6 percent. The 5-month average for the Iran war inflation spike is just .2 percentage points higher than the 3.4 percent figure reported just two days after Krugman claimed in January 2024 that inflation had “plunged.”
