It’s Trump’s Party

The thing about Stephen Moore is that he’s both a ludicrous hack and one of the Republican Party’s most prominent and well-published “intellectuals”:

Moore’s nomination deserves to sink because he’s a crank. As the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell writes, he complained of imminent hyperinflation at the height of the Great Recession while now arguing that the economy faces deflation when there’s no evidence of this in economic data. He “advocates — at least when politically convenient — crank economic ideas, including returning to the gold standard.” Paul Krugman reminds us that in 2007-’08 when the country was tumbling into recession, he called for interest rate hikes that would have greatly exacerbated the problem.

But to point out that Moore is a crank and a charlatan would raise the difficult question of why a crank and charlatan has published in all the major conservative journals and held prominent positions in major conservative think tanks. Conveniently, Moore also has a long track record of offensive statements on a wide variety of subjects that give lots of people plausible cover to oppose him.

And, indeed, Moore is every bit as horrible a person as he is as a policy analyst:

Stephen Moore complained publicly that “the male needs to be the breadwinner of the family.” His wife Allison took this to heart, quitting her job to raise the kids. Then he cheated on her, divorced her, and denied her $300,000 he owed in support. https://t.co/v4romPzUWV pic.twitter.com/bfbyMGKZFk— Christopher Orr (@OrrChris) May 1, 2019

Donald Trump becoming the internally beloved leader of the Republican Party remains an eternal mystery.