This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.

I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump recently declared that the country he's about to take charge of is a disaster and a laughing stock all over the world.

Of course, that's completely false, particularly on the economy. By many metrics, it's actually quite good and certainly better than the wreckage that Trump handed off to Joe

Biden in 2021, and our recovery from COVID has been the envy of the developed world.

But Paul Krugman recently noticed something interesting. In one respect, that's actually bad for

Trump. As Krugman asked on his new substack, how will Trump justify radical policies like across-the-board

tariffs and mass deportations if things are going pretty well? One way is by lying to his supporters, outright scamming them

and feeding them demagogic nonsense about things like the LA wildfires, all of which he's

already begun to do. Today we're talking to Paul Krogman about all of us. Paul, congrats on the new

substack. Good to have you back on. Good to be back on.

All right. So in your piece, you walked through several economic metrics. We have low unemployment.

Inflation is also low now. But at the same time, as you pointed out, Trump is planning some very radical policies.

And he presumably needs to say why they're necessary. Can you talk about the

disconnect and the potential political challenge this creates for him? Okay, yeah. I mean, Trump has

really radical policy ideas. I obviously think they're terrible, but they are radically. He wants

smooth-holy-level tariffs. He wants mass deportations. He wants

to take away the independence of the Federal Reserve. How do you justify all of that when

we're pretty much a Goldilocks economy? Inflation is very close to, you know, the target. We

basically have full employment. There's no, by normal standards, this is about as good as it gets.

So even under Trump, a little bit hard to say, and now we need to, you know, if it's not broken,

so why do we need this enormous fix? Obviously, certain people would respond to what they're

...