Paul Krugman in the New York Times: “So Trump’s promise to restore U.S. manufacturing was doomed to fail. Why did he make it in the first place?

“For what it’s worth, I suspect that in this case Trump wasn’t actually trying to scam voters. My guess is that he genuinely believed that he could bring manufacturing, coal mining and so on roaring back, that others had failed to do so only because they weren’t tough enough.

“You might wonder where his confidence came from, given how little he obviously knows about economics. The answer, probably, is the Dunning-Kruger effect: inept people are often confident in their abilities, because they’re too inept to know how badly they’re doing.

“But the real question isn’t whether Trump will ever realize that he doesn’t know how to MAGA. It’s whether and when his supporters will figure it out. I guess we’ll learn the answer in the months ahead.”

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