NYT's Krugman says GOP 'can't handle' 2020 election results, but declared 2016 election was 'rigged'
'Once a party gets into the habit of rejecting facts ... one fact it’s bound to reject sooner or later is the fact that it lost an election,' Krugman wrote
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New York Times columnist Paul Krugman lambasted the GOP this week for not accepting the results of the 2020 presidential election, a mere four years after Krugman himself appeared to not accept the results of the 2016 election.
In a piece published Monday titled, "Republicans Can’t Handle the Truth," Krugman blasted Republican lawmakers after only 27 of them acknowledged the projected victory of President-elect Joe Biden in a Washington Post survey. He also noted that roughly two-thirds of GOP voters say "the election was rigged ... despite the complete lack of evidence of significant fraud."
"But you really shouldn’t be surprised by this willingness to indulge malicious, democracy-endangering lies," Krugman wrote. "After all, when was the last time Republicans accepted a politically inconvenient fact? It has been clear for years that the modern G.O.P. [sic] is a party that can’t handle the truth."
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Later in the piece, Krugman accused Republicans of refusing to "acknowledge the dangers of the coronavirus."
"The point is that once a party gets into the habit of rejecting facts it doesn’t want to hear, one fact it’s bound to reject sooner or later is the fact that it lost an election ...," Krugman explained. "And the G.O.P.’s [sic] previous history of dealing with inconvenient reality gives us a pretty good idea about when the party will accept Joe Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election — namely, never."
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POCANTICO HILLS, NY - OCTOBER 21: Paul Krugman, pictured in 2015 (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for the New York Times)
However, as pointed out by RealClearPolitcs president and co-founder Tom Bevan, Krugman struck a vastly different tone in his Nov. 7, 2016 piece headlined, "How to Rig an Election."
"Let’s be clear: this was, in fact, a rigged election," the columnist declared the day before Election Day.
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Four years ago, Krugman claimed the election was "rigged" by a number of entities, including "state governments that did all they could to prevent nonwhite Americans from voting," "Russian intelligence," then-FBI Director James Comey, and "the media obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails."
"Mrs. Clinton still seems likely to win. If she does, you know what will happen. Republicans will, of course, deny her legitimacy from day one, just as they did for the last two Democratic presidents," Krugman predicted at the time. "But there will also — you can count on it — be a lot of deprecation and sneering from mainstream pundits and many in the media, lots of denial that she has a 'mandate' (whatever that means), because some other Republican would supposedly have beaten her, she should have won by more, or something."