We’re with the celebrated Scots-accented people’s economist—celebrated above all when he’s home with the locals in his own old pub in Dundee, settling all the arguments there are around money and power, and populism on the way to plutocracy in the comeback reign of Donald Trump.

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Mark Blyth.

Before we get to Trump 2, we speak of the lingering Biden paradox. The economy was said to be the saving grace of Joe Biden’s short term, specifically the drive to rebuild the industrial base at home. But the same economy was the undoing of his would-be successor, Kamala Harris—specifically, inflation, a largely hidden cost-of-living crisis in food and energy that hurt real people, poor people most of all.