President Donald Trump and the GOP have an affordability crisis on their hands, and they are dealing with it — not by solving it, as a “normal” political party would do — but by “denying reality,” argues Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman.

After all, Trump promised to make prices drop on “day one.” He vowed to cut energy costs in half. That has not happened.

“He has instead presided over rising inflation — the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure is running almost a percentage point higher than it was when he took office — and his Iran debacle has caused a spike in gasoline and diesel prices,” Krugman writes.

Krugman points to several prominent Republicans who over the past few days have taken to the nation’s airwaves to claim that gas prices are falling.

CNN put the falsehoods in focus:

U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) on Thursday claimed “gas prices continue to come down.” CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale noted that “average gas prices in the US as a whole and in his home state of South Carolina had actually gone up over the last day, week, month and year, according to AAA data.”

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House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Dale found, “falsely claimed Thursday that gas prices are much lower now than they were ‘two years ago,’ when, he claimed, they were ‘$6.’ Thursday’s AAA national average, $4.30 per gallon, was actually higher, not lower, than the average two years prior, when it was $3.66 per gallon.”

One day earlier, CNN notes, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “falsely suggested” the average gas price in California was $8 per gallon right before the Iran war started. “The state average at the time was actually $4.64 per gallon, according to AAA.”

Krugman calls it “striking” that Republicans are “lying” by trying to create an “alternate reality” about a fact that most Americans can see on a daily basis, on “giant signs all around America,” namely, at the gas station.

So why do they, apparently, think these lies will work?

Krugman argues Republicans are pretending that President Donald Trump’s second term in office started during President Joe Biden’s term in office, “after the inflation surge of 2021-2022,” and not after what he calls the “immaculate disinflation” that followed.

Calling that effort “games with the timeline,” Krugman notes that it will not work: “That ship has already sailed (and sunk).”

So who is it for?

An “audience of one”: President Donald Trump, who, “swaddled in his Mar-a-Lago bubble,” doesn’t know that prices at the pump and inflation are up.

“Trump says that we have no inflation,” Krugman notes. “He recently insisted that inflation was 5 percent at the end of Biden’s term and took credit for falling inflation before he took office. So Republicans determined to say whatever he wants to hear — which means everyone still in the party — feel obliged to praise his inflation record, the facts be damned.”

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Several Democratic members of Congress are demanding answers from the Department of Justice after a whistleblower alleged that prosecutors were ordered to rush the controversial indictment of a prominent left-leaning civil rights organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC has long drawn fire from some on the right who label it a hate group — a charge rooted in opposition to the organization’s work tracking discrimination and extremism.

MS NOW reports that it exclusively obtained a description of the whistleblower’s allegations, which state that prosecutors had concerns about the strength of the case against the SPLC. Former federal fraud prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, an MS NOW contributor and a former Mueller team member, called the legal theory behind the indictment “exceedingly far-fetched.”

“According to whistleblower information provided to this Committee, Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh ordered your office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama, to rush through the indictment of the SPLC, despite serious concerns about the strength of the case,” reads a letter from U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government.

MS NOW reports that current and former DOJ officials describe Singh as an “enforcer” for acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who has pushed U.S. attorneys to bring cases of interest to Trump.

Raskin and Scanlon’s letter alleges “systemic flaws” in the indictment.

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“As you are well aware,” the Democrats’ letter continues, “it is a violation of Department of Justice (DOJ) regulations to  commence a prosecution when an attorney for the government does not believe ‘that the admissible evidence will probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction.’ It is also a  violation of federal law to intimidate or injure individuals or organizations for exercising their  constitutional rights, including their right to free speech.”

The letter was sent to Kevin Davidson, the acting U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama.

The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted by a federal grand jury last month in Alabama’s Middle District on charges including fraud and money laundering. The indictment alleges the 54-year old organization, which worked to bankrupt the Ku Klux Klan through lawsuits, paid more than $3 million to informants working in extremist groups.

“The indictment alleged that those informants furthered the hateful aims of the various groups, including the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi groups,” MS NOW reports. The SPLC denies any wrongdoing, saying its informants fed intelligence to the FBI and DOJ for years.

Weissmann noted that the indictment does not specify what the SPLC told donors that was fraudulent.

“DOJ’s exercise in gaslighting-by-indictment also requires America to bury its head in the sand and pretend SPLC’s payments to infiltrate white nationalist groups were meant to support them, despite evidence to the contrary presented in its charging document,” Raskin wrote to Singh.

Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, charged that federal prosecutors are “bringing cases without probable cause or any reasonable expectation of winning at trial.”

“Instead, the clear purpose of your directive and the onslaught of bogus cases is to intimidate and stifle criticism of this Administration’s policies,” Raskin said.

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Professor of Law Richard Hasen, an elections law expert, is denouncing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito as a “coward” who is either lying to himself or the American public, after authoring what has been called the “earthquake” decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which sharply erodes the Voting Rights Act.

Alito’s “disastrous” majority opinion in Callais “essentially gutted what remains of the Voting Rights Act,” but he “claims to have done no such thing. The question is why,” Hasen posits.

Hasen charges that Justice Alito was too “afraid” to share his actual opinion, and so he found ways to “get away with overturning Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act through technical minutiae rather than through a direct hit.”

Section 2, passed in 1965, is the provision of the Voting Rights Act that protects minority voters from discriminatory voting laws and maps.

Hasen argues that Alito’s opinions in both Callais and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee “necessarily imply” that “Congress cannot do anything to protect minority voting rights short of banning intentional discrimination despite the 14th Amendment’s equal protection guarantee, despite the 15th Amendment’s ban on race discrimination in voting, and despite the fact that both amendments explicitly give Congress the power to enforce the measures by ‘appropriate legislation.'”

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He notes that Alito managed to render Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “essentially toothless,” while leaving the six-decade-old landmark law on the books.

“Since Brnovich,” he writes, “no plaintiffs have brought successful suits under Section 2 challenging a law alleged to suppress votes.”

Indeed, Alito’s opinions in both cases are “extreme overkill,” handing states “multiple pathways” to defeat a Section 2 claim.

Hasen explains that for Alito, “to discriminate against Louisiana Democrats is not to discriminate against Louisiana’s Black voters, despite the overwhelming overlap between the two groups.”

But for Hasen, the most “galling” issue is that Alito “goes out of his way to disclaim he is making radical change while putting multiple stakes through the heart of Section 2.”

He offers some possibilities of why Alito has acted in this way.

“Maybe Alito is worried that a ruling forthrightly saying what he is doing would sully the reputation of the court, which has already faced public criticism for killing off another key part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013’s Shelby County decision,” Hasen writes. “Perhaps he is worried that a frontal kill of Section 2 would energize Democrats, leading to greater losses for Republicans in the midterm elections and in future elections.”

Regardless, Hasen concludes, no one “is fooled by Justice Alito’s act of cowardice, unless it is Justice Alito himself. If that’s the case, he is more deluded than he seems to think the rest of us are.”

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