benjamin cornia

The book is extremely well written and thorough. My one issue is that Woodard tries to be non-biased to a degree that becomes disingenuous. For example, Trump says that China’s GDP was negative and Woodard says that he could only find one economist to agree with that statement. That makes it seem like Trump is probably wrong, which is incorrect. Trump is certainly wrong. What should have been said was that Trump was unequivocally wrong about China’s GDP and that Trump doubled down on something every credible economist knows to be false. Claims that have no evidence can be dismissed without consideration and yet here was blatant falsehood pushed as being plausible. It is not enough to simply say he was wrong, but there’s a moral imperative to clarify that he was acting in bad faith.