Mr. “It’s the economy, stupid” James Carville is scheming how to exploit the economy for hapless Democrats to use as a political cudgel against President Donald Trump. Carville’s latest guest essay for The New York Times, “How to Turn Trump’s Economic Chaos Against Him,” scrambled to find some silver lining to Congressional Democrats’ political woes, given that they’re currently “underwater” with their own voter base according to Politico March 21. In Carville’s 20th century worldview, Trump violated the “cardinal rule” of American politics by supposedly “destabiliz[ing] the economy” with his tariffs, despite the fact that this was one of his core campaign platforms he ran on prior to his landslide 2024 electoral victory.  Carville insisted that Trump was responsible for “one of the most ignorant acts of political leadership in American history,” completely ignoring the economic devastation brought about by President Joe Biden’s outrageous spending policies that fueled the worst inflation crisis in decades. In fact, Biden’s name didn’t appear once in his entire piece. The irony is that Carville had the audacity to belch with gusto that “[t]he problem is that smoke and mirrors only work until you screw up so hard that no act of lunacy can pull the American people’s attention elsewhere.” Uh, did he forget this very scenario played out under Trump’s predecessor? After all, it was Carville himself who was advising Democrats in 2024 not to “tell people how great this economy is” because it was mismatched with Americans’ real economic struggles. Carville made "the economy, stupid" the central issue of the 1992 presidential campaign, and George H. W. Bush's economy was much better than what happened under Biden. Carville later crashed out on his own party November 10, 2024 for “farting around, going to wine and cheese parties,” and for displaying “goddamn arrogance and stupidity” that turned off voters. To quote Lord of the Rings character Sméagol while he berated himself in Return of the King (2003), “You don’t have any friends. Nobody likes you.” Talk about a projection. “Mr. Trump didn’t have a plan to bring down inflation and make life better (except for the rich, who disproportionately benefit from his tax cuts), and he was hellbent on tariffs at all costs,” Carville further railed in his latest column. He must have missed that inflation did in fact decrease 0.1 percent on a month-to-month basis in March, “the first decrease in nearly five years,” according to Bloomberg News, and that overall inflation slowed down to 2.4 percent, cooler than projections by economists. Bloomberg News summarized that the latest consumer inflation numbers “showed little impact so far from tariffs” that Trump already put “in place — in categories like toys and appliances that are more exposed to China.”  If that wasn’t enough, the Producer Price Index also unexpectedly dipped 0.4 percent in March against economists’ expectations of a 0.2 percent increase, “the first decline for PPI since October 2023,” according to CNBC. But in Carville’s deluded world, “This is where the Democrats have an opening. In February I wrote a piece calling on my party’s leaders to play dead, allowing the Republicans to punch themselves out and crumble beneath their own weight.” He continued: “Now, Democrats have an opportunity to allow the Republicans to edge closer to collapse as the party in full control of Washington — let’s please not become the story again and get in their way.”  Flexing his crystal ball on economics, Carville predicted mass economic pain on American consumers in the coming weeks and months that the Democrats could take advantage of. “The Trump administration will not be competent enough to dig us out,” Carville prophesied. “The path to stabilizing and strengthening the country starts when Democrats can take back the economic narrative from the Republican Party and persuade the majority of Americans to close the book on the Trump chaos.” In other words, hope the economy goes belly up so Carville’s lefty party can score political points. How classy. This is the same, er, genius who admitted in January that he got the 2024 election all wrong: Although the U.S. economy remains the strongest in the world, with G.D.P. soaring and inflation subsiding, the American people did not settle for us being better than the rest or take that as good enough. Missing from that narrative, is the sine qua non context that much of that GDP growth was being artificially juiced by the Biden administration swallowing an enormous amount of “Tyrannosaurus debt” and inflation was nowhere near subsiding.  Perhaps Carville would just be better off “farting around” and “going to wine and cheese parties” with his elitist colleagues.