(Bloomberg) -- Greg Mankiw, who served as chief economist to former President George W. Bush, said he quit the Republican party because too many of its members are ignoring Donald Trump's “misdeeds,” pledging to help Democrats to pick a moderate candidate to defeat him in the 2020 election.
“Too many Republicans in Congress are willing, in the interest of protecting their jobs, to overlook Trump's misdeeds (just as too many Democrats were for Clinton during his impeachment),” the Harvard economist wrote on his blog. “I have no interest in associating myself with that behavior.”
Mankiw, 61, said he switched his voter registration Monday to independent, a category that allows Massachusetts residents to vote in either party's primary. He said plans to help Democrats choose a “center-left” candidate, citing Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Andrew Yang.
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders “propose to move the country too far in the direction of heavy-handed state control,” Mankiw wrote in the post. “And in doing so, they tempt those in the center and center-right to hold their noses and vote for Trump's re-election.”
It's not the first time Mankiw, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2005, has sounded off against the Trump administration. In a post in March, he said Stephen Moore, a White House nominee to serve on the Federal Reserve, “does not have the intellectual gravitas for this important job.” Moore later withdrew his nomination to be a Fed governor.
To contact the reporter on this story: Brendan Murray in London at brmurray@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Simon Kennedy at skennedy4@bloomberg.net, Brian Swint
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