About Moore: It goes almost without saying that he has been wrong about everything. I don’t mean the occasional bad call, which all of us make. I mean a track record that includes predicting that George W. Bush’s policies would produce a magnificent boom, Barack Obama’s policies would lead to runaway inflation, tax cuts in Kansas would produce a “near immediate” boost to the state’s economy, and much more. And, of course, never an acknowledgment of error or reflection on why he got it wrong.

[For an even deeper look at what’s on Paul Krugman’s mind, sign up for his weekly newsletter.]

Beyond that, Moore has a problem with facts. After printing a Moore op-ed in which all the key numbers were wrong, one editor vowed never to publish the man’s work again. And a blizzard of factual errors is standard practice in his writing and speaking. It’s actually hard to find cases where Moore got a fact right.

Yet Moore isn’t some random guy who caught Trump’s eye. He has long been a prominent figure in the conservative movement: a writer for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, chief economist of the Heritage Foundation, a fixture on the right-wing lecture circuit. Why?

You might say that the G.O.P. values partisan loyalty above professional competence. But that’s only a partial explanation, because there are plenty of conservative economists with solid professional credentials — and some of them are pretty naked in their partisanship, too. Thus, a who’s who of well-known conservative economists rushed to endorse the Trump administration’s outlandish claims about the benefits from its tax cut, claims they knew full well were unreasonable.

Nor h as their partisanship been restrained and polite. Many of us are still mourning the death of Alan Krueger, the Princeton economist best known for research — since vindicated by many other studies — showing that increases in the minimum wage don’t usually seem to reduce employment. Well, the Nobel-winning conservative economist James Buchanan denounced those pursuing that line of research as “a bevy of camp-following whores.”