You could make a killing outsmarting them if you think that.

The media are doing the job they are bought and paid to do: promote Republicanism. Just look at all the media consolidation! Even the somewhat independent NYT is weak on this.

(The media you actually want for this case are the FT, which has ended up looking weirdly leftist by comparison to the rightward swing of everyone else, and, despite the ownership, Bloomberg. You can't feed business customers news which makes them lose money, they tend to notice when you've misled them.)

The consequence of COVID financial measures. The flipside is that growth was maintained through that period, which wasn't the case in less expansionary countries.

I didn't interpret his explanations that inflation wasn't bad, but that it wasn't linked to more structural economic issues. It was due to the shock of Covid, and then the macroeconomic policies that tried (and very much succeeded, if you take other countries as counterexamples) to limit the medium- and long-term damage.

To compare and contrast, much of the current wave of inflation can be traced to tariffs and conflict in the Middle East and Ukraine, which is mostly self-inflicted and based on strongman politics. I would maybe argue even those aren't necessarily structural issues, as they could be relatively solved overnight, theoretically.

True structural economic issues are scenarios like the 2008 GFC.

tl;dr you've provided a poor reason to not be listening to Krugman, and you probably have more reasons than what you're letting on.