After midnight Monday — and seemingly out of nowhere — Donald Trump lashed out at the New York Times with a claim the venerable paper should be sued by people who chose to stay out of the stock market since 2016 because of the newspaper — and a former columnist's influence.

The president began by focusing his ire on Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, apparently unaware that the columnist left the Times several months ago. Krugman wrote at the time on The Contrarian, "If you check out my Substack, you will see that I have by no means run out of energy or topics to write about. But from my perspective, the nature of my relationship with the Times had degenerated to a point where I couldn’t stay."

Regardless of the widely publicized departure, Trump took to Truth Social in the early hours of Monday to write, "Paul Krugman of the New York Times has been predicting Doom and Gloom ever since my great election success in 2016. In other words, he has been wrong for YEARS, as ALL markets have been hitting new HIGHS, and are now higher than ever before."

He then added, "People stayed out of the 'BEST MARKET IN HISTORY' because of this Trump Deranged BUM. Sue them!"

You can see his post here.