Sunday evening, on Air Force One, a reporter asked Trump if he is worried about a recession. “Who knows?” the president answered. “All I know is this: We’re going to take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs, and we’re going to become so rich, you’re not going to know where to spend all that money. I’m telling you, you just watch. We’re going to have jobs. We’re going to have open factories. It’s going to be great.”
Then the stock market plunged.
According to MarketWatch, this is the worst start to a presidential term since 2009, when the country was in the subprime mortgage crisis. But Trump did not inherit an economy in crisis. That is reality. He inherited what was, at the time, the strongest economy in the world.
That booming economy is no more. Goldman is now predicting higher inflation and slower growth than it had previously forecast, while its forecast for Europe is now stronger than it had been.
What was always a dodgy salesman more than anything, telling supporters what they want to hear, is now a president who has in the space of not even two months sent us tumbling on every front.
He insisted that the strong economy under Biden was, in fact, a disaster that only he could fix. In October, Trump told attendees at a rally: “We will begin a new era of soaring incomes. Skyrocketing wealth. Millions and millions of new jobs and a booming middle class. We are going to boom like we’ve never boomed before.”
Now, he’s struggling to make that sales pitch fit into a reality that it doesn’t match.
Trump’s top priority is the extension of the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, while at the same time that he has also promising to cut the deficit. This is delusional.
The CBO says tax cuts will cost the country more than $4 trillion over the next ten years.
Tariffs are his solution. When economists reiterated that tariffs are paid by U.S. consumers and would drive up prices and slow growth, he insisted they were wrong.
“[T]ariffs are not just about protecting American jobs,” Trump told Congress last week. “They are about protecting the soul of our country. Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again, and it is happening and it will happen rather quickly. There will be a little disturbance, but we are OK with that.”
Who’s “we?” You?
So while we watch the president moving back in time, advertising the availability of the first season of “the Emmy nominated ORIGINAL APPRENTICE STARRING PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP” ponder America’s future.
The White House said yesterday in a statement: “Since President Trump was elected, industry leaders have responded to President Trump’s America First economic agenda of tariffs, deregulation, and the unleashing of American energy with trillions in investment commitments that will create thousands of new jobs. President Trump delivered historic job, wage, and investment growth in his first term, and is set to do so again in his second term.”
Wanna bet?
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