A contraction of the gross domestic product in the first quarter is the clearest sign yet that Donald Trump is needlessly plunging the US economy into chaos.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
In his first 100 days in office, Donald Trump and his volatile and nonsensical tariff “strategy” have pushed the US economy to the brink of a recession.
The bill for his erratic leadership style came due on Wednesday, when the Commerce Department announced that the gross domestic product (GDP) shrank at an annualized rate of 0.3 percent in the first quarter.
What is particularly noteworthy is that this data does not even take into account what happened on and after Trump’s “Liberation Day,” when he set, changed, revoked, and increased tariffs on most of the world’s countries.
Those moves wiped out trillions of dollars from the total wealth of Americans, and the markets are still down substantially from Inauguration Day.
Trump, who always tries to take credit for any stock market increases while blaming everybody else for the downturns he is responsible for, predictably tried to pin the bad news on his predecessor.
“This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s,” he wrote in a social media post Wednesday morning after it became apparent that stocks were tanking once again. “I didn’t take over until January 20th. Tariffs will soon start kicking in, and companies are starting to move into the USA in record numbers. Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden ‘Overhang.’”
Just to be clear, the “Biden overhang” was an economy that was the envy of the Western world and, just three months ago, was expected to grow at a robust pace.
Trump has ruined all of that in just a few weeks, and his social media post revealed a sense of panic.
“This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other,” he stated. “BE PATIENT!!!”
Trump now has his work cut out for him… not in terms of fixing the mess he created, of course, because he is incapable of that.
Instead, the president and his allies now have to somehow gaslight Americans into believing that the flourishing economy of 2024 was Trump’s accomplishment, but that this year’s failing economy is Biden’s fault.
While hard-core MAGA supporters may be gullible enough to buy that, recent polling has shown that Americans overall know very well who is to blame… and it’s not as though economists expect things to get better going forward.
In fact, the smart money is on another contraction in the second quarter, which would officially make this the start of the Trumpcession.
Finally, it should also be noted that the president’s focus on the stock market is misplaced. Yes, many Americans, especially those who are already retired or will retire soon, have seen their 401(k)s take a dive, but the real victims will be the small and medium-sized businesses that are going to start closing and the people they will be forced to lay off.
The tragic thing about that is that many of them probably voted for Trump and believed that he would bring about a “golden age,” even though all of this was very predictable… as are the GOP’s attempts to point the finger at anybody but the president and themselves.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
