How Trump squandered the economic recovery

When Donald Trump was 13, his father caught him with a hidden cache of switchblades. Fred Trump, according to Tony Schwartz, who ghostwrote the president’s book “The Art of the Deal,” was “a very brutal guy” — a martinet of a father who shipped his son off to military school. A poor student and apparently not much of a leader, Donald Trump still managed to fail up into a prestigious position that came with the most coveted honor: leading the parade down Fifth Avenue in a flamboyant cadet uniform. 

That pattern has continued throughout his life. 

Trump may not be the smartest president in America’s history, but he is certainly the luckiest. That’s not to say that he doesn’t have his troubles. In fact, he’s constantly mired in scandal, shame and disgrace, and has been his entire life. Still, like a political Houdini, he manages to wriggle out of every jam, usually leaving a pile of wreckage in his wake. That single characteristic may be the key to his popularity. To some people, it makes Trump an almost mystical figure — a person who never has to pay any consequences. In fact, he’s always rewarded in the end with even more fame, fortune and power.

In 2016, he managed to sneak into the White House without winning the popular vote, taking over at a time when the economy had finally recovered from the shock of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession. Since he was new to politics and had no knowledge of history, he didn’t know how to implement whatever vague policy ideas he had developed back in the 1980s. The people surrounding him put the brakes on his craziest notions, so he mainly concentrated on undoing whatever former president Barack Obama had done wherever possible and allowing the GOP to enact their perennial tax cuts. 

Trump’s pugnacious style remained unpopular with the majority of the public, but he did get credit for the healthy economy that accompanied his first term — even though he did little to affect it. He probably would have squeaked out a victory in 2020 if he had demonstrated he was capable of guiding the nation through his first crisis, the global Covid-19 pandemic. He did not. His performance was abysmal, and at the end of the day he managed to exacerbate America’s divisions at the worst possible time. He lost the election, and we all know what happened next. 

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But once again, Trump’s luck played out. All over the world, incumbents were tumbling in the wake of the pandemic, and he was among the first of them. But there was never any doubt he would attempt a Napoleonic comeback, and he was fortunate enough that the anti-incumbent fever was still in full effect when he ran again in 2024 as a challenger. The economy was still recovering from the pandemic shock and, as usual, the president in office was held liable, which blew back on the Biden administration. People remembered the good economy during Trump’s first term, and with all his braggadocio, he managed to convince a plurality of voters that they should take another chance on him. 

He returned to office in January 2025 with a political movement behind him, a party that was completely submissive to his will, a smartly recovering economy and a world that was open to new ideas and looking for leadership.

Again, his luck had held out. He returned to office in January 2025 with a political movement behind him, a party that was completely submissive to his will, a smartly recovering economy and a world that was open to new ideas and looking for leadership. As is the historical custom, Democrats had done the heavy economic lifting in the post-pandemic period and guided the country to a soft landing so impressive that The Economist ran a cover story before the election that called the American economy “The Envy of the World.”

Trump had the wind at his back — and a perfect opportunity to remake his legacy as the incompetent, divisive, sore loser of 2020 to a leader with a thriving economy and a new political coalition that included the fastest-growing segments of the population: young people and Latinos. He could have had it all. 

That did not happen, and it’s because of Trump’s lifelong propensity to take a gift horse and punch it in the mouth. He can’t help himself. 

As Vox’s Eric Levitz recently pointed out, “Trump could have presided over a pristine economy, if he’d simply refrained from increasing import prices, reducing labor-force growth, and launching a war of choice near the aorta of the global energy market. One could call this the ‘We had a good thing’ account of Trump-era economic performance, after Mike Ehrmantraut’s much-memed scolding of the self-sabotaging drug lord Walter White in a late season of the AMC series ‘Breaking Bad.’”

Trump’s tariffs have wreaked havoc on the economy in ways beyond just the increased costs borne by businesses and consumers. The uncertainty caused by his mercurial system of threats and rewards has created massive uncertainty for the economy and stalled the recovery. Luckily, the Supreme Court did him a favor by reversing the original “Liberation Day” tariffs, giving businesses some breathing room and allowing them to recover some of the money from the government. So naturally he’s appealing the judicial order that’s been allowing companies to recover and boost the economy, and he decided to make things even worse by starting a war for no good reason that has strangled the world’s oil supply. Even if the war ends soon, his “excursion” will hobble the economy for months.

Trump has always been very incompetent and very lucky, and his luck may hold out once again. He is likely to survive the disaster he is making of the country by the skin of his teeth, and will probably leave office with a massive fortune derived from his presidency. There will likely be no accountability for the vast corruption and abuse of power for him personally; his friends and allies have seen to that.

Up until now, America has been an equally lucky nation, blessed with vast resources and resilient people who came to this country with lots of energy and ambition. But it’s entirely possible that our fortune has run out and we won’t be lucky enough to survive Donald Trump. After all, his good luck almost always leaves nothing but carnage for the people he leaves behind.

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