Trump’s trade war is guiding the U.S. economy toward a self-inflicted crisis

This is an adapted excerpt from the March 18 episode of "Deadline: White House."

Normally, recessions are caused by a spike in interest rates or an outside event, like the Covid pandemic, but what we’re witnessing happen to the U.S. economy right now is all Donald Trump. The president’s nonsensical trade war with some of America’s closest allies isn’t based on any actual economic policy, it’s a result of his own resentment. 

Trump didn’t hide his affinity for tariffs on the campaign trail, but I’m sure a lot of business leaders thought he didn’t mean it. They may have believed they could talk him out of it, or he would look at the bond market and quickly come to his senses. But now they’re realizing this was Trump’s plan all along. He sees tariffs as a cudgel, as a weapon of his own resentment and his own ego. 

This has injected uncertainty into the U.S. economy, and it’s rattling the markets. We are headed into rough waters. Every week the business world has to ask: Are the tariffs going to go up? Are they going to go down? What are they going to be applied to? No one has the answer to those questions, so no one can plan ahead. 

And it’s already having an effect on the American people. A new poll from NBC News shows 54% of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy. Numbers like this will likely get to Trump. It’s not his brand to be perceived as weak.

But Trump also believes he can talk himself out of virtually anything. For the president, it’s all marketing — he doesn’t actually have to build the wall, he just has to say that he built the wall. However, this becomes more difficult when people are experiencing the effects of his policies right in front of their eyes, in their communities or in their pocketbooks. One of the things we learned over the last couple of years is that the daily experience of the economy — inflation, loss of jobs, loss of income — is very difficult for any political party or politician to spin.

The extraordinary thing about all of this is that it’s self-inflicted. Trump inherited a sound, healthy, growing economy, and almost everything that’s happened has been a result of his voluntary actions. I’m not sure that there’s any precedent in American history in which a president’s own policies, without any help from an outside force, risked driving the country into a recession. But that’s what Trump is doing.