Behold: The Glorious Trumpcession Is Here
This isn’t just Trump and tariffs. It’s a coordinated attempt by the Republican party to hobble the economy.
1. Numbers
The GDP numbers for the first quarter of the year are brutal. The U.S. economy contracted by -0.3 percent.
But the data are even worse than they look. Consider:
Leading up to this contraction, we had eleven consecutive quarters of growth.
Forecasts which took Trump’s actions into account thought that growth would be bad—they estimated that it would drop from +2.4 percent in Q4 2024 all the way to +0.3 percent this quarter. That’s a huge miss.
The error size of this projection means that the pace of contraction is much faster than we understood.
Remember: Trump was president for only ten weeks during the first quarter. The contraction did not begin until mid-February.
Which means that Trump caused enough damage in six weeks to implode the entire quarter.
The contraction is ongoing.
We are barely five weeks into Q2 and the numbers we’re seeing are dreadful. A recession is defined by two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, which at this point seems like a lock.
The Trumpcession is here.
It’s absolutely critical you understand that this isn’t just a story about a mad king doing tariffs. We’re seeing a comprehensive program of action by Trump and his party.
We’re going to talk about what they’re doing, how—and why.
But first, let’s look under the hood at some of the numbers that will define the second quarter:
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