After President Donald Trump declined to say whether he’s expecting a recession this year, stock markets took a tumble Monday. That continued Tuesday, as Trump’s announcements of additional tariffs on Canada sent stocks further into free fall.
Last fall, Elon Musk told people to expect “temporary hardship” and a collapsed economy under Trump’s economic policies, but the president and his allies have been more open recently in conceding that Americans will face such harm.
Now that the cat is officially out of the bag, many contributors and hosts on the president’s favorite news network, Fox News, and its sister channel, Fox Business, seem to have rallied around a common conclusion: Pain is on the horizon.
Last week on Fox Business, for example, conservative economist Brian Wesbury characterized the nation’s economic outlook as “not a heart attack; it’s heartburn.”
As such, pain is coming for Americans, he said, thanks to Trump’s tariff policies:
I think it will slow the economy down a little bit. Then we have to count on cutting spending and cutting taxes, and cutting interest rates, to lift it in other places, so net-net … we’re going to make it through this. I still expect a recession, but this is not the Great Depression. We’re not in 2000, we’re not in 2009. We’ll have some pain. But we have to, before we get to the game.
“We’ll have some pain” sounds like a pretty grim economic outlook, no?
During a conversation with Fox News host Harris Faulkner, Fox Business host Jackie DeAngelis had a similar message for viewers:
This is going to be hard. It might be a little painful, but the CEO of our country, President Donald Trump, is actually doing something that is really courageous, Harris. Nobody has tried to do this, even though we’ve known for the last 30 years that we need to.
I suspect that “nobody has tried to do this” because tariff-happy policies led to the Great Depression a century ago, and most people want to avoid an outcome like that. DeAngelis said Trump’s tariffs will bring manufacturing back to the United States, a theory discredited by economics experts. When Faulkner asked her how long that will take, DeAngelis said: “It’s going to take some time; it’s going to take years.”
So years of chronic pain, I guess. That’s apparently what’s required of all of us to make America great … again. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., got on the pain train himself, during an interview with Larry Kudlow on Fox Business: At the end of the day, President Trump has told people there’s going to be a little bit of pain with this. And there is. That’s fine. You know, the stock market has gone up and down before. It’ll come back.
Asked about the stock market tanking, Tuberville says "I don't think President Trump needs to be concerned about it. He doesn't need to look at it … he has told me people there's gonna be a little bit of pain with this. And there is. That's fine. The stock market has gone up… pic.twitter.com/Z0qhebfEgV Other Fox shows, including “The Big Weekend Show” and “The Big Money Show,” have also featured hosts and guests predicting that some economic suffering is in store for Americans — but with assurances that it’ll all be worth it in the end. In a way, they’re doing a version of what Tucker Carlson did when he visited Moscow last year and said it was “so much nicer” than any American city. They’re essentially encouraging their viewers to embrace a lower standard of living — and to view it as an act of service toward MAGA’s grand vision for the country. This certainly wasn’t the message coming from Fox News in the lead-up to the election. But faced with the reality of Trump’s policies, it appears to be the best spin that some conservatives can muster.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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