Just seven weeks into his second term, Donald Trump was asked about the possibility of his economic agenda creating a downturn, at least in the short term. “Are you expecting a recession this year?” Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo asked. The president responded to the question with a great many words. None of them was “no.”
“I hate to predict things like that,” Trump replied, weeks after publicly conceding that some Americans would might soon feel “some pain” from his policies.
In March, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick added that Trump’s agenda might very well lead to a recession, though he believed it’d be “worth it” in the long run.
Six months later, Scott Bessent, Trump’s treasury secretary, offered some notable comments of his own on the state of the nation’s economy. Axios reported:
Some portions of the economy are already in a recession, and others could fall into one without more interest rate cuts, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on CNN Sunday. … Asked if the U.S. risks a recession if the Fed doesn’t keep cutting rates, Bessent told CNN’s Jake Tapper, ‘I think we are in good shape, but I think that there are sectors of the economy that are in recession.’
As is always the case, context matters: The Cabinet secretary made these comments while arguing in support of additional interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve.
The bottom line, however, remains the same: According to Trump’s treasury secretary, as the first year of the president’s second term nears its end, the U.S. economy isn’t just struggling in some areas — there are some “sectors of the economy” that are already “in recession.”
This is not the White House’s official line. On the contrary, Trump pushes the opposite line on a very regular basis.
“We have the best economy we’ve ever had,” the president declared a month ago. “We had the best economy in my first term, but we have an economy that’s blowing it away.” During his Asia trip, the Republican repeated the line several times, insisting that American eyes have never before seen an economy as strong as the current one in the U.S. Unfortunately for Trump, not only does his treasury secretary apparently disagree, but the public also seems to know better. The latest CBS News/YouGov poll found that 60% of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, while 51% said his economic agenda has made them worse off. Plenty of other recent national surveys have pointed in the same direction, including a newly released CNN poll, which found 61% of the public believes the Republican’s policies have made the economy worse, not better. Or put another way, that “pain” the president warned us about in March is now being noticed by much of the country, his boasts of a “golden age” notwithstanding.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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