Paul Waldman was one of my favorite reporters at The Washington Post. He left and started his blog, “The Cross Section.” In this post, he says that most of Trump’s economic setbacks are the result of his own disastrous policies, not forces beyond his control.

I do think Walkman is unfair to Hoover. Unlike Trump, Hoover had a distinguished career and tried to make the right decisions for the right reason.

Waldman writes:

As spring arrives and the cherry blossoms bloom around Washington, Donald Trump’s approval ratings are officially in the toilet:

There are many reasons why he keeps falling lower and lower, but the single most important is likely that Trump has utterly failed on what the foolish and gullible believed was his great strength: the economy. While he does a lot of distasteful but symbolic things like demolishing the East Wing and plastering his name on everything in sight, all of Trump’s most consequential screwups and authoritarian abuses have an economic component. And they all make things worse.

In fact, you’d have to go back to Herbert Hoover to find a president whose decisions were so directly and willfully disastrous for the economy. That’s not because this is the worst economy since the Great Depression; it isn’t, not yet anyway. But in all the downturns and crises we’ve had over the last century, the causes were largely outside of the president’s control.

Those presidents might have made some different decisions or found a way to improve things more quickly, but one wouldn’t say that George W. Bush created the economic crisis of 2008, or that the inflation that crossed the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter happened only because of the decisions they made. Most of the judgments we make of them in retrospect were about how they responded once the crisis arrived. They may have been blamed when things turned bad, but one could argue in every case that it wasn’t really their fault. The latest example is from 2022, when inflation spiked all over the world and here at home Joe Biden got the blame.

But what’s happening now is different. Consider the major policy initiatives of Trump’s second term:

  • Tariffs: Trump believes fervently in the power of tariffs to produce boundless prosperity, and so he has imposed an ever-shifting program of tariffs on foreign materials and products. The nearly universal conclusion of economists is that this policy has been a failure; not only hasn’t it created the manufacturing boom Trump promised, it has increased prices for American consumers and led our trading partners to begin constructing a new global trade system to circumvent the U.S.
  • Immigration: Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration — both deporting immigrants already here and making it all but impossible for new immigrants to come — has been an economic disaster. As a Brookings Institution report notes, “Reduced migration will dampen growth in the labor force, consumer spending, and gross domestic product” in years to come. Multiple economic sectors from construction to agriculture are facing labor shortages, and job growth has slowed to a crawl. And because the crackdown is motivated by naked animus toward all immigrants but especially non-white ones, it extends to a large and growing number of policy areas. For instance, the Small Business Administration just announced that it will cut off loans to green card holders, despite the fact that immigrants start more businesses and create more jobs than native-born Americans. One could hardly imagine a dumber economic own-goal, done for no reason other than the fact that the Trump administration hates immigrants.
  • Energy: Trump has waged an outright war on renewable energy, one of the most dynamic and fast-growing sectors of the world’s economy. As a result, we’ve ceded the green manufacturing sector to China, which now makes most of the world’s wind turbines, solar panels, and lithium-ion batteries. While the Chinese electric car industry is leaping ahead, ours is pulling back, a direct consequence of Trump’s decision to kill EV subsidies. In its lust to prop up the fossil fuel industry, the administration is literally forcing utilities against their will to keep coal plants open so customers can pay more for electricity and get dirtier air in the bargain. And speaking of fossil fuels…
  • The Iran War: We don’t know how long this war will go on, but the economic effects are already being felt. Gas has now crossed $4 a gallon (which will cause a broad increase in prices for all kinds of goods), farmers are facing a spike in the cost of fertilizer, and as Paul Krugman points out, the real effects of the constriction in oil supplies haven’t even been felt yet, which is why some energy analysts are predicting that this could be a worse crisis than the oil shock of the 1970s. The Pentagon wants an additional $200 billion to fund the war, and congressional Republicans are considering health care cuts to pay for it. There are now serious worries that the war could produce a global recession.

He’s a business guy, he knows the economy and stuff

To call this a record of economic incompetence would be too kind. In every case, Trump chose to do what he did for the most stupid, petty, and malicious reasons, despite the fact that the economic effects his decisions would produce were obvious and predicted by anyone with half a brain. It’s especially notable given that in his first term, Trump operated with a kind of benign neglect on many economic fronts, the consequence of which was that before he utterly screwed up his response to the covid pandemic, things were going pretty well. Yes, he restricted immigration and imposed some tariffs, but it was on a much smaller scale. For the first three years of his term, job growth was reasonable, inflation was low, and the economy largely rolled along.

Which probably reinforced the widespread and completely false notion that because Trump was a business guy who knows business stuff, he would be skilled at managing the economy. Even if Trump had been a traditional business leader and not a scam artist with a checkered record of successes and spectacular failures (including multiple bankruptcies), that wouldn’t have meant he knew anything about macroeconomic policy; as I’ve been shouting for far too many years, government and business are not remotely alike, and the skills and knowledge one needs to succeed in one do not transfer to the other.

Yet despite the crushing weight of all available evidence, one still heard voters in 2024 say that because Trump knows business, he could come into office, business away all that inflation (which was largely gone by the time of the election anyway), and bring us to a new age of prosperity. The fact that people thought that is a tribute to the propagandistic power of repetition: Say a thing often enough, no matter how ridiculous it is, and at least some people will believe it. (The same is true of the idea that Trump is a great deal-maker, when in fact he is the world’s worst negotiator.)

To their credit, Americans are now giving Trump dreadful ratings on the economy; in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll (which was taken a week ago, before the national average for gas topped $4 a gallon), his economic approval was only 29%, worse than Joe Biden’s at the height of the 2022 inflation:

It would be nice if this were the result of the American public’s discerning judgment, but it almost certainly isn’t. That’s not to say that a majority of them favor fascism, because they don’t. But to drive your approval as low as Trump’s has gotten, you have to really muck up the economy. And on that score, we haven’t seen anything yet.