President Donald Trump’s economic policies have already cost him the confidence of a majority of Americans. The stock markets and consumer confidence plunged last week—and the fall continued Monday morning, with markets hitting lows not seen since September.
Economic experts are sounding the alarm, warning that inflation and joblessness are set to rise, and demand for goods and services is poised to drop dramatically. All this comes just days before Trump’s massive and deeply controversial tariffs package is scheduled to take effect.
Fears of stagflation are “rippling through Wall Street and Main Street,” Axios reported.
President Donald Trump, however, has decided to mock all this.
Aboard Air Force One on Sunday evening, the President was asked if he is worried about stagflation—an economy that has high inflation, high unemployment, and stagnant demand for goods and services. Trump brushed off the growing fears (see video below).
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“I haven’t heard that term in years,” Trump claimed, despite having campaigned on the false claim of stagflation just last year.
“I don’t know anything about it,” the President continued, using an increasingly favorite phrase he is turning to repeatedly to escape criticism.
“This country is going to be more successful than it ever was,” he insisted, despite numerous economic indicators to the contrary. “It’s gonna boom. We’re gonna have Boomtown USA. We’re gonna boom.”
Many economists, and a majority of Americans, disagree.
Fifty-one percent of Americans now disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, according to a YouGov/Yahoo poll. Newsweek reports that number is even higher than during the height of COVID during the first Trump administration, when 49% disapproved of his handling of the economy.
A majority (52%) believe the nation is currently in a recession or heading toward one, while seven in ten Americans rate today’s economic climate as fair or poor.
Meanwhile, top economists warn it is about to get worse.
“I’m raising my odds that a recession will begin sometime this year to 40%, up from 15% at the start of the year,” wrote Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, on Sunday morning. “Last week’s economic data were disconcerting, including the slide in consumer confidence, punk consumer spending, and persistently high inflation.”
Zandi put the blame squarely on President Trump.
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“The intensifying trade war and DOGE cuts are behind all this and with last week’s announcement of big tariff increases on vehicle imports and the coming reciprocal tariffs, things are sure to get worse,” he added.
Zandi is looking for more information when the March jobs report drops Friday morning. Regardless of what that looks like, however, he said, “as long as the tariffs and DOGE cuts continue to mount, so too will the odds of recession.”
CNBC averaged forecasts for inflation and gross domestic product (GDP) from fourteen economists, the financial news network reported Monday morning.
“Policy uncertainty and new sweeping tariffs from the Trump administration are combining to create a stagflationary outlook for the U.S. economy in the latest CNBC Rapid Update,” CNBC reported, which “sees first quarter growth registering an anemic 0.3% compared with the 2.3% reported in the fourth quarter of 2024. It would be the weakest growth since 2022 as the economy emerged from the pandemic.”
That would be better than the forecast from the Atlanta Fed, which forecasted negative growth this year, at minus 2.8%, meaning the economy is expected to shrink.
As far as Trump claiming to not know what stagflation is, last year during the campaign he repeatedly claimed—falsely—that the economy was experiencing stagflation.
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