BREAKING: The Trump Economy

Trump's tanking the economy faster and more recognizably even to his own voters than expected

Time literally looms ominously over President-elect Donald Trump on Dec. 12, 2024, as he rings the New York Stock Exchange opening bell…of doom. (Screengrab / AP video.)

Well, that didn’t take long.

U.S. employers reported that they laid off more people last month than they have since, well, the last time Pres. Donald Trump was president.

In February, starting just after Trump took office, U.S. employers laid off 172,017 people. That’s a 245% increase from January layoffs. It’s the most layoffs since July 2020, at the height of Covid.

It’s just one economic indicator that’s suddenly blinking red. And much of it is directly attributable to the election of a president who campaigned on fixing an economy that was doing not too terribly, thanks very much.

Billionaire Elon Musk accounts for more than a third of the February layoffs. The federal government laid off 62,242 people, according to the layoff data reported by the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

If federal layoffs increase, as Trump has threatened, the job situation could make for a challenging and gray Christmas.

The new numbers are the worst February layoff numbers since 2009, at the height of the global economic meltdown, another crisis also precipitated by a Republican president.

According to Andrew Challenger, of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, “With the impact of the Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] actions, as well as canceled Government contracts, fear of trade wars, and bankruptcies, job cuts soared in February.”

But it’s not just those 62,242 terminated federal workers who are due to Trump and Musk. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, “Downstream impacts of DOGE, such as loss of funding to private Non-Profits, led to another 894 job cut plans.”

The new numbers don’t account for new hiring. But that picture isn’t cheery, either. ADP yesterday reported that the U.S. economy saw a net increase last month of only 77,000 jobs.

That’s a massive drop from the 148,000 expected new jobs for February, and a massiver drop from the 186,000 created in January, the last mostly-Biden month.

And what drove that unexpected softness in new hirings? The sector that includes trade, transportation, and utilities — all of them impacted by tariffs (utilities are affected by cross-border sales with Canada of electricity and fossil fuels). That sector, in just one month, shrank by 33,000 jobs.

Small businesses, with 50 or fewer employees, also shed jobs, losing 12,000 workers. Official Labor Department numbers are expected tomorrow, assuming the Labor Department hasn’t eliminated all of its own jobs.

ADP’s chief economist, Nela Richardson, said, “Our data, combined with other recent indicators, suggests a hiring hesitancy among employers as they assess the economic climate ahead.” You don’t say! (Trump, specifically, is what you don’t say.)

Meanwhile, we just got another dire warning from those wild-eyed panickers at the Atlanta Federal Reserve. The Atlanta Fed has a much-watched computer model that estimates the gross domestic product (GDP) in real time.

On Monday, it flashed into the red redder than it’s been since early 2021, when Trump reluctantly agreed to stop doing president things. According to the Atlanta Fed’s model, the annualized growth of the U.S. economy was in negative territory, -2.8% ,on Monday.

Here’s Reuters, guaranteeing its ejection from the White House Press Pool:

"Trumpcession".

If you haven't heard the term before, you will now.

Nor is the Atlanta Fed the only flashing red light. A top official at the International Chamber of Commerce warned on Tuesday that if Trump sticks to his tariffs, “this could be the start of a downward spiral that puts us in 1930s trade-war territory.”

The 1930s, of course, was the Great Depression. Or, as it would be known in the 2020s, the Great Trumpression.

And the U.S. dollar may no longer be a safe place to put whatever money you may still have if Trump does make the economy go man-boobs up. Deutsche Bank warned clients this week that the dollar may lose its traditional safe-haven status.

After the Peterson Institute estimated that tariffs — whichever ones Trump was threatening that day — would cost the average American household more than $1,200 a year, Moody’s Chief Economist Mark Zandi effectively agreed.

But Zandi said it’s not just the tariffs — it’s the not knowing which Trump brain fart is wafting their way that’s really choking Wall Street. “The longer the uncertainty hangs around, the more likely the economy’s going to start choking,” Zandi said. “I think it’s going to do a lot of damage.”

Reuters notes that economic inequality is soaring in the U.S. And it turns out that putting all our expensive eggs in one basket of rich assholes was a bad idea.

Specifically, the top 10% richest people in the country now account for half of all consumer spending. Consumer spending is the biggest driver of the U.S. economy. Which means if our rich overlords stop spending, we’re all more fucked than we’re already fucked.

Because, as Reuters notes, recent Wall Street stock-market downturns could lead even the 10% richest of us to cut back on spending. Which, of course, would tank the economy further.

All of this matters for two reasons. One, because people are going to get hurt by the damaged man haunting the White House. But also, it will ultimately hurt him.

My greatest fear has been that Trump would wipe his fingerprints off his economic damage; blame liberal mayors, undocumented immigrants, Democratic governors, or transgender athletes participating in the economy.

But Trump has been so ham-handed that people already blame him for the high price of ham and everything else. Puck reports that young dudes, who went for Trump by a 14-point margin — because the only alternative was voting for Vice President Kamala Harris, a sane person — are discovering that Trump is bad at economying.

In January, 62% of dudes under 30 approved of Trump’s handling of the Bidenconomy. Just one month later, by mid-February, only 48% approved of Trump’s handling of the Trumpconomy.

And inflation? Trump’s bro-proval numbers went down like a SpaceX rocket, from 55% to 40%. See, Newsfuckers? They’re learning!

As the New Republic notes, Trump promised that the economic suffering of 90% of Americans will be “A little disturbance, but we’re okay with that. It won’t be much.”

If that sounds familiar, five years ago this month, Trump said that inflation Covid “is going to disappear. One day — it's like a miracle — it will disappear.”

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TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and Air America Radio, and has also worked at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Young Turks.