The US economy is sinking fast as statistics released show that the first quarter of 2025 saw the economy shrink by 0.3%.
When Trump took over as president, he inherited an economy on the mend. The COVID-19 pandemic was “over” (it’ll never fully go away from a medical standpoint), lockdowns had ended, markets had spent a year in a growth trajectory, and so on. If anything, the economic engines were right on the verge of firing on all cylinders. Of course, as the saying and book title goes, “Everything Trump touches dies”.
Right after Trump’s takeover of the presidency, he immediately got to work completely burying the US economy. The most random things got hit with completely uncalled for tariffs, the stock markets responded by undergoing multiple crashes, international bridges were burned, and, more recently, the notorious “Big Beautiful Bill” which threatened to unleash even greater harm on the US economy, passed by razor thin margins ironically in time for Independence Day.
It’s impossible to overstate just how much damage Trump has unleashed economically onto the US and the rest of the world. Vladimir Putin couldn’t ask for a better result from his underling to torch the US from top to bottom.
One of the things on the minds of many is whether the US has been damaged so severely by Trump’s completely insane policies that we are currently living in the Trump recession. Well, those numbers take a while to come out, but we do know some numbers that did come out: the first quarter of the US economy’s performance. Apparently, it shrank by 0.3%. From CNBC:
The U.S. economy contracted in the first three months of 2025 on an import surge at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term in office as he wages a potentially costly trade war.
Gross domestic product, a sum of all the goods and services produced from January through March, fell at a 0.3% annualized pace, according to a Commerce Department report Wednesday adjusted for seasonal factors and inflation. This was the first quarter of negative growth since Q1 of 2022.
Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for a gain of 0.4% after GDP rose by 2.4% in the fourth quarter of 2024. However, over the past day or so some Wall Street economists changed their outlook to negative growth, largely because of an unexpected rise in imports as companies and consumers sought to get ahead of the Trump tariffs implemented in early April.
If you are looking for an official word on whether or not the Trump recession is here, well, the first half of the requirements for such has already been officially filled. The technical definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of a shrinking economy. So, if the economy shrinks again in the second quarter, then the US would officially meet the definition of a recession.
The above article also mentions soaring imports. That likely has to do with businesses rushing to get orders in before the Trump tariffs trigger. This before prices would have to go up, triggering inflation so that American’s can pay for all of these stupid and unnecessary tariffs.
The thing with all of this is that this is just another sign that Trump could start becoming more desperate in his bad ways of viewing the world. Trump has already unleashed enormous harm on a number of levels and as the US economy continues to sink faster (especially with the effects of the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” still forthcoming), he could very well resort to even more desperate and destructive decisions moving forward. How that would ultimately manifest obviously remains to be seen, but since we are already witnessing, among other things, arresting political opponents, martial law being effectively declared, and even assassinations of Trump opponents, so the situation is already pretty ugly in the US as it is. I don’t even want to think about how much worse it could be.
Indeed, economic forecasting isn’t looking good for the US economy in the second quarter. From TD:
The global economy continues to ride the tariff rollercoaster, and our economic forecast hinges on assumptions about where the train cars will end up. Tariffs are likely to come down in the coming months, but remain far higher than prior to the election.
The U.S. economic outlook has dimmed slightly this year as policy uncertainty and higher costs weigh on spending. Fed cuts later this year will provide a boost, and momentum is set to pick up next year fueled by tax cuts and a tariff truce.
Yeah, things are continuing to look worse and worse in the US and I can only see things getting even uglier with digital rights being swept up into all of this in the process.
