It’s no small feat to tank the $29 trillion U.S. economy in just seven weeks, but Donald Trump appears to be on the cusp of pulling it off. Plunging stock markets have lost some $4 trillion, Americans’ retirement accounts are shriveling, the president’s trade war is set to raise prices on everything from cars to avocados, and recession alarms are blinking red.
Opinion
Dana Milbank The Washington Post
Trump’s ad hoc presidency is destroying the economy — and a lot more
Trump eases the fears of jittery Americans by turning the White House driveway into a Tesla showroom.
March 14, 2025
But this week, Trump took action to ease the fears of jittery Americans. He told them to buy Teslas.
“It’s a great product, as good as it gets,” Trump said from the White House lawn, where an assortment of the automaker’s vehicles was on display. In his hand, Trump held a Tesla sales pitch: “Teslas can be purchased as low as $299/month.”
“They have one which is $35,000, which is pretty low,” he suggested.
“Teslas aren’t all expensive,” agreed Tesla CEO Elon Musk, standing at Trump’s side wearing a black MAGA cap. “And I just wanted to thank the president for his support.”
Trump, examining one of the cars, reacted with wonder. “Wow!” said Trump. “This is a different panel. Everything’s computer!”
Tesla’s shares have lost half of their value over the previous three months, erasing $800 billion in its market value — as consumers around the world shun the vehicles, horrified by Musk’s promotion of far-right figures and his aimless sabotage of the federal government and savage slashing of its workforce. Trump, who said he bought a Tesla Model S (listed at $108,990 on his sales sheet) to show his support, promised to label those who vandalize Tesla sales lots as “domestic terrorists” (he previously said people were “illegally” boycotting Tesla and later said the protesters are “paid agitators”) and threatened: “We’re going to catch you, and you’re going to go through hell.”
Even Fox News’s Peter Doocy was skeptical about the wisdom of Trump’s pitch: “What is your message, President Trump, buying a new car while there are some folks who will see this clip at home and they are struggling with their retirement accounts, down at the moment, uncertainty about work ahead?”
“Well, I think they’re going to do great,” Trump said, before steering the subject back to Tesla’s “incredible” car plant in Texas.
The peasants are struggling? Then let them drive Teslas! Markets continued their swoon after Trump’s event, but Tesla shares were up more than 5 percent.
It was a grotesque sight: Trump using the awesome powers of the presidency to make the world’s richest man even richer — and to threaten government action against those who stand in his way.
This is precisely why we are in the mess we’re in.
Trump is running an ad hoc presidency. There are no rules. The law is strictly optional. And Trump, unbound by both, administers one shock to the system after another. There is no predictability to his actions. Business leaders and consumers have no idea what’s coming next and, therefore, have no way to plan — and that, as much as anything, is what is wrecking the economy.
Trump has unilaterally shattered the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal he negotiated with much fanfare just five years ago, at the time calling it “the largest, fairest, most balanced and modern trade agreement ever achieved.” He’s slapping huge tariffs on Mexico, Canada and Europe and is making wild threats to raise them higher. At different points this week, he threatened a 50 percent tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum and 200 percent on European alcohol — and our erstwhile allies are retaliating. Trump has similarly shocked the world’s security, destroying U.S. soft power (the administration announced this week that it had canceled 83 percent of foreign-aid programs) and chaotically cutting off military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine before restoring it days later.
One minute, Trump is declining to rule out a recession; the next, he’s saying “I don’t see it at all.” One minute, Trump is vowing to protect Americans’ Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The next, Musk is saying these entitlements are “the big one to eliminate.” (Newly installed private-equity executives at Social Security can see to it.) One minute, congressional Republicans are saying they will never pass a government spending bill that adds to the deficit without major spending cuts; the next minute, they do exactly that.
This week alone, the Trump administration eliminated half the staff at the Education Department — overnight — while making cuts that will cause as many as 2 million people to lose health insurance. After campaigning on a promise to make the nation’s capital safer, Trump successfully pushed the House to pass legislation that will all but force the District of Columbia to fire police officers. The Environmental Protection Agency terminated $20 billion in grants that had already been awarded to local communities to help reduce Americans’ energy bills, drawing a rebuke from a federal judge on Wednesday who suggested the White House had offered no justification for canceling the program other than that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin “doesn’t like it.” The administration ousted the top lawyer at the IRS because he objected to Musk’s team accessing taxpayers’ private records.
And that’s just a sampling of the chaos. The Wall Street Journal reported that senior White House officials “have received panicked calls from chief executives and lobbyists, who have urged the administration to calm jittery markets by outlining a more predictable tariff agenda,” and that conservative economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin called it a “horrific start for the economic policy team.” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told The Post’s Jeff Stein and Isaac Arnsdorf that business leaders “are nervous, bordering on unnerved, by the policies that are being implemented. … There’s overwhelming uncertainty and increasing discomfort with how policy is being implemented.”
There was a time, back when Republicans still believed in the free market, that avoiding such “overwhelming uncertainty” would have been the highest priority of government. “The role of government,” Milton Friedman, the celebrated conservative economist, wrote in 1956, “is to do something that the market cannot do for itself, namely, to determine, arbitrate and enforce the rules of the game.”
Friedrich Hayek, the iconic 20th-century champion of free markets, explained it further in “The Road to Serfdom” in 1944: “Nothing distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law. Stripped of all technicalities, this means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand — rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge.”
Under the rule of law, Hayek wrote, “the government is prevented from stultifying individual efforts by ad hoc action.” For people to make plans, “they must be able to predict actions of the state which may affect these plans.”
But the Trump administration is acting as though there are no rules of the game — and Republican leaders are cheering it on. “What President Trump is doing: I think of it sort of like when you’re playing billiards,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters. “You go on the table and the balls are racked, right? And you hit it as hard as you can. This is many people’s strategy in the game: You hit as hard as you can, to break up the balls on the table and send them to spread."
Yep. Violate and terminate the federal government’s legal contracts with no justification. Violate federal law and sack federal workers while leaving them no recourse. Abuse the power of the state to promote friends of the president and persecute critics. It’s all good!
On Thursday, a federal judge ordered the administration to re-offer jobs to many of the 30,000 probationary workers it fired, after previously ruling that the firings broke the law. On Wednesday, a judge slapped a restraining order on the administration for an executive order that, she said, sent “chills down my spine”: punishing the law firm Perkins Coie because of its work for Democrats against Trump. Trump had unilaterally revoked security clearances for lawyers at the firm, blocked their access to federal buildings and stripped the firm’s clients of their government contracts. On Tuesday, another federal judge blocked a Trump scheme to eliminate more than $600 million in grants for teacher training, without justification, at a time when the country already has a nationwide teacher shortage.
Already, federal judges have blocked an executive action by Trump at least 45 times since he has taken office. (The New York Times keeps a handy tally.)
The courts will take a long time to resolve Trump’s lawlessness. But the chaos has had an immediate impact on the economy. At a briefing this week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt made a point of giving the first question to a friendly journalist, the conservative podcaster Saagar Enjeti, only for him to ask about the stock market. “There’s a lot of concern for a lot of Americans right now about the state of the economy,” Enjeti said, asking whether the White House could “assure Americans today that there’s not going to be a recession.” “If people are looking for certainty,” Leavitt proposed, “they should look at the record of this president.”
Yes, let’s do that.
Here’s Trump’s DOGE boss, Musk, using his federal powers to further his private fortune again, telling the Polish foreign minister to “Be quiet, small man,” when the minister complained about Musk’s threats to cut off his Starlink service to Ukraine; Secretary of State Marco Rubio backed up Musk. Here’s Musk calling Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona), a combat veteran and former NASA astronaut, “a traitor” because Kelly visited Ukraine and criticized the Trump administration’s “‘screw you, go it alone’ foreign policy.” And here’s Musk baselessly blaming Tesla protests on George Soros.
Here’s Trump naming those noted patrons of the arts, Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo, to the Kennedy Center board. Here’s Trump’s FCC chief threatening action against YouTube TV’s parent unless it agrees to carry a particular religious network. Here’s the Army Corps of Engineers acknowledging that it knew that Trump’s wasteful order to release water from two California reservoirs would not get water to the southern part of the state as Trump had promised.
Here’s the government running out of cleaning fluid in food safety labs and suspending efforts to identify U.S. soldiers killed in combat and canceling contracts for PTSD research for veterans. Here’s the government eliminating grants to study vaccine use at a time when measles is spreading and bird flu is threatening, and reluctantly dropping the nomination of a guy who wrongly claims vaccines cause autism to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Here’s the administration disbanding panels that make sure the government’s economic statistics are reliable, killing $1 billion in funds to help schools and food banks get food from local farmers, blocking affordable-housing funds and eliminating top science jobs at NASA (a sometime rival of Musk’s SpaceX). And here’s the administration concocting an ad hoc justification for deporting Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, who has a green card and is married to a U.S. citizen — because Khalil, who committed no crime, participated in Gaza protests.
Here’s Trump calling the European Union “hostile and abusive” and treating our friend and ally Canada as an enemy, vowing to hit it with economic warfare that “will be read about in History Books for many years to come!” and insisting that it become the 51st state. Here he is threatening to oust Rep. Tom Massie (R-Kentucky), for refusing to abandon his anti-deficit position even as all other House Republicans did. (“I guess deficits only matter when we’re in the minority,” Massie observed.)
And here’s the White House assuring Republicans that it will (illegally) impound funds that Congress authorizes in order to eliminate duly enacted programs.
That’s just a sampling of Trump’s latest assaults on the “rules of the game.”
In this swirl of uncertainty, it’s impossible for businesses and consumers to make plans with any confidence. This is why forecasts increasingly see a recession — about which Trump administration officials are, characteristically, sending confusing messages.
Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, said there are merely “some blips in the data.”
Trump, who has for years taken credit for stock market records, now says that “markets are going to go up and they’re going to go down.” And he blames all bad news on his predecessor, because “Biden gave us a horrible economy.” (President Joe Biden presided over 48 straight months of job growth, and there was nary a whisper of recession when he left office, as the economy executed its “soft landing” into low inflation.)
The explanations are as ad hoc as the administration’s actions. When the January jobs report came out last month showing employment growth of 143,000 jobs and a 4 percent unemployment rate, Leavitt declared: “Today’s jobs report reveals the Biden economy was far worse than anyone thought.” When the February jobs report came out this month showing a nearly identical employment growth of 151,000 jobs and a 4.1 percent unemployment rate, Leavitt proclaimed: “February’s jobs report was good news for America.”
Trump was supposed to reassure corporate leaders this week at a meeting with the Business Roundtable. But just seven minutes into the event — as the moderator asked Trump, “What is your strategy to lower the overall cost of living?” — reporters and cameras were kicked out of the event, which was supposed to be open to the press.
Fortunately, the president was able to make his most important point before that happened. “Elon Musk has been doing, really, a fantastic job,” Trump said — and his Teslas are “beautiful.”