How Trump squandered the economic recovery

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How Trump squandered the economic recovery
In January 2025, the president was set up for success. Instead, he blew it

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published May 31, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) When Donald Trump was 13, his father caught him with a hidden cache of switchblades. Fred Trump, according to Tony Schwartz, who ghostwrote the president’s book “The Art of the Deal,” was “a very brutal guy” — a martinet of a father who shipped his son off to military school. A poor student and apparently not much of a leader, Donald Trump still managed to fail up into a prestigious position that came with the most coveted honor: leading the parade down Fifth Avenue in a flamboyant cadet uniform.

That pattern has continued throughout his life.

Trump may not be the smartest president in America’s history, but he is certainly the luckiest. That’s not to say that he doesn’t have his troubles. In fact, he’s constantly mired in scandal, shame and disgrace, and has been his entire life. Still, like a political Houdini, he manages to wriggle out of every jam, usually leaving a pile of wreckage in his wake. That single characteristic may be the key to his popularity. To some people, it makes Trump an almost mystical figure — a person who never has to pay any consequences. In fact, he’s always rewarded in the end with even more fame, fortune and power.

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That did not happen, and it’s because of Trump’s lifelong propensity to take a gift horse and punch it in the mouth. He can’t help himself.

As Vox’s Eric Levitz recently pointed out, “Trump could have presided over a pristine economy, if he’d simply refrained from increasing import prices, reducing labor-force growth, and launching a war of choice near the aorta of the global energy market. One could call this the ‘We had a good thing’ account of Trump-era economic performance, after Mike Ehrmantraut’s much-memed scolding of the self-sabotaging drug lord Walter White in a late season of the AMC series ‘Breaking Bad.’” .....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/05/31/how-trump-squandered-the-economic-recovery/