A dismal jobs report affirms earlier warnings about the economic impact of Donald Trump’s tariffs, immigration restrictions, and DOGE-led firings.
At the start of last week, I watched a big cargo ship stacked high with containers enter New York Harbor. As the vessel approached the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, it appeared to stop, but that was an illusion created by its size and the slowness of its advance. Fifteen minutes later, it had managed to push its way under the bridge.
Throughout the years, I’ve often compared the U.S. economy to a giant freighter that is tough to deflect from its course, and, since Donald Trump was elected for a second time, this metaphor has become particularly apt. Even as he subjected the economy, a colossus that generates more than thirty trillion dollars’ worth of goods and services annually, to a one-two-three punch of high tariffs (which raise prices), immigration restrictions (which reduce the labor supply), and DOGE-led job cuts in the federal government, things seemed, until recently, to be moving slowly ahead and defying the direst predictions about the consequences of MAGAnomics.
