Economists are getting a bit louder now in their warnings that the Trump shutdown, if it continues, could very well trigger a recession. You can't stop paychecks to 800,000 people and expect them and their families to be fine; you can't close government offices and major tourist destinations indefinitely and simply ignore the economic hit to businesses that rely on those things being open. Reports are that Trump is still willing to continue this particular tantrum indefinitely, if only because he doesn't have the foggiest clue how to get back out of it without looking "weak," but "indefinitely" isn't an option here. The clock is ticking.
“You can take the ruler out right now and calculate the exact impact from missed paychecks and contracts and you don’t have to go many months to get to zero growth,” said Torsten Slok, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank. “But this is not just some linear event. It can get exponentially worse in very unpredictable ways, from government workers quitting, to strikes, to companies not going public. It’s no longer just a political sideshow, it’s a real recession risk.”
Team Trump has been putting the screws to the economy in multiple ways this last year. Their escalating tariff-fueled trade war is doing damage to farmers especially. The administration's penchant for baffling decision-making and unannounced upheavals of long-standing prior policies has done the markets no favors. Compounding all of this together, it is looking increasingly likely that Donald J. Trump and his top advisers could manage to throw a previously strong economy into recession, and it will have taken them only a stitch over two years to do it.
Right now, the only advisers who have a realistic chance at stopping Trump from intentionally throwing the U.S. economy into recession are the people he sees on Fox News, and the Fox News policy as of this morning continued to be a burn-it-down, own-the-libs insistence that Trump ought to do whatever damage needs doing in order to satisfy the xenophobia-obsessed conservative id. That may end up costing the nation a fortune, but none of the people in front of the cameras seem terribly concerned about that.