For all his success in imposing his will on the federal government, Donald Trump may be deliberately engineering his own political downfall by mishandling the very job he was most certainly elected to perform: stewardship of the economy. The risks he’s running were impressively summarized by Washington Post economics columnist Heather Long:

President Donald Trump is pushing the economy to a breaking point with sweeping tariffs and rapid cuts to immigration and the federal workforce. There is growing fear of not just a recession but stagflation, a frightful situation — not seen in the United States since the 1970s — in which the economy contracts and people lose jobs but prices remain high.

This is a self-inflicted wound from Trump. Many of his economic advisers, including Larry Kudlow and Stephen Moore, are urging him to show restraint on tariffs. But Trump is set to unleash the biggest increase in tariffs since the Depression era on Wednesday. He’s calling it “Liberation Day.” It may turn out to be Stagflation Day.

“Stagflation” (an economy characterized by both rapidly rising prices and slow growth) is the horrible bogeyman that economic policy wonks scare one another with around the campfire late at night. In theory, it’s not supposed to happen because fiscal and monetary policies tend to push the economy........

© Daily Intelligencer