Axios Economic Reporter Pours Cold Water On Trump Blaming Biden For Bad GDP Numbers, Offers Warning For Future

MSNBC’s Christina Ruffini asked Axios’s chief economic correspondent, Neil Irwin, on Wednesday if President Donald Trump’s blaming of ex-President Joe Biden for weak GDP numbers this past quarter carried any weight.

“Neil, I also want to ask you about the GDP numbers. You know, they were down, but that was in anticipation of Trump’s tariffs. But I don’t think anyone thought we’d see a 145% tariff on China. Do you think this is the tip of a recession?” Ruffini asked, adding:

Are we expecting more contraction in the next quarter? And you heard the president blame those numbers on Biden and said that was what happened before I came into office. That’s, you know, lingering effects from Bidenomics. Is there any truth to that?

“Yeah, look, there is in the sense that what happens in the first quarter of a presidential term, it’s hard to chalk too much up to the president in normal times,” Irwin explained, adding:

So, he only became president 20 days into this quarter. It ended March 31st. So it’s not really a ton of time for his policies to have much effect, normally. But, what seems to have happened this quarter with GDP is that with imports, companies were front-running imports. They said, there’s gonna be big tariffs coming.

So I’m gonna import as much stuff as I can, maybe even on exports in anticipation of retaliation, they try and export more. And that’s what led us to this negative number, a 1.5% annual rate of decrease in imports, which is not something you see very often. So on the one hand, it’s kind of backward-looking. It doesn’t tell us about the underlying strength of the economy.

On the other hand, Liberation Day, those big reciprocal tariffs were announced on April 2nd. That’s two days after this quarter ended. So to the degree we’ve seen market fluctuations, a decline in business confidence, consumer confidence, all these things we’ve been talking about for the entire month of April, those all started after this data ends. And so what that holds for the summer and beyond is anybody’s guess.

Notably, a recession is usually defined by two consecutive quarters of negative GPD growth, meaning one more negative quarter would officially signal a recession.

Watch the clip above via MSNBC.