How much is Donald Trump costing America’s economy? | The Economist

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]The American economy has done really quite well, both in the long run or the medium run, but also even since Donald Trump took over and that feels quite odd given the forecasts of problems from tariffs and from migration The way we found to resolve this paradox was to realise that actually the American economy was really set up for an extraordinary year in 2025 There was a strong baseline going in and a number of boosts, even ahead of that, that were much stronger than expected coming through and those are the first of those blue bars that we have up on the chart there So starting from the baseline, which we pull out of pre-Trump forecasts, we then see that actually there’s a big boost from tax cuts, so there's more of that yet in 2026, but in 2025 there's already some A boost from stockmarkets doing very well, which is partly fuelled by optimism about Trump to a degree, but really mostly fuelled by the extraordinary advances in AI and then, even beyond that, a specific kind of data-centre boom that we label AI capital expenditure that you can see in the numbers too And so, off that baseline we reckon, were it not for the MAGA tax, were it not for everything we’re going to get to, America was set up to be homing in on almost 3% GDP growth and instead what happened in 2025 was a lot closer to 2% So the gap between the two is about three-quarters of a percentage point Yes Let's just... just to keep it simple, the American economy would have grown, you think, about three-quarters of a percentage point faster to tell us about very briefly Indeed, and so that’s one way of doing it The other way is just to look straight at what did Donald Trump do and how damaging was it?

[00:01:25]And this is pulling together external estimates, our own crunching of the numbers and so on We really pulled out three that we thought mattered The first was tariffs, we talked about those to death Those have, we reckon, genuinely contracted the economy We've used an estimate there of 0.2 percentage points-ish but something pretty material Just as important if not more than the tariffs, we reckon, was the immigration drag, that border shutdown, mass deportations, talented people not coming in, all of that Then finally, in our calculations actually, the largest of that was the uncertainty So the sheer churn, the sheer chaos and if you look at American business investment outside of the AI sector, which has done really well, it’s actually in a slump It's actually a slump even worse than what Britain suffered after Brexit, which was another similar shock to uncertainty So you add all that up and you get to a similar figure of, again, three-quarters of a percentage point give or take, but a pretty hefty MAGA tax