From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarrow.

This is the Daily.

As President Trump has rolled out his economic agenda, the assumption was that he would quickly scale back his most aggressive policies once they began to scare consumers and the financial markets.

That assumption turned out to be wrong.

Today, my colleagues, economics reporter Ben Castleman and White House reporter Maggie Haberman

on why the Trump economic plan

may be backfiring and why Trump doesn't seem to mind.

It's Friday, March 21st.

Hey, Ben.

Hi, Michael.

Good to have you back in the studio. It's been a while.

It has been a while. Happy to be here. As you know, we're two months into the Trump administration and therefore two months into the Trump economy. And he comes to office with a set of sweeping economic promises that the business community and the stock market and polling shows Americans generally are very excited about.

More prosperity, lower costs, lower regulation, lower taxes.

The market booms when he gets elected.

Stock market is surging.

And then Trump starts to actually put his fingerprints on the economy, and the stock market has over the past few weeks been plunging,

and now the Federal Reserve is telling us that the country's financial outlook is pretty unsteady,

and Trump himself is now acknowledging that his plans may wreak a certain amount of havoc on the economy. So a lot has changed very quickly.

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, it's worth winding back a little bit to what Trump inherited in the economy.

Because by many measures, it was pretty solid, right? Unemployment was low, job growth was solid, corporate profits were good, right? There were a lot of things that were pretty good. We know there was one really big thing that was not good, right, which was inflation. It had gotten a lot better, but we know cost of living had gone up, and that was in inflation, and it was in housing prices, and it was in all sorts of things. And we know that Americans did not feel good about the economy, right? That was a big part of the reason that Trump was brought

back to office in the first place. Exactly. So, as you said, when he is elected, there's a surge

in optimism among businesses. There's a surge of optimism among many consumers. There was this

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