SURPRISE — THOSE DIRE PREDICTIONS OF TRUMP ‘CRASHING’ THE ECONOMY WERE WRONG. Six weeks ago, the Democratic talking point was that President Donald Trump was “crashing” the economy with his tariff policy. You heard it over and over, both from party leaders and their allies in the media.

Fast forward to today, and the Washington Post headline is “Trump economy shows surprising resilience despite tariff impacts.” Taking note of a number of encouraging indicators, the paper said that Trump’s various trade wars may have rattled corporate boardrooms — they could have mentioned media commentators, too — but “the U.S. economy so far has kept humming along.”

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“The latest encouraging sign came Wednesday, when the Labor Department reported that inflation remained mild in May, rising at an annual pace of 2.4% — less than economists had anticipated,” the Washington Post reported. And this: “The labor market continues to chug as well, adding a healthy 139,000 jobs last month, which also beat expectations.” All in all, it was a “wave of good news” that “surprised” analysts who had widely predicted “higher inflation and weaker hiring” in the Trump economy.

“For four months, many economists have predicted that U.S. inflation would reignite, in large part due to President Donald Trump’s trade war and the knock-on effects his tariffs would have on the economy,” Bloomberg added. “But for the fourth month in a row, data released by the Trump administration’s Bureau of Labor Statistics came in lower than expected.”

So what happened with the dire outlook for Trump’s tariffs? There has been evidence of some effects, but not a lot. “With respect to the tariffs, there was upward pressure present in appliance prices — exactly the kind of imported durable goods one would expect to be affected — that one might attribute to tariffs,” writes Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “But auto prices declined during the month; not exactly what analysts expected. Looking forward, it appears that the tariff impacts will phase in slowly over the summer instead of showing a sharp uptick.”

Six weeks ago, even some Trump supporters predicted that inflation would kick in quickly with the president’s tariffs. “I’ve got to confess, I’ve been wrong on the inflation numbers over the last three or four months,” economist Stephen Moore said recently. “I did think that tariffs would raise prices. They did a little bit but not much, and that was offset by the fact that the economy is doing really well. We’re producing more goods and services, and this is just basic supply-side economics. If you produce more eggs and you produce more oil, guess what? The prices of these things go down.”

Readers should appreciate Moore’s candor. The fact is that a lot of predictions about the economy, not to mention Democratic/media talking points, have been wrong. Some of them, the Democrats, were in bad faith and politically motivated. Others were the result of groupthink. Others were sincere differences of opinion. But the fact is, they were wrong.

That does not mean they will always be wrong. As this newsletter noted six weeks ago, “We should always note that we don’t know what will happen in the future. The economy might indeed crash, or it might boom.” But be skeptical when anyone, and especially a partisan, seems a little too eager to declare the economy a disaster.