ANDREW NEIL: How team Trump's trying to spin his disastrous economic crash... and the dire consequences for us all

Not content with undermining NATO, the greatest democratic alliance for peace and prosperity in world history, and increasingly siding with Russia in Ukraine’s struggle for survival in the face of dictator Putin’s barbaric onslaught, President Trump now seems determined to take a wrecking ball to the mighty US economy. And stung by Ontario’s threat to cut off its electricity supply to New York, Michigan and Minnesota altogether if Washington imposed any more tariffs, Trump also threatened to ‘permanently shut down’ the Canadian auto sector and said the only thing that would make him withdraw his tariffs is for Canada to become the US’s 51st state. Just about every Wall Street forecaster is downgrading their estimates of US economic growth in 2025, and all the gains US stock markets made in the wake of Trump’s election last November — the famous ‘Trump Bump’ — have already been erased in the past few weeks. US President Donald Trump, joined by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, holds up his original executive order imposing 25 per cent tariffs on steel imports - which he today doubled to 50 per cent on Canadian steel and aluminium Ontario Premier Doug Ford retaliated and has threatened to cut off its electricity supply to New York, Michigan and Minnesota The value of his electric car company has halved — a spectacular fall of $800billion — since it peaked in December as consumers rebelled against his cavalier approach to slashing US federal spending as Trump’s cost-cutter-in-chief and his support for Europe’s hard-Right parties by boycotting his cars. Traders on the New York Stock Exchange today saw shares diving because of Trump's 'tariff wars' Nor did he do anything to counter that with some comforting words of reassurance when in TV interviews at the weekend he refused to rule out, twice, the possibility of a recession, even as his Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, was on another TV channel stating baldly: ‘There is going to be no recession in America.’ The mixed signals simply served to spark another sell-off when the markets opened on Monday.