Trump is about to do something no president has done: cause a "permanent" recession.

Analysts are warning about a market crash, and it stands to be bleaker than anything we’ve seen since 1929.

Donald Trump’s war, gas prices, and taxes on goods are conspiring to create a terrible recession. But it’s worse than people think. This one might be “permanent.”

CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin warned this weekend, on a rebroadcast of 60 Minutes, that an economic reckoning is coming. He said that Americans CEOs know how bad it is but “are very scared to speak out publicly about anything,” for fear of being targeted by Trump. “They are so nervous about criticizing anything that’s going on with this administration,” he said.

Anchor Lesley Stahl pressed Sorkin on whether it will be like 1929 at the start of the Great Depression, the topic of his recent book.

“The answer is, we will have a crash. I just can’t tell you when, and I can’t tell you how deep. But I can assure you, unfortunately, I wish I wasn’t saying this, we will have the crash.”

I can tell you what Andrew Ross Sorkin can’t tell you.

If nothing is done about the current situation, Trump’s looming recession could blow a deep hole in the economy. So deep that — if it happens before we’re ready — many folks may never be able to crawl back out. That’s because two explosions could hit the U.S. economy at the same time.

The first is a bomb of Trump’s own making. He built it, he lit the fuse, and he is, at this moment, holding it in his hands. The Iran war has done exactly what every serious economist warned it would. Oil prices have surged and Americans are paying for it at the pump. Worse still, the economic disruption has rippled so far across the global economy that, even if the war stopped this week, we’ll be paying higher prices across the board well into 2027 or beyond. Add to that the self-inflicted wound of Trump’s tariffs, and you’ve got a full-blown, manmade catastrophe.

Moody’s Mark Zandi has been pegging U.S. recession odds at anywhere between 40 and 50 percent (a coin flip). Signs across the Atlantic Ocean point to the same, with European industry sagging. Meanwhile, one of America’s top CEOs, Jamie Dimon, who’s not exactly a flame-thrower, warned a few weeks ago that economic disruption of the kind we’re seeing “can change sentiment rapidly and cause a flight to cash.” That’s bureaucratic speak for “economic panic.” Bankers don’t really like to talk about a run on banks, but here we are.

Trump is conjuring up a recession that should’ve been avoidable, which is bad enough. But the second explosion that could hit the economy at the same time is a different kind of weapon entirely.

Think of this one as a ticking time bomb, buried under every single American workplace. I’ve been hearing it tick for the last three years, and wondering when it will go off (whether we’d have enough time to defuse the worst of it before it did). That weapon is the AI replacement of the American workforce. Unfortunately, Trump’s economy bomb might detonate this other one, years ahead of schedule.

Let me explain what’s happening. Almost every company in America has been dabbling in AI. They’re all running pilots or deploying automated AI agents for customer service, legal research, code review, sales leads, and more. All these trials are tentative because the technology is new and a lot of these CEOs are, for now, still cautious about the optics of mass replacement. But steadily they’re figuring out where they might able to replace their workers with machines.

A recession changes everything.

The instant the economy turns, the cautious AI pilots will become emergency AI rollouts. Corporate boards will start demanding cost cuts, and CFOs will start drafting reduction-in-force memos. Layoffs that would have been framed as long-term “restructuring” or “right-sizing” will become, by necessity, full-scale workforce replacement.

If you think I’m fear-mongering, then don’t take my word for it. Check out what the CEOs are saying not-so-quietly to pollsters. A report published days ago found that ninety-nine percent of CEOs surveyed expect AI-driven layoffs at their companies within the next two years. Ninety-nine percent. Ninety-nine. They all see what’s coming because they’re the ones planning for it. In the first quarter of this year alone, around 80,000 tech workers were laid off, with nearly half of those cuts directly attributed to AI replacement. Meanwhile, an MIT simulation estimated AI could already replace twelve percent of the entire U.S. workforce.

Again, if a Trump recession hits, all of that speeds up. And there’s no time for the economy to adapt. But that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that this recession will be permanent.

Here’s the thing about AI agents that the labor market hasn’t fully reckoned with. Once a company replaces a human team with an automated AI system and runs it for a year — as they wait for Trump’s recession to end — they’ll realize they like the new setup a whole lot more than the old one. They’ll see the consistency, the higher productivity, the absence of healthcare costs and HR complaints, no one taking time off for vacations, and they’ll decide that they are never, ever hiring those workers back. Layoffs are usually framed as “cyclical,” but this one will be indefinite.

That’s what Trump is doing right now. He’s taking his bomb (the war, the tariffs, and the detonation of consumer confidence) and slamming it directly into the buried weapon under the American economy. He’s basically forcing the second explosion to go off years and years before we are fully ready for it.

This is what makes Trump’s looming recession different from all the others that came before it. The recessions of 1973, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2008, and during COVID were all similar. Markets panicked and people held back their money, the economy slowed down, and workers waited on the sidelines until the engine cranked back up. They were all painful, yes, but they were “cyclical.” The recession Trump is steering us into will arrive at the precise moment in history when, for the first time ever, wide swaths of the human workforce can be replaced instantly by software.

If Trump hadn’t meddled so furiously in the economy, we might have had more time to adapt. The workforce and our political institutions would have had room to respond to the building tension inside the system. That might mean reskilling programs, more human-machine teaming, changes to the welfare system, and eventually a new social contract to grapple with the AI future. Trump’s recession could steal those years from us.

What does a society with permanent ten, fifteen, or twenty percent unemployment look like? We don’t actually know. The United States has never experienced such sustained mass unemployment in a wealthy, networked, armed, politically polarized society. The closest historical analog is the Great Depression, which produced the New Deal here and fascism in Europe, but even that doesn’t compare in terms of the speed at which this could hit us and the permanence of the change. In the worst case, the political consequences could be measured in mass unrest, radicalization, and the corrosion of every institution that requires a baseline of public trust to function.

The part that should really make you angry is that we saw this coming. If you’d asked me on February 27, 2026 (the day before the Iran war started) what a major gas spike and an extended bout of inflation would do, layered on top of the corporate flirtation with AI automation, I would’ve told you exactly this. A recession itself is survivable, of course. But a recession arriving now, at this technological inflection point, with these incentives, won’t just be a downturn but a phase change.

There’s something you can do about it, though. Aside from making your elected representatives panic and put pressure on the White House to reverse course on Trump’s foolish war and stupid tariffs, which you should, you can make corporate CEOs feel the heat.

Remember what Andrew Ross Sorkin said at the top of this essay? CEOs know the double economic explosion is coming. But they’re too “scared” to say it out loud because they’re scared of the president. We need to do something about that.

The titans of American business are watching Trump light the fuse, and they are choosing to stay quiet. They will not speak for the workers about to lose their jobs or for the entry-level kids whose first rungs on the ladder are about to be sawed off. Hell, they won’t even speak for the country whose flag hangs in their corporate lobbies. Apparently, they’ve decided that being singled out in a Truth Social post is a worse fate than the country sliding into a permanent recession on their watch.

That’s just plain old cowardice. There’s no other word for it. And at this moment in time, it’s beyond unacceptable. It’s contemptible. The rest of us — the little guys — have had to face our fears of getting attacked by a retributive administration. We’ve stood up to them in cities where they deployed the national guard. We’ve stood up to them when they tried to censor our news and cancel our comedians. We’ve stood up to them in the streets of Minneapolis when they were executing citizens. We’ve stood up to them by the millions in the biggest nationwide protests in history.

And we’re going to let these CEOs sit safely in a quiet board room, waiting for the collapse that could consume us all, because they’re worried about mean tweets? Here’s what you can do about that.

These CEOs aren’t going to grow spines on their own. They’re going to grow spines when their inboxes fill up, when their customer service lines light up, when their social media mentions become unmanageable, and when their boards start asking why the brand is suddenly toxic. The American consumer has more power over the American executive than you think, and you’ve already made that happen in the past year with the cowardice at places like Disney. But it only works if you use it. So use it.

This week, think about finding a CEO. I don’t mean in person (stalking ain’t the name of the game), I just mean virtually. Find the CEO of the company whose products you buy, or the bank that holds your mortgage, or the company that manages your 401(k). You can find them on LinkedIn, their public comment line, or someone on their corporate communications team. And tell them, in whatever words feel most natural to you, that you are sick of the silence. If they won’t speak up out of patriotism, they can at least speak up out of fiduciary self-interest because, if Trump sparks a permanent recession, it will destroy their shareholders and companies, too.

In other words, now’s the time to make our weak-spined CEOs less scared of speaking than they are of not speaking.

As Andrew Ross Sorkin said, a crash will come. But whether it’s temporary or “permanent” — whether the country crawls back out or stays in the hole for a generation — might depend on whether the most powerful people in American business find their voices and push back against this rogue president, or stay silent until there is nothing left worth saving.

Make them find their voices. You’ve done it before. And your defiance could be the deciding factor between two very different futures.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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