President Trump is telling Americans to “be patient” as the stock market slides and a grim gross domestic product report for the first quarter of 2025 suggests the economy is flailing during the early days of his second administration. 

The report, released by the Department of Commerce on Wednesday, showed that GDP — which measures the country’s output of goods and services — shrank at an annual rate of 0.3 percent in the first three months of 2025. The contraction was bigger than economists expected, and is the worst quarterly performance for the economy since 2022.

The contraction marks a significant decline from the 2.4 percent annual growth rate that the economy saw in the fourth quarter of 2024. 

The American stock market slid after the report’s release, with the three main indexes — the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq — down at least 1 percent each. 

Mr. Trump said on Truth Social on Wednesday morning that the market slump is a reflection of “Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s.” 

“Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden ‘Overhang,’” he wrote. “This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!” 

The agency behind the GDP figures, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, noted that the growth slump “primarily reflected an increase in imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP,” in addition to “a decrease in government spending.” 

Although the president announced his tariff scheme on April 2 — after the first quarter had ended — American businesses rushed to import goods ahead of the anticipated rollout. Imports during the first quarter grew at a 41.3 percent rate, up from -1.9 percent in the fourth quarter of last year. 

Given that imports detract from GDP, however, economists are warning that the report — dismal as it may look — might not show the full picture. An economist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, Justin Wolfers, argues that the GDP report “really isn’t that bad” when you “look into the details.” Specifically, he notes, the figures for consumption and investment “remained strong.” 

A former chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Ernie Tedeschi, reckoned on X that the GDP report “is almost exactly what an otherwise-healthy economy looks like anticipating — but not yet directly hurt by — tariffs.” He pointed to the spike in imports as an indication that businesses are trying to “stock up their inventories.”