This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.

I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

President Donald Trump just got some more terrible economic news, and boy, is he in a rage over it.

On Wednesday, we learned that the economy contracted in the first quarter, and on two separate occasions,

Trump unloaded over this, attempting to blame Joe Biden for it.

Faced with this situation, some of Trump's aides went full North Korea, bowing down before him and offering adulation in almost shockingly sycophantic terms, which got us thinking, how long did Trump's

advisors think they can keep him in a protective cocoon, shielding him from the realities of his

disastrous reign, and why do they think that will get any easier over time rather than harder?

New Republic Senior Editor Alex Shepard has a good new piece arguing that Trump's unpopularity is only going to get a lot worse due to basic structural facts about his presidency.

So we're talking to Alex today about all this. Thanks for coming back on, man. That's great to be here.

So we just learned that U.S. gross domestic product declined by a 0.3% annual rate during this year's first

three months. There's some uncertainty about the precise accuracy of this data, but what's

overwhelmingly clear is that Trump's talk about his own policies basically started wrecking the

economy Trump inherited early on. Your reaction to all that, Alex?

The whole thing is ridiculous because, you know, I think all of the sort of top line economic data from the Biden administration was pretty positive, even if you sort of factor in

the inflationary issue. And Trump inherited this and essentially, I mean, in some ways,

it's not that dissimilar to what he did with the 2017 tax cuts, right?

He was gifted this sort of well-oiled big-picture economy in which, you know, I think a lot of people were nevertheless,

understandably in many cases, frustrated, and immediately sort of just pushed it off a cliff.

And the idea that this is somehow Biden's fault is like ridiculous, too,

I think, you know, I think regardless of what you think about the sort of mechanics of the Biden

economy, right? It was the envy of the developed and the undeveloped world. It was working. It was

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