Is Donald Trump trying to wreck the American Economy?

“We don’t know what straw will break the camel’s back here, but Trump is looking like he wants to try to find out,” Tim Duy, an economist at the University of Oregon, wrote in a blog post on Friday.

In the span of 30 days, Mr. Trump has enacted or threatened what amounts to a nearly $200 billion annual tax increase on American businesses and consumers, which would be enough to cancel out the average annual value of the tax cut package the president signed in late 2017. His actions have also further imperiled congressional passage of the new trade agreement he negotiated last year with Mexico and Canada, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which markets and business leaders have long presumed would win approval.

They are now reassessing. “While still possible, enactment of U.S.M.C.A. prior to the 2020 election would no longer be our base case if these tariffs are implemented as proposed,” Goldman Sachs economists wrote in a research note.

In a companion note, they said that the Goldman Sachs Analyst Index, which tracks manufacturing and service-sector activity, had fallen to a two-year low in May, with some sub-components pointing toward economic contraction and with the bank’s analysts suggesting “neutral-to-negative effects from this month’s trade war escalation.”

Markets have shown clear damage from the escalation. At the start of May, the American economy was riding a strong quarter of growth — 3.2 percent for the first quarter, which has since been revised down to 3.1 percent — and investors were bullish on the months to come. The Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome H. Powell, told reporters in a May 1 news conference that risks from unresolved trade negotiations “have moderated somewhat,” citing reports of progress on a deal between Mr. Trump and China.

Almost immediately thereafter, the China talks broke down, and Mr. Trump said he would increase tariffs until a deal was reached. Stocks are down more than 6 percent since then. On Wall Street, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index opened down more than 1 percent, following declines in Europe and parts of Asia. The Mexican peso also slid.

Analysts at financial firms, long sanguine on the likelihood that Mr. Trump’s trade provocations would resolve relatively painlessly for the economy, are growing unsure that is the case.

“Trump trade policy might well mean a permanent state of endemic uncertainty and instability in the global trading system,” Krishna Guha, vice chairman of Evercore ISI, wrote in a research note on Friday morning.

Mr. Trump continues to insist that tariff escalation poses no economic risk, saying tariffs boosted United States growth earlier this year. He wrote on Twitter in early May that tariff payments “are partially responsible for our great economic results” — a statement that little evidence supports.

Most economists warn that large and sustained tariff increases, along with likely retaliation from China and Mexico against American farmers and other exporters, will dampen global trade and drag on growth in the United States….

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