Rampell: Let’s hope no crisis befalls Trump’s economic leadership

Their deepest regrets, these former officials said, were not about specific policy decisions but general communication strategy. And their communications were indeed woefully inadequate.

Nevertheless, it was a formidable team. They came from different political parties and professional backgrounds, and yet managed to work together to pull us back from the brink — that is, to prevent the Great Recession from turning into another Great Depression.

The subtext of the interview is the but-for’s — that is, all the ways this very bad crisis could have been much, much worse.

But-for these policymakers’ backgrounds. But-for finding a buyer for troubled Merrill Lynch. But-for their ability to instill just enough fear in Congress to get lawmakers to act, but not so much fear that they made the global panic even worse in the meantime.

And but-for the fact that the presidential candidates in 2008 — Obama and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. — agreed not to exploit the escalating crisis for political advantage over one another. They released a joint statement shortly after Lehman Brothers collapsed, about the need “to rise above politics for the good of the country.”

Imagine such a thing.

It makes one wonder, and then shudder: What if instead, a decade ago, we had the political and economic leadership we have in place today? Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and incoming National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow do not exactly inspire confidence.

Both continue to make repeated unforced errors. More than a year into this administration, Mnuchin still doesn’t understand how the federal-budget process works; he had to be corrected twice by a Fox News anchor on Sunday about whether Congress can grant the president unilateral line-item veto power (which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional 20 years ago).

He likewise struggled to keep the lies straight about what exactly the tax cuts were supposed to do, and by what mechanism they would help the middle class.

Kudlow has likewise offered his own absurd forecasts for growth. And when it comes to actual policy, both propose little other than even more tax cuts.

Today, with Trump’s hunger for a trade war; trillion-dollar deficits, amid low unemployment and rising interest costs; rollback of post-crisis financial regulations; and cavalier attitude toward debt default, it is, alas, not hard to imagine some sort of self-inflicted economic catastrophe befalling the country.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. But if it does, let’s then hope the team in charge grows up.

Fast.