Look at the bright side! Sure, a recession could throw millions of Americans out of work, and shrink retirement portfolios. But an economic downturn would also hurt President Trump in 2020!

That was CNN's theme this morning. The 6 am New Day hour led with co-host John Berman trumpeting yesterday's stock market drop. CNN economic analyst Rana Foroohar then said of a recession: "it's here."

Things quickly turned political. Berman read a tweet claiming that Trump's economic team consists of "a guy who plays an economist on TV, a nutcase the entire real economic profession has disowned, and the producer of Lego Batman." And it turned out that the author of the tweet was none other than . . . a member of the panel: Catherine Rampell, a CNN commentator and Washington Post columnist.

John Avlon then weighed in to crow: "if the economy goes south, [Trump] is in a world of hurt."

Alisyn Camerota then referred to a recent CNN panel of swing Trump voters, in which they indicated that if the economy crashed, their support for Trump would be "done." Rampell concurred: "he could lose a lot of those supporters."

Foroohar then chimed in to say the economy was "not looking good" for 2020, "which I think is going to hurt his prospects." She predicted "a lot of big crashes."

Berman ended the segment by gleefully suggesting that an economic downturn could cause congressional Republicans to turn against Trump.

Here's the transcript.

CNN

New Day

8/15/19

6:03 am EDT