The Federal Reserve’s job could be a lot easier or a lot harder depending on what Friday’s report on the nation’s gross domestic product shows.

The report will also show, with greater clarity, what has really been happening with the US economy since well before the last presidential election.

As it now stands, the Fed is expected to make President Trump very happy by cutting interest rates by one quarter of 1 percentage point.

Less likely, is a half-point cut in rates (which the president and stock market would love) or no action at all on rates (which will make Trump a very unhappy chief executive of the US economy).

But Friday’s GDP report, to be issued at 8:30 a.m. by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, could change the narrative.

Wall Street economists are expecting annualized growth of 2 percent in the second quarter, which is considered acceptable. But that would be considerably lower than the 3.1 percent growth in the first three months of 2019.

I’ve already explained in other columns why the first-quarter growth looked like a fluke because of inventory buildup and a ridiculously low inflation rate that was used in the calculation.

The 2 percent second-quarter growth, if it happens, would be in line with the 2.2 percent growth reported for the last three months of 2018, a time when the Fed was deciding to raise rates.

For the record, the New York Federal Reserve Bank and the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank are both predicting annualized GDP growth for the second quarter that’s below what Wall Street is expecting – 1.6 percent and 1.4 percent, respectively.

If the New York and Atlanta Fed banks are right in their pessimism, there won’t be any controversy at the meeting of Fed policy makers next week.

But if Friday’s GDP announcement beats Wall Street estimates, then the financial markets are going to have some pretty nervous days between now and next Wednesday’s announcement of a rate decision by the Fed, which has said it will only cut rates to boost a slowing economy.

And while all this is going on, on Friday, the Fed also will be revising GDP figures all the way back to 2014.

Revisions tend to show what the economy was doing with more accuracy. So, on Friday, we will learn what was happening with the economy at the time President Trump was elected and what it has done since then.