Former Rep. Mark Sanford, a potential primary challenger to President Trump, said the U.S. is headed for an economic collapse on a greater scale than the 2008 downturn if things aren’t corrected quickly.

“We’re headed for worse than [a recession], because the average recession out there is driven by inventory imbalances,” Mr. Sanford told Iowa Public Television this week. “The really scary stuff goes to a balance sheet imbalance, and fundamentally that’s what we have.”

He said the Federal Reserve has exhausted its potential remedies if things take a turn for the worse.

“And on the financial side with the federal government, look at those trillion-plus dollar deficits [anticipated] over the next 10 years,” Mr. Sanford said. “We don’t have a lot of leeway there, either.”

“This is going to be the most significant financial storm that we have seen, I would argue, since the Great Depression,” Mr. Sanford said. “I would argue that it [would] be greater than what we saw in 2008. It’s going to diminish and destroy people’s dreams and their hopes going forward if we don’t get ahead of this curve.”

“Because the history … is if you don’t proactively deal with these kinds of numbers and simply wait for the financial markets to do it for you, the process is bloody,” he said.

If Mr. Sanford jumps in, he would join other long-shot GOP challengers to Mr. Trump, including former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld and former Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois.

Mr. Trump has dismissed the trio as the “Three Stooges” and alluded to Mr. Sanford’s extramarital affair when he was governor of South Carolina earlier this week.

“One is ‘Mr. Appalachian Trail’ who was actually in Argentina for bad reasons…Another is a one-time BAD Congressman from Illinois who lost in his second term by a landslide, then failed in radio. The third is a man who couldn’t stand up straight while receiving an award. I should be able to take them!” the president tweeted this week.

It’s unclear what incident Mr. Trump was referring to with respect to Mr. Weld, though the former governor’s campaign pointed to this 1996 event when the governor collapsed and was briefly unconscious at a graduation ceremony as a possibility.

His campaign said he was able to speak at the ceremony and receive an honorary degree despite suffering from the flu and that Mr. Weld ended up in the hospital that night.

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