A key economic adviser to President Donald Trump on Monday pushed back on talk of recession stemming from uncertainty around his administration's tariff policies, even as a survey of American households showed consumers growing more pessimistic about their prospects,

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt fielded questions about the ongoing stock market decline, saying the U.S. was in a “period of economic transition.”

President Donald Trump is defying projections of an economic recession, plowing forward with new tariffs and, in the process, abandoning one of the core economic measuring sticks of his first term in office: the stock market.