Donald Trump’s backpedaling on tariffs, and the partial recovery in US financial assets since the post-“Liberation Day” lows, succeeded in stabilizing consumer sentiment and capping household inflation expectations.

That was the takeaway from the final read on University of Michigan sentiment for April, released Friday. And that’s where the good news stops.

Recall that the preliminary release was among the worst in the (very long) history of the survey. The final headline print for this month was 52.2, abysmal to be sure, but an improvement from the 50.8 tipped on April 11.

The upward revision was entirely attributable to a more favorable read on the current conditions index. The expectations gauge — which, you’re gently reminded, printed a 45-year low in the initial readout — was basically unchanged at an unfathomably poor 47.3.

I don’t care who you voted for: If the header and deck on that chart don’t make you laugh, you need to check your pulse. Trump declared the dawn of an American renaissance and promptly tanked household perceptions of the economy to a five-decade low.

Survey director Joanne Hsu described the deterioration in consumers’ outlook since Inauguration Day as “precipitous.” Specifically, the three-month drop, at 32%, is the most pronounced since a recession in 1990. Middle-class families were the hardest hit this month, she said, but noted that expectations “worsened for vast swaths of the population across age, education, income and political affiliation.”

Remember: The economy was a strong issue for Trump and the GOP. As a body politic (i.e., considered as a whole), Americans were thoroughly disgusted with Democrats’ economic record, proof that a strong labor market’s irrelevant if inflation’s running high enough to be perceptible in real-time. The fact that households’ outlook for the economy is worse now, under Trump, thus says a lot, none of it good.

Hsu stated the obvious: The problem is those God-forsaken tariffs. “Consumers perceived risks to multiple aspects of the economy, in large part due to ongoing uncertainty around trade policy and the potential for a resurgence of inflation,” she said.

Mercifully, the five- to 10-year inflation expectations series was unchanged at 4.4%. That’s still the highest since 1991, but at least it didn’t move up any further. The year-ahead outlook was revised lower, to 6.5% from 6.7% in the initial readout.

Needless to say, those readings are still far, far too high, where that means they’re at five-alarm blaze levels. Hsu included the figure below in Friday’s release.

That suggests that in the immediate aftermath of “Liberation Day,” households’ near-term inflation expectations very nearly made it into the double-digits, before receding when Trump got cold feet amid a stock rout and a chaotic couple of days in the Treasury market.

As a quick aside, Trump claimed, in an interview with Time published Friday, that the bond market turmoil on April 7 and April 8 didn’t compel the tariff pause on April 9. That’s just another bald-faced lie. Lies atop lies atop lies. Par for Bedminster.

“After the April 9 partial pause in tariff increases, inflation expectations ebbed but remained substantially elevated relative to March,” Hsu went on, adding that the sharp increase in long-run inflation expectations “reflect[ed] a particularly large jump among independents.”