If only someone had warned them.

Wall Street is apparently shocked that President Donald Trump is destroying the robust economy he inherited. All those self-defeating tariffs! Those arbitrary federal layoffs! Stripping work permits from legal immigrants! The self-dealing! The dismantling of the rule of law!

These are among the reasons recession risks are rising and markets are in correction territory (at least 10% below their recent peak). Investors and businesses apparently spent last year wish-casting about Trump’s agenda, assuming he’d implement all the policies they want (tax cuts, deregulation) and none of the ones they don’t (see above).

“With hindsight, we did not appreciate the nature of what the administration was going to be like,” a remorseful banker told the Financial Times, to cite just one representative quote. “I do believe they are hurting their stated objectives of peace and prosperity.”

Trump’s close allies and advisers are similarly “rattled,” “spooked” and “unnerved” by the president’s destructive decisions, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Were any of these people watching the same campaign the rest of the country saw?

Trump’s self-sabotaging agenda was not subtext; it was explicit text, often delivered in all caps. He devoted much more time in his rally speeches to trade wars and fantasies of retaliation against personal enemies than to corporate tax breaks. And some commentators (ahem) tried to convey that even if those precious tax cuts passed, there’s a lot more to capitalism than low taxes.

Maybe investors thought Trump was sufficiently transactional that they’d be able to control him. Or that market losses would temper him. Perhaps they assumed his senior aides would curb his worst impulses.

This time around, however, Trump’s personnel choices have prioritized personal loyalty over sound judgment or respect for the law.

Meanwhile, the yes-men advisers who do have influence are either rationalizing or encouraging Trump’s dumbest ideas.

Trade adviser Peter Navarro once explained that his “function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm (Trump’s) intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.” Needless to say, economic analysis is not supposed to reverse engineer evidence to support a predetermined conclusion.

This was all a matter of public record well before Trump took office. Markets are only figuring it out now?

To be clear, I do not blame regular, everyday voters for not fully anticipating these outcomes. News organizations have profiled regretful Trump voters who (wrongly) believed he’d lower prices, make fertility care free or crack down on migrant gangbangers — and who are only now realizing just how much they or their families have to lose. Social media greets these stories with schadenfreude and leopards-eating-faces memes.

But normal people — who are not professionally obligated to follow the news or read white papers — are busy with their jobs, families and other stressors. Many feel disconnected from our bitter politics or lack the bandwidth to digest dense policy proposals. What will or won’t help reduce prices is not always intuitive, and America’s archaic political procedures often obscure what it takes to get even sound policy passed. (Byrd rule? Blue slips? What?) One of my core beliefs, as a journalist and a citizen, is that government complexity always rewards demagogues.

But C-suite executives and market analysts have no excuses for getting Trump’s economic agenda wrong. They are paid to make accurate predictions and to follow incremental regulatory and legislative developments. They were supposed to know that the “Tariff Man” might raise tariffs, and that the guardrails were being dismantled. They went into this eyes-wide-open.

Everyone makes mistakes, I suppose.

Even I once naively assumed the private sector would be a firewall against (at least some of) Trump’s excesses and erratic behavior, because companies know that property rights and the rule of law are critical for a stable business environment. But as a recent straw poll of CEOs conducted by Yale shows, executives are staying quiet. Most said market losses would need to double or even triple before they’d be willing to publicly criticize Trump’s policies.

Even the bottom line, it seems, is sometimes an insufficient motivator for mustering courage.

Email: crampell@washpost.com.