The U.S. consumer has seemed unstoppable in recent years, spending throughout soaring inflation and the highest borrowing costs in decades. That resilience helped to keep at bay a recession that many thought inevitable after the pandemic.

President Trump’s tariffs and their scattershot rollout have once again raised concerns that the United States may soon face an economic downturn. While the odds of an outright recession have fallen as the highest levies have been paused, there are reasons to be worried about the ability of consumers to continue to prop up growth.

Consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, meaning a sharp enough pullback could cause significant damage.

For now, consumers are still spending, although more slowly than in the past. Their attitudes about the economic outlook have soured in recent months in anticipation of elevated prices, slower growth and higher unemployment. Americans have also become choosier about how they spend their money. Leisure and business travel has declined. People are buying fewer snacks and eating out less as they look to cut costs. They are even doing fewer loads of laundry to save money.

“The economy is really vulnerable to anything that could go wrong, and clearly there’s a lot that could go wrong,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics.

It is not yet clear if the slowdown simply reflects distortions related to stockpiling before Mr. Trump’s trade war starts to really bite, or if it is an early sign of a full-blown retreat.

Part of what has enabled consumers to spend so freely up until this point is a stockpile of savings that they accrued as a result of government stimulus during the pandemic and a booming stock market. Those savings have now largely been tapped out.

“The cushion that was there during the pandemic to weather the storm of higher prices is not there now,” Diane Swonk, the chief economist at KPMG, said. The highest-earning 10 percent of Americans, who drive the bulk of consumer spending, are still in good shape, but it’s the bottom 90 percent that worry her most.

Those households are under increased financial stress.

The share of outstanding credit card debt that is 90 days or more past due started increasing in 2023 and has continued to rise across geographies and income levels, according to data through the first quarter of this year released Tuesday by the New York Fed and research by the St. Louis Fed. The trend has become particularly pronounced for poorer households.

And real-time credit reports from Experian, one of the three major U.S. credit rating firms, suggest the pace accelerated in April.

Americans are struggling with other kinds of payments, too. The overall delinquency rate, which includes all loan types, reached its highest level since 2020 in the first quarter of this year, according to the Fed data. This was driven by student loan delinquencies, as past-due student loans once again were included in credit reports after a pandemic-era pause on federal student loan repayments.

Because they now have to pay down those balances after a five-year reprieve, consumers may increasingly have trouble servicing other kinds of loans, another strain.

What matters most, however, is the labor market. “If American consumers have money, they’re going to spend it, and the primary place they get money is through their jobs,” said Eric Winograd, an economist at the investment firm AllianceBernstein.

Businesses are still hiring, layoffs are low and the unemployment rate has stabilized at a historically low level of around 4 percent. But the labor market is noticeably less robust than it was in the aftermath of the pandemic, a period that was marked by booming hiring, soaring wages and acute worker shortages.

“Nothing emboldens consumers quite like a strong labor market, and we don’t have that anymore,” said Tom Porcelli, chief U.S. economist at PGIM Fixed Income.

Companies are posting far fewer job openings and positions are no longer much more plentiful than the number of people looking for work as businesses reassess their staffing needs in an environment of slowing growth.

Spending is now consistently increasing faster than income, once adjusted for inflation. This imbalance cannot last, said Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro. Either incomes will need to accelerate or consumption must slow over time. “Given what we know about the job market and wage growth, it’s more likely that consumer spending slows than incomes rise,” he said.

Pay is no longer soaring for workers in the lowest-paid industries, such as leisure and hospitality, who saw their earnings increase the fastest in the initial recovery period when the job market was strong and demand for their services was high. Now, pay is rising faster in high-wage industries — as pay for lower- and mid-wage jobs stagnate.

It is too early to say if the lessons of the post-pandemic period will prove applicable this time around. Consumers are clearly under heightened pressure, but it will take time to know whether they are buckling under that weight or once again muscling through.

So far, policymakers at the Federal Reserve do not appear too worried just yet and are taking their time to assess the economic impact of Mr. Trump’s policies before restarting interest rate cuts.

“The U.S. consumer never lets us down,” John Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in a recent interview.

A locally owned grocery store fed up with a rise in theft in its Inland Empire community is trying to crack down on the problem by restricting the use of large personal shopping bags in the store.

On a Facebook post in April, Matthew and Allison Whitlow announced their ownership of the Grocery Outlet on East Florida Avenue in Hemet. Less than a month later, the owners noted on social media that a personal bag policy will be strictly enforced citing “an influx of theft.”

In the post, the Whitlows asked that customers leave their reusable shopping and personal bags — including anything larger than a small handbag — in the front of the grocery store with a cashier.

“While this has always been posted on our front door, we have had some take advantage and walk out of store without stopping by the register,” according to a Facebook post.

The Whitlows declined to speak with The Times about the incidents that led to their decision.

But asking customers to leave their reusable bags at the front of the store could create confusion for shoppers who are trying to follow state law and help the environment.

Since 2014, California has worked to eliminate single-use plastic bags from grocery stores and have recently taken a step further by passing legislation that would do away with the thicker plastic bags made of high-density polyethylene, or HDPE. Grocery stores have been offering the thicker HDPE bags to shoppers instead of the banned thin plastic bags.

In response, shoppers across the state have stocked up on reusuable grocery bags, made of canvas or cloth.

The new bag policy is in response to an uptick in retail theft across the state, an issue so problematic that state officials have dispatched California Highway Patrol officers to help local police get a handle on retail crime and car theft and help bolster traffic enforcement.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has sent officers to Oakland and Bakersfield, cities that have had immense issues with smash-and-grab retail crime.

Customers who leave their large bags at the front are allowed to take out and carry their smartphones and wallets while they shop.

The Whitlows are encouraging their customers to use store-provided hand baskets instead.

“With us being locally/independently owned, when theft occurs, it not only hurts us, but the community,” the post stated. “We know this is inconvenient for everyone, but we want to ensure that we have products for you all as well as not lose any so we can keep pricing affordable.”

Rather than resort to theft, the owners suggested in the post that shoppers who are struggling to make ends meet ask for help.

“Please ask for one of the owners, Matt or Allison, and we will see what we can do to help,” the post stated.

In Mr. Musk’s own telling, his political views were shaped by X.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Mr. Musk said that videos circulating on X years ago depicting crowds of migrants sparked his fascination with right-wing politics and stronger border protections.

“I’ve seen videos of people streaming across the border on Twitter, now X,” he said, citing politicized and sometimes misleading videos that have spread online about migrants. “And I was like, is this real?”

It was a stark example of the power X has to politicize its own users — including the world’s richest man — using hyperpartisan opinions and far-right media.

To better understand how the information that Mr. Musk consumes on X could shape his worldview, The New York Times recreated a version of Mr. Musk’s personal feed by opening a new account on X and following the same 1,109 users that he follows. We then analyzed more than 175,000 posts from the accounts that he follows, using a service that collects data from X.

Though there is no guarantee that Mr. Musk saw all of the posts captured by The New York Times, the accounts that he follows — including world leaders and business tycoons alongside conspiracy theorists and far-right influencers — reveal the voices that Mr. Musk appears to value. (This “Following” feed is different from the main “For You” feed, which includes posts from those he follows alongside others selected by X’s algorithm.)

The resulting feed, shown in this article as a selection of posts curated from the much larger set, revealed ample praise for Mr. Musk and his various priorities, mixed with a torrent of right-wing outrage over progressive politics. It highlights the ways that social networks can create information bubbles. X declined to comment.

Step, once again, into a version of Mr. Musk’s personal X feed below.

Those voices are mostly right-wing: Among tens of thousands of posts during a typical week, nearly half of them came from right-wing media figures, conservative influencers, Republican politicians or government leaders.

Those accounts included Chaya Raichik, whose X account, Libs of TikTok, has more than four million followers. Ms. Raichik’s appearances on Mr. Musk’s feed match her growing prominence offline: Her influence has exploded during the second Trump administration, and she has appeared at the White House multiple times this year, cementing her status as a top Trump advocate.

The accounts that Mr. Musk follows are also the ones he interacts with most on X, according to The Times’s analysis, giving them a valuable boost on the platform since Mr. Musk is the site’s most popular user, with more than 200 million followers.

That seems to give his followers the power to seize Mr. Musk’s attention and could even redirect his policy goals. It is something they have noticed, with some users boasting they can catch Mr. Musk’s attention with a well-timed post or question.

“Pretty amazing when the owner of a platform personally tells you he is fixing your problem in real time,” Mario Nawfal, an influencer with more than two million followers, posted after Mr. Musk said he would fix an issue on X.

Some of the ideas that circulated on Mr. Musk’s feed later emerged on the national stage.

President Trump had claimed at an address to Congress that federal funds were used for “making mice transgender” — a misleading description of various studies that tested the effect of hormone therapy on H.I.V. infections and other other side effects of the medication. The idea had gathered steam on X two months earlier, when a conservative-led animal advocacy group posted about it. The group’s account is followed by Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, and by Mr. Musk. Mr. Musk had personally shared one of the posts.

Later, as Tesla vehicles and dealerships were vandalized or attacked in a violent reaction to Mr. Musk, his feed was filled with calls to charge the attackers with “domestic terrorism,” giving the perpetrators 20-year prison sentences.

Mr. Musk agreed, calling attacks on Tesla’s vehicles “extreme domestic terrorism!!” Days later, Mr. Trump repeated the idea, saying that he would enjoy seeing “the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences.”

After a right-wing news aggregator claimed, incorrectly, that DOGE had blocked a $52 million payment for the World Economic Forum, Mr. Musk replied: “True. You’re welcome.” In reality, ending the program had saved $7.8 million.

Those inaccuracies have not stopped Mr. Musk from recommending the DOGE account to others — he frequently promotes the accounts he follows to his own 219 million followers.

“Just follow @DOGE for details,” Mr. Musk wrote in February. “There is a firehouse of information.”