It was just five years ago when Donald Trump, worried about a re-election race he would ultimately lose, warned that his defeat would lead to economic ruin. In fact, with just a couple of weeks remaining before Election Day, the two major-party nominees faced off in their final debate, which included a rather specific prediction.
“They say the stock market will rule if I’m elected,” Trump said, failing to identify who “they” might be. He added, in reference to Joe Biden: “If he’s elected, the stock market will crash.”
As it turns out, the Republican had the right concerns, but the wrong presidents. The major Wall Street indexes fared quite well throughout Biden’s term in the White House. Unfortunately for everyone, the Democrat’s Republican successor can’t say the same. NBC News reported:
The broad-based S&P 500 had fallen 5.5% as of Friday afternoon. The tech-heavy Nasdaq also dropped 5.4%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 2,000 points, or about 5.1%. The Russell 2000 Index, which tracks the stocks of smaller U.S. companies, dropped by 4.6%.
We are not, of course, talking about a one-day sell-off. On the contrary, a day earlier — the day the White House unveiled its highly controversial policy on trade tariffs — the S&P had its worst day since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Nasdaq Composite is now down 22% from its high in December, and the S&P 500 is about 17% off its high in February.
Amid the downturn, the president — who left the White House for a Saudi-backed golf event in Florida — wrote to his social media platform, “MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE.”
Evidently, that didn’t make investors feel any better.
To be sure, markets can fluctuate for all sorts of reasons, many of which are often outside the control of any one administration. But that’s precisely what makes the latest downturn so politically potent: You don’t have to be a financial genius to draw a straight line between stock market turmoil, Trump’s agenda and his public rhetoric.
Indeed, as the major indexes sink, it’s painfully obvious that in this game of “Clue,” it was the president, in the Oval Office, with his trade tariffs and layoffs.
Asked a month ago about the market losses that have happened after he returned to the White House, the president blamed “globalist countries” and “globalists that see how rich our country’s going to be and they don’t like it.” That was gibberish at the time, and it’s noticeably worse now.
But stepping back, the problem isn’t just that Trump is responsible for massive Wall Street losses, it’s also the fact that he promised to deliver the opposite results.
When markets soared during Biden’s presidency, the Republican repeatedly insisted that the major indexes were only up because investors expected Trump to return to the White House. It was part of a broader push: Trump told Americans to see the stock market as the one true metric that mattered more than any other.
“If [then-Vice President Kamala] Harris wins this election, the result will be a Kamala economic crash. … A 1929-style depression,” the Republican declared in August. “When I win the election, we will immediately begin a brand new Trump economic boom.”
In hindsight, perhaps “immediately” was the wrong choice of words.
Months later, as his inauguration neared, Trump vowed a Wall Street boom, and as NBC News recently reported, the rhetorical push continued as the president’s second term got underway.
When President Donald Trump wanted to make the case for his first term’s success in an interview last month, he turned to the stock market. “I was very proud to have handed over the country when the stock market was higher than it was, previous to the pandemic coming in,” he said in a Fox News interview Feb. 9. “It was an amazing achievement.” And in his second term, he has promised that trend would continue. “The stock market is going to be great,” he told the crowd at an investor conference Feb. 19.
Just 18 days after declaring, “The stock market is going to be great,” Trump appeared on Fox News and said: “You can’t really watch the stock market.”
The problem, of course, is that we can watch the stock market; we can recognize who’s responsible for these massive losses; and we can’t help but notice that Trump is golfing instead of trying to clean up his mess.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
