Topline
President Donald Trump on Monday celebrated last week’s historic stock market surge following his softening on tariffs, the latest evidence of financial market movements’ influence on Trump, whose Monday assertion was arguably cherrypicked considering the stock losses during his second term are still stark.
President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office on Monday.
Key Facts
“We had the largest gain in the stock market in history on every single category last week,” Trump said Monday afternoon during a White House appearance alongside El Salvador President Nayib Bukele.
Trump was likely referencing the explosive Wednesday rallies for all major indexes as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 and Nasdaq all tallied their largest single-day point gains ever.
For all three major indexes, Wednesday was not the biggest jump ever on a percentage basis, a more commonly-cited measure of stock movements considering the long-term ascension of index prices.
It was a “nice gain because we were getting a little hit because people didn’t understand” the intent of the tariffs, Trump added.
Contra
Stock market returns are not exactly a feather in Trump’s cap for his second turn in the Oval Office. All three indexes are down at least 4% since Election Day and 7% since Inauguration Day. Most of the losses followed Trump announcing much bigger than anticipated country-by-country tariffs earlier this month. Even after Trump paused and exempted a slew of goods from the most severe tariffs last week, sending stocks recovering, the bellwether S&P is still down 5% since April 2, the date of Trump’s “Liberation Day” reciprocal tariff debut at the White House Rose Garden.
Trump Says He ‘helped’ Apple
All three major indexes rose modestly Monday, led by a rally from iPhone maker Apple after the Trump administration at least temporarily exempted Chinese smartphone imports from the more than 100% duties on other Chinese goods. Trump said Monday he “helped” Apple CEO “Tim Cook recently and that whole business,” explaining he doesn’t “want to hurt anybody” with his tariffs. The world’s most valuable company, Apple assembles more than 80% of its iPhones in China, and was facing a profit hit of up to 30% prior to the exemption, according to analysts.
Key Background
Since the early days of his first presidential term, Trump has viewed stock market performance as a barometer of his success, saying in 2017 he was “very honored” by the Dow hitting a new record while he was in office and welcoming last July a rally stemming from his climbing election odds as a “nice compliment.” Yet as his tariffs sent stocks plunging – the S&P declined 19% from its February record through last Tuesday – Trump publicly shrugged off any losses tied to trade war agita, saying last month “Markets are going to go up and they’re going to go down.” Earlier this month, Trump even reposted to social media a video claiming he was “crashing the stock market…on purpose” in order to lower Treasury yields, which heavily influence borrowing costs, from government debt to mortgages. But Treasury yields shot back up last week as the bond market hinted at heightened fears about a self-inflicted recession, and Trump said this bond market panic influenced his decision to pause tariffs, saying ““People were getting a little queasy” and the bond market can be “tricky.”
Further Reading
