Donald Trump says the state of the stock market, more than 100 days into his presidency, is his predecessor’s fault. For now, his GOP allies on Capitol Hill are playing along.
“That will work now,” Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina told reporters. “It won’t work six months from now.”
Stocks fell significantly on Wednesday following the news that for the first time in three years, the US economy is contracting. In the first three months of 2025, US real gross domestic product fell at an annualized rate of 0.3%, compared with 2.4% growth in the final quarter of 2024.
That led Trump to blame former President Joe Biden. “This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden ‘Overhang.'”
It’s not the first time that a president — rightly or wrongly — has blamed their predecessor for the state of the economy.
But it’s particularly hard for Trump to blame Biden for the state of the stock market, given that the president’s tariff policies have caused rapid fluctuations in the market in recent weeks.
Trump also sought credit when stocks were performing well under Biden in early 2024, arguing that investors were expecting him to win.
In the midst of a dip in the stock market at the beginning of April, Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana vigorously agreed with a CNN interviewer that Trump is responsible for the economy.
“There’s no question,” Kennedy said on April 7. “I think once he decided to add the tariffs, clearly, I mean, he will be held responsible, as he should, whether it turns out good or it turns out badly.”
On Wednesday, Kennedy stopped short of reaffirming his prior statement. But he did say that higher imports, driven in part by businesses trying to get ahead of Trump’s tariffs, may have led to a lower GDP number.
“When you make the changes to our trading system that are this dramatic, you’re not going to really know the impact on your economy for four to six months,” Kennedy said.
That leads to the question of when, exactly, a president can no longer reasonably attribute the state of the economy to his predecessor.
For Trump, it may be another three months. “You could even say the next quarter is sort of Biden,” the president said at a Cabinet meeting later on Wednesday.
Most GOP senators who spoke with BI declined to provide a specific timeframe for when Trump should assume full responsibility for the state of the economy, though Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio offered that it would take about two years for Trump’s new policies to fully make their mark.
“You typically judge a president after about two years,” Moreno said. “It takes time. It takes more than 100 days.”
“I think Joe Biden and the Democrats did enormous damage to the economy for four years,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas told BI. “It takes longer than a couple of months to turn that around.”
