Throughout the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump repeatedly delivered a scary warning to the electorate: If elected, Joe Biden would cause an economic collapse. The incumbent’s demagoguery wasn’t based on anything real or substantive; he just hoped to scare voters into re-electing him.
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. “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, which at least so far, is not the case for his successor. NBC News reported:
Major stock indexes tanked Monday, continuing a sell-off that gathered steam last week as rattled investors began zeroing in on the prospect of a significant falloff in U.S. growth amid persistent inflation and a wobbling job market. The broad S&P 500 index closed down 2.7%. Not only has it now given up all of President Donald Trump’s post-election gains, it fell to its lowest level since September and is essentially unchanged over the past seven months. … The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 4% as it plunged deeper into “correction” territory. … The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 900 points, or roughly 2.1%.
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: It’s easy to draw a straight line between stock market turmoil, Trump’s agenda and his public rhetoric.
Indeed, as the major indexes sink, no credible observers are seriously making the argument that the slides are unrelated to the White House. Everyone seems to understand exactly who and what is responsible for the significant losses. In this game of “Clue,” it was the president, in the Oval Office, with his trade tariffs and layoffs.
“What’s remarkable is that there’s hardly any real news driving this,” Nobel laureate Paul Krugman noted via Bluesky. “It’s just investors belatedly realizing that Trump is who he is, and always was.”
Asked last week about the market losses, the president blamed “globalist countries” and “globalists [who] 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 market instability, 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.
Before his inauguration, the president vowed a Wall Street boom, and as NBC News reported, the rhetorical push continued as his 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.”
If the Republican is counting on the public not to notice the contradiction, he’s likely to be disappointed.
