President Trump took to Twitter this morning to finally address the wild fluctuations in the stock market over the past few days, which began on Monday with a historically unprecedented 1,175 point loss in the Dow Jones and sent markets into a spin before eventually stabilizing on Tuesday.
Trump has made the dangerously misleading assertion that a healthy stock market means a healthy economy one of his central talking points, lazily assuming that he could simply take credit for a healthy Obama economy and ride the market confidence boost from his appalling tax bill to great approval ratings.
That all came crashing down on Monday, however, when the President was reminded in the bigliest way that the market is an inherently volatile and unpredictable beast and perhaps it’s not the best idea to peg the performance of your nation’s economy – let alone one’s political fortunes – to such fickle financial voodoo.
Rather than address his mistakes, however, the President appears to be…blaming the market for making a big mistake, because “good news” was reported.
In the “old days,” when good news was reported, the Stock Market would go up. Today, when good news is reported, the Stock Market goes down. Big mistake, and we have so much good (great) news about the economy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 7, 2018
This latest proclamation from the president means absolutely nothing – and it just goes to show that even in the one area where he might reasonably have some expertise – “business” – Trump knows absolutely nothing.
“Trump’s claims all along that the stock market is reflecting his presidency are as ridiculous as blaming him when the market goes down…Trump truly doesn’t understand any of this. He does not understand what’s going on in the financial markets” groused Wall Street soothsayer Dan Alpert to Vanity Fair.
We shudder to think of what might happen when the entire economy tanks – how can we trust a man who literally just berated an algorithm to do the right thing for the American people?
