Financial markets are taking a nosedive for the second straight day amid global panic and investor anxiety over Donald Trump’s implementation of broad tariffs on foreign imports. Economists are warning that the president’s actions are putting not just the United States, but the world at risk of a global recession, and that working class Americans will experience acute economic pain. Fret not, says the president, he is apparently playing chess while the world is playing checkers — whatever that means. Even some of his most prominent GOP supporters aren’t buying it.
On Friday morning, the president shared a link on Truth Social to what appears to be a partially AI-generated video claiming that he was “Purposely CRASHING The Market.”
The one-minute video — originally shared March 15 on TikTok — predates the president’s tariff announcement on Wednesday. It claims that “Trump is crashing the stock market by 20 percent this month, but he’s doing it on purpose. […] Here’s the secret game he’s playing, and it could make you rich.”
The video proposes that Trump is attempting to “push cash into treasuries, which forces the Fed to slash interest rates in May, and those lower rates give the Fed the ability to refinance trillions of debt very inexpensively. It also weakens the dollar and drops mortgage rates. Now it’s a wild chess move, but it’s working.”
“What about his tariffs? I’ll tell you, it’s a genius play,” the video adds. “It actually forces companies to build here to dodge them. It also forces farmers to sell more of their products here in the U.S., to bring grocery prices way down. We’ve already seen this with eggs. Now, remember, 94 percent of all stocks are owned only by 8 percent of Americans. So Trump, he’s taking from the rich short term and handing it to the middle class through lower prices.”
Sound dodgy and completely made up? Don’t stress, the video makes sure to point out that super rich guy Warren Buffet “just said [that] Trump is making the best economic moves he’s seen in over 50 years.” Only Warren Buffet never said that. He actually called Trump’s proposed tariff regime an “act of war.”
“Over time they’re a tax on goods,” Buffet said in March, stressing that tariffs typically end up being paid by consumers as corporations pass along the increased price of goods to the point of sale. “I mean, the tooth fairy doesn’t pay them,” he said.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, several close Trump allies and administration officials, who often defend Trump’s most fanatical actions, outbursts, or policies, did not or would not even bother defending the wisdom of a president promoting to the world the idea that he is tanking the stock market deliberately.
“I have no idea,” says Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and an informal adviser to Trump, when asked about the video Friday morning and why Trump would promote the view that crashing the stock market on purpose is good policy. “I didn’t know he had done it and I have no comment because I literally have no idea.”
Gingrich this week has been casting Trump as a master negotiator amid the massive trade warfare that the president just launched.
Former senior aides in Trump’s orbit similarly had no idea why a reasonable person would crash the stock market intentionally. “I saw some posts on social media recently making that crazy claim that Trump is crashing the stock market on purpose,” says Marc Short, who served as Trump’s White House legislative affairs director and as a top adviser to Mike Pence. “I suppose one way to induce the Fed to lower rates would be to crash the economy but that seems in line with the viewpoint among the mercantilists in this administration, that crashing our economy is a way to solve the trade deficit. If Americans can no longer afford to buy goods and services it does solve the trade deficit. I’m kind of at a loss for words.”
One Trump mega-donor — a wealthy person, who cares about things like stocks — simply messages Rolling Stone multiple crying emojis, concluding that the new trade war and Trump’s apparent embrace of the message that he’s torpedoing the stock market intentionally is “NOT GOOD.”
Another Trump administration official says: “You gotta take the good spin where you find it, and there is very little out there right now.” A longtime Trump associate and ally of the White House was also dumbfounded by the president’s public promotion of this policy view, adding: “In all the messaging guidance we received from the administration on this, not once do I recall hearing that ‘President Trump is crashing the market on purpose’ is something we should say.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the president’s post.
As previously reported by Rolling Stone, advisers close to the president say the tariffs were not designed around careful economic calculations, but shock value. “The president isn’t a number-crunching guy, per se, but President Trump strongly demanded big numbers that would make other countries treat us fairly. And I think you can see today that those numbers are huge,” one Trump official said.
Most Americans are bracing not for a windfall of riches, but a potentially lengthy period of economic hardship. The stock market is taking a dive, pummeling the working class’ retirement savings and 401ks. On Thursday, the global financial firm J.P. Morgan Chase raised its global recession risk indicator to 60 percent. As Fox Business’ Stuart Varney put it during his Friday morning coverage of the market selloff: “That’s a probability, not a possibility.”
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