All eyes were on the president over the past week or two because of the fact that the value of the stock market, which had been generally increasing for some time and which the belligerent businessman pointed to as supposed evidence of his policies working, took a nosedive. At one point, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost about 4 and a half percent of its value in just one day.
The drop hasn’t been enough to send the economy towards a Bush era style recession, with the markets having slowly but surely turned around, at least for the time being.
As the market inches closer to the level it was at before the most recent plummet, the president himself has finally publicly addressed the stock market volatility, and his explanation is strange to say the least, with him jumping through mental hoops to try and vindicate himself and in the end making little sense.
He’s often pointed to the generally increasing stock market value as his own doing, even though the stock market has been on a general upward trend since the Obama era and him doing so therefore ignores the whole story.
Now that the market took a nosedive, however, suddenly in his world he’s completely vindicated of any responsibility for the economy.
Taking to Twitter this Wednesday morning, he wrote:
‘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!’
Trump’s explanation here, then, is that the fundamental nature of the entire economy changed just so that he wouldn’t be able to be said to be responsible for the recent volatility in the stock market.
Instead of spending his time coming up with these conspiracy theories, he could spend his time working to actually advance the interests of the people he was elected to represent, but he has interests like his corporate buddies to look out for instead.
He’s offered benefits to his corporate buddies through such means as the widespread slashing of regulation no matter what the cost just so that corporations can have an increased profit margin, no matter how small the increase.
The steps that he’s taken to make the U.S. economy even more favorable of an environment for corporations have sent it closer, some say, to overheating, with businesses eventually outpacing demand with their production.
To slow down the rate of business expansion, the Federal Reserve stands to raise interest rates multiple times this year, and it was fear of the Fed doing so sooner than expected that precipitated the recent stock market volatility.
Trump, however, continues to insist, as he did in his tweet, that everything is getting along just fine, as he continues to tout skewed statistics about the benefit to lower income American workers of the tax law he signed into law late last year.
One wonders how bad things would have to get for the president to actually acknowledge that something is wrong. Most of us can see right through his nonsense but he continues on with it anyway.
Check out Twitter’s response to the president’s latest revisionist ranting below.
Featured Image via Chris Kleponis-Pool/ Getty Images
