President Donald Trump continues careening wildly on down the path of his egomania, apparently hoping to base his re-election campaign on that theme heading into 2020. This weekend, he faced a harsh fact-check after claiming days ahead of his official launch of that campaign that if he’s not re-elected, there will be an epic stock market crash. It’s worth noting at the outset that stock market values going up (or down), while a useful indicator of the financial standing of the major corporations of the U.S. and world, has little direct, daily impact on the underserved, lower income U.S. interests Trump is supposedly sticking up for.
He’s asking his supporters to believe that he’s bettering their situations by pointing to the betterment of other people’s situations that in reality, he didn’t even have some magic touch behind in the first place.
He tweeted, in part:
‘[I]f anyone but me takes over in 2020 (I know the competition very well), there will be a Market Crash the likes of which has not been seen before! KEEP AMERICA GREAT’
All-caps Twitter messages don’t magically become sound economic policy just because Trump stands in front of a mirror and wishes for them to.
Bloomberg shares quite simply:
‘Research by Macrotrends shows the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s performance so far in Trump’s term has been middling compared with his predecessors.’
This middle-of-the-road, not too remarkable standing is behind the stock market gains seen under the presidencies of Democrats Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, while slightly above stock market value spikes seen under previous Republicans like Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Trump has driven the economic shifts that can be tied to him by policy moves like massive tax breaks for corporations driving their actually paid taxes down to a low not seen in decades.
Meanwhile, he’s whittling away at the economic standing of the people he’s supposedly sticking up for who are definitely not represented by the stock market in the first place through meas like, perhaps most prominently, his tariffs. He has imposed harsh, punitive tariffs on China (and other jurisdictions) that have increased taxes on Americans since they’re the ones trying to carry out the taxed imports and driven down their own sales since other countries have responded by closing their own shores to some U.S. business.
So yeah — not only is Trump not some magic lord over the economy, it’s dragging significantly under his leadership.
Check out Twitter’s response to him claiming otherwise…
Featured Image via screenshot
