Donald Trump to America as Markets Crash: Take Your ‘Medicine’
Donald Trump said Sunday he is not deliberately tanking the stock market, following his extreme tariff announcement last week, though the president indicated it’s OK if Americans suffer as a result of his economic policies.
Speaking with reporters on Air Force One, Trump was asked if there was a level of pain in the markets he wasn’t willing to tolerate. He called this question “so stupid,” before saying: “I don’t want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”
He added, perhaps more optimistically, that “eventually it’s going to straighten out, and our country will be solid and strong again.” The message was a departure from Trump sharing, and later re-sharing, a link on Truth Social to a video claiming that he was “Purposely CRASHING The Market.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Trump announced sweeping tariffs that sent the markets tumbling Thursday and Friday. U.S. stock futures plunged again on Sunday evening, as observers warned of a looming “Black Monday.”
As Rolling Stone reported, Trump specifically wanted his tariff announcement to feature “big numbers.” The conservative American Enterprise Institute says the way the administration arrived there was all wrong — a math error that resulted in the proposed tariffs being four times higher than they intended.
Trump announced many big numbers, including tariffs of 49 percent on Cambodia, 48 percent on Laos, 46 percent on Vietnam, 36 percent on Thailand, 34 percent on China, and 20 percent on the European Union. Not even penguins were spared, though Russia was.
Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins was asked about the AEI analysis Sunday, and said the organization was “just wrong on this,” before admitting she hadn’t read it.
Two Trump administration officials told Rolling Stone over the weekend that even though they personally view the tariff barrage as highly risky and perhaps unwise economic policy, Trump officials who feel this way are largely not trying to talk the president out of it, convinced that at this time attempting to wean him off the massive trade war will either have no effect or cause Trump to dig in further.
“Ride it out,” one official says.
Other sources close to the president and two GOP mega-donors on Sunday continued to express increasing alarm that Trump’s commitment to his tariff warfare, including against longtime allies of the U.S., was not merely a negotiating tactic and that the president was in the process of tanking the American economy for little reason beyond his grudges and his long-running obsessions.
“I am not willing to go public yet but I will say this: I don’t know if I would be this worried about what will happen to the economy if Bernie fucking Sanders were president,” one big Trump and Republican Party donor says. “That’s how bad this is, and there’s very little time to fix the situation and turn the ship around.”
Trump — in his own words and actions — appears determined at this moment to steer the ship straight into widespread economic pain, in the hope that the American people will somehow thank him for it.
