In mid-February, President Trump spoke at an investment conference and offered a prediction.
“We’re on the verge of soaring markets,” he told the crowd in Miami that evening. “I think the stock market is going to be great.”
Unfortunately for him and for investors, it turned out to be tough timing. That Feb. 19 speech ended up taking place during the peak of the recent market, with the S&P 500 (^GSPC) then beginning a now weeks-long decline.
And the selling hasn’t abated. Markets are now firmly in correction territory with prices down over 10% this week from the levels on that February evening.
That turn in market fortunes has forced Trump into a rapid reorientation of how he has talked about stocks, even as he has also repeatedly said that the long-term gains he sees coming from his tariff agenda will outweigh the current “turbulence.”
But even amid the selling, Trump couldn’t resist an occasional foray into his long-held role as a sort of stock pundit-in-chief.
Last Tuesday, Trump appeared alongside Elon Musk to buy a Tesla and perhaps prop up that beleaguered stock (TSLA). And he couldn’t resist a message to overall investors to buy the dip.
“Some people are going to make great deals by buying stocks and bonds and all the things they are buying,” he said, adding that “smart” businessmen he knows “are now investing because of what I’m doing because long term what I’m doing is making our country strong again.”
During Joe Biden’s presidency, Trump’s rhetoric on the market often whipsawed dramatically as he tried to explain price increases under a Democratic administration that he had promised would be bad for investors.
“If he’s elected,” Trump said in 2020 while pointing across the debate stage at Biden, “the stock market will crash.”
President Trump offered a thumbs up before walking onstage to speak at the FII PRIORITY Miami 2025 Summit (Future Investment Initiative) in Miami Beach on Feb. 19. (Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images) ·ROBERTO SCHMIDT via Getty Images
After his election victory last November, Trump quickly settled into a familiar routine of touting market increases as ones that he was responsible for.
On Dec. 22, the then president-elect traveled to Phoenix to note, “[S]ince the election, the stock market has broken one record after another … they’re calling it the Trump effect because even before taking office, we’re already bringing in the jobs and opportunity and safety and common sense back to the USA.”
It was a refrain Trump continued for weeks.
“I don’t want to say this, it’s too braggadocious, but we’ll say it anyway: the Trump effect,” he offered on the eve of his inauguration.
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And once in office, Trump downplayed initial market fears around tariffs, even at one point feigning ignorance of market moves.
“How is the market doing?” he asked reporters in early February after signing a batch of executive orders, saying of recent market action, “I don’t think about it.”
President Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk stand next to a Tesla vehicle on the South Portico of the White House on March 11. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images) ·MANDEL NGAN via Getty Images
But then came the sell-off that began on Feb. 19 with Trump again putting forth a range of tactics to deflect the questions that came at increasing velocity from reporters.
“Look, what I have to do is build a strong country,” he offered in a Fox Business interview taped on March 7. “You can’t really watch the stock market.”
Then, on March 12, a day after his appearance with Musk nudging people to buy stocks, Trump returned to an old favorite and blamed the downturn on his predecessor.
“I think a lot of the stock market going down was because of the really bad four years that we had [under Joe Biden],” he said.
Read more: The latest news and updates on Trump’s tariffs
Indeed, Trump and his aides have now taken to offering a series of euphemisms to wave away market troubles — from a “detox period” to “a little turbulence” to “growing pains” — but with the underlying message that Trump clearly thinks the current downturn is an acceptable medicine worth taking in the service of tariffs.
Perhaps the most recent signal from Trump came Thursday as he again indicated he is not looking to turn away from his market-rattling tariffs anytime soon.
“We’re not going to bend,” he promised after yet another round of questions about his tariff plans and the market fallout.
Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
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