Donald Trump and his White House are going all out this week to tout the president’s second 100th day in office, but their boasting has to tiptoe around the worst stock market start for a president in decades.
The president can’t resist bragging on days when the market is up. That’s a continuation of a tendency that stretches back years. But those days have been few and far between so far, despite a rebounding run over the last week.
Overall, through Tuesday’s close, the S&P 500 (^GSPC) has dropped around 7.3% since Trump’s inauguration to mark the worst start for investors for a new president since the 1970s, when both Richard Nixon (as he began his second term) and Gerald Ford (when he was thrust into office following Nixon’s resignation) saw greater initial losses.
This tariff-fueled rout is leading to recession fears and is a deeply inconvenient fact for the president, who came into office touting “the Trump effect” on stocks that he said would push prices upward.
Instead, the opposite has occurred so far, with the president and his team offering a range of explanations. A Yahoo Finance review of dozens of examples of market commentary from Trump and his orbit in recent weeks points to three strategies used to explain the disconnect.
Perhaps most often, the refrain from Trump and his aides is that these losses are essentially part of their plan or at least of a short “transition period” that will soon be reversed as the economy adjusts to his tariffs.
A second common response is a focus on an array of other factors — from technology to healthcare to Joe Biden — to explain the losses.
Trump and his aides have also at times taken to a third approach of downplaying the stock market’s importance, but it only tends to last until the next up day.
In the end, perhaps the last resort for Trump is to plead ignorance.
“I haven’t seen it,” Trump offered during a Cabinet meeting on April 10 during a big sell-off, instead noting gains from the day before. He handed things over to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who said he didn’t “see anything unusual” in that day’s 1,000-point Dow sell-off.
Here is a closer look at the three ways Trump world has explained the stock market’s rocky ride:
Approach 1: All part of the plan
Trump’s “Liberation Day” proclamation on April 2 was followed by a stock market rout the next day.
“It’s to be expected,” Trump offered as he flew to Florida that evening. He compared the economy to “a sick patient that went through an operation on Liberation Day, and it’s going to be a very booming country … we’ve just got to give it a little bit of time.”
It was part of a stretch that saw markets realize that Trump was serious about steep tariffs — and often fall precipitously as a result. At times, Trump has even suggested that market downturns could be a sort of negotiating tool.
“We’ll set a tariff,” he said on April 17 of what will happen if he can’t reach a deal with certain countries. “The market may find it too high or the country may find it too high then they’ll come back and … negotiate.”
Trump even had to bat down questions about whether he was pushing stocks down intentionally after the president shared a video on Truth Social on April 4 that suggested he was pushing down the market “on purpose.”
“That’s not so,” the president was forced to tell reporters a few days later.
Approach 2: Other ‘idiosyncratic’ factors
Trump and his aides have also often sought to point to a range of non-Trump and non-tariff factors that they say could be driving down prices.
Bessent has often answered the question with a focus on DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence company, to make the case, as he put it on Fox at one point, that “a lot of what we have seen has been just an idiosyncratic tech sell-off.”
Reports of advancements at that AI company did spark a market sell-off in late January, but that was followed by price increases, with the market then peaking on Feb. 19 before months of selling that have usually coincided with tariff news.
In comments on April 21, Trump tied losses that day to healthcare, saying, “They had a bad report today from one of the healthcare companies that had an impact on the stock market, but this isn’t about that.”
It was an apparent reference to UnitedHealth Group (UNH), which had indeed had a bad earnings report that week, but it was far from the only driver.
Far more important that day — with the S&P 500 (^GSPC) down more than 2.3% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq (^IXIC) down 2.5% — was Trump’s hurling of new criticism at Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, calling him “a major loser.”
Then, of course, Trump has at times blamed his predecessor, saying market weakness is essentially Biden’s fault.
“I think a lot of the stock market going down was because of a really bad four years that we had,” Trump offered on March 13.
Approach 3: Downplaying the stock market’s importance
Another common refrain is to downplay the importance of stocks.
An often repeated note from Trump’s aides is that tariffs are about helping “Main Street” over “Wall Street,” even with about 61% of Americans owning stock.
This week in a CNBC appearance, Secretary Bessent offered that he didn’t want to comment on the status of trade negotiations “just to feed the news cycle.”
Trump posted during another market sell-off that “ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!”
Yet it’s a refrain that Trump at least rarely keeps up for long, with the president going out of his way to tout market moves upwards pretty much any time he can.
Stocks had their best day in years on April 9 as Trump announced a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs for most countries.
“We’re having a good day in the stock market,” Trump was quick to note in the aftermath.
“There’s a lot of winning out there.”
Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
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