MW No, Donald Trump: This is your stock market, not Joe Biden's

By Brett Arends

This is Trump's economy now, too. He needs to own it.

Six months ago almost to the day, Elon Musk, an influential adviser to presidential candidate Donald Trump and the world's richest person, warned that Trump, if returned to the White House by voters, might have to crash the stock market and the economy when he took office.

Yes, really. "Everyone," Musk said in those pre-chainsaw days, will take a "haircut."

Now that this seems to be happening, Trump has a simple explanation for the stock-market turmoil.

It's all Joe Biden's fault.

In a presidential post on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday that is remarkable even by the usual standards of the genre, Trump said the volatile stock market actually has nothing to do with him.

"This is Biden's Stock Market, not Trump's," he wrote, placing the blame squarely on his predecessor. "I didn't take over until January 20th." He added: "Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden "Overhang." This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!"

Trump was commenting as new data showed the U.S. economy, which was booming at the start of 2025, has apparently now gone into reverse. First-quarter GDP, which according to the Atlanta Fed was heading for 2% or 3% annualized growth as recently as mid-January, came in at minus-0.3%.

Read: Trump blames Biden for stock-market fall, a year after taking credit for stock-market climb

Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro said the economic figures would have been terrific - except for the stuff that shrank. He directly contradicted the president and said tariffs had helped cause the first-quarter downturn, by boosting imports.

And in a comment for the ages, Navarro added, "That's the best negative print I have ever seen in my life."

Trump's comments about the "Biden overhang" and the Biden stock market came on the heels of data showing that Trump's first 100 days in office had been the worst for the stock market since the Nixon administration.

Read: Trump's first 100 days in office are worst for stock market in half a century

OK, so stock markets go up and down. No investors are guaranteed to make money every quarter. A 100-day window is hardly any time to judge any stock-market performance.

But since Trump is raising the issue, it's worth looking at the math.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA rose more than 12,000 points during Biden's term. So far under Trump, the U.S. market benchmark is down 3,000 points.

Read; Americans are betting too much of their retirement on the U.S. stock market. They should be doing this instead.

The S&P 500 Index SPX, meanwhile, put together three stellar years while Biden was president, returning 28%, 26%, and 25%, plus one bad year when it lost 18%. Overall the "Joe Biden" stock market looked pretty good, at least for blue-chip large-cap stocks.

So far under Trump, the S&P 500 is down about 7%. The main indexes of mid-sized and small U.S. stocks, the S&P MidCap 400 MID and Russell 2000 RUT, have lost around 11% and 13%, respectively.

Meanwhile since Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, international stocks, as measured by the standard EAFE index of Europe, Australasian and Far Eastern stock markets, have gained about 10%.

DOGE-ing responsibility

By seeking to blame the turmoil on Biden, Trump is asking everyone - even his fans - to just look the other way. Like we were supposed to do after the "liberation day" debacle, when Trump unilaterally declared a trade war on the rest of the world - provoking a 10% collapse in the U.S. stock market in two days.

We should also ignore the stream of embarrassing, humiliating and quick capitulations that followed from the Trump administration on trade, as the president bedecked almost his entire battlefield with white flags.

And we should ignore the debilitating policy uncertainty that has therefore hung over the economy for a month, as business leaders wring their hands, delay decisions and wait for clarity.

Trump also asks us to ignore the impact on the U.S. consumer in the wake of Musk's gleeful boasting about all the people he was firing or going to fire.

Never mind all the federal workers that Musk's DOGE had to hire back, days or weeks later, as the Tesla $(TSLA)$ tycoon cheerfully played games with the lives and livelihoods of middle- class Americans. Imagine the turmoil, distress and humiliation these people went through as they were fired and then rehired.

Hey, no biggie, right? Some 32 million people work for the federal government. No, historically that is not a lot. How many of them do you think have bought a new car, or booked a new vacation, or remodeled their kitchen since Musk was photographed waving his chainsaw around? What about their families? Even if DOGE only planned to lay off, say, 5% of federal employees, nobody - including the other 95% - would feel secure. Anyone who didn't put their plans on hold was taking a foolish gamble.

How many others have had second thoughts about big purchases or decisions as they watched this self-imposed economic turmoil unfold from the White House?

How reassuring was it when billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick casually remarked that the government might not send Social Security checks to see who complained - on the assumption that only the crooks complain. (Everybody else just taps their billionaire son-in-law for a spare million to tide them over.)

With all of this, it is hardly any surprise that U.S. consumer confidence has now collapsed to a five-year low. The data shows that confidence was booming not long ago. As recently as last November, in fact. Hmmm.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, then-candidate Trump promised that if he was elected, America would win so much we might all get "tired of winning."

Are we there yet? No, but we are - staggering, but true - just 7% of the way through the second Trump administration. Only 194 more weeks to go.

More: 'DOGE' cuts are in doubt as Trump shows Musk the door in cabinet-meeting sendoff

Plus: Elon Musk's $2 trillion in miracle money forgotten as Trump administration rushes unfunded tax cuts

-Brett Arends

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April 30, 2025 17:07 ET (21:07 GMT)

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