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On the eve of his inauguration on Jan. 19, Donald Trump took a bow for the then surging stock market.
Trump rings the opening bell on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Dec. 12, 2024, in New York City. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.
“Everyone is calling it the — I don’t want to say this, it’s too braggadocious, but we’ll say it anyway — the Trump effect. It’s you. You’re the effect. Since the election, the stock market has surged,” Trump said.
But in the ensuing three months, the stock market has faltered. The S&P 500 stock average has declined by 5.2% since Trump took office, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average, made up of 30 large corporations, has dropped by 5%, as of closing on May 2.
On Truth Social last week, Trump blamed his predecessor, former President Joe Biden.
“This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s,” Trump wrote on April 30. “I didn’t take over until January 20th.” And then, partly in all caps, Trump emphasized that the market downturn “has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers.”
Later that day, Trump expounded on the claim, saying, “I don’t view the stock market as the end all. It’s an indicator, but what the stock market really tells you and … when you look at the stock market in this case … it says how bad a situation we inherited.”
Stock prices are, of course, driven by a myriad of economic factors. Market experts, however, have said that the market’s recent volatility has a great deal to do with Trump’s tariff policies. The following graphic shows how the markets responded after Trump made various tariff announcements, and how Trump took credit or placed blame on Biden, depending on whether stocks were up or down.
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