Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Monday blamed Vice President Kamala Harris for the stock market’s dramatic decline, months after claiming he deserved credit for the stock market’s then-record rally.
“Of course there is a massive market drop. Kamala is even worse than Crooked Joe,” Trump wrote in a Social Truth post about Harris, the de facto Democratic presidential nominee.
The night before, as Asian markets fell dramatically, the former president wrote: “THE STOCK MARKETS ARE CRASHING. I TOLD YOU YES!!! KAMALA DOESN’T GIVE. BIDEN IS ALWAYS SLEEPING. ALL CAUSED BY MISLEADERSHIP USA!”
US stocks fell sharply on Monday, apparently in response to fears of a recession that were sparked in part by Friday’s weaker-than-expected jobs report.
But in January, when Dow Jones Industrial Average AND S&P 500 hit record highs, Trump said the surge was because investors thought he would beat President Joe Biden.
“THIS IS THE TRUMP STOCK MARKET BECAUSE MY POLLS AGAINST BIDEN ARE SO GOOD INVESTORS ARE PROJECTING I WILL WIN,” he wrote on Social Truth that month.
Trump’s comments reflect the political risk of tying a campaign to the ever-changing behavior of markets. Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi told CNBC.
“Throughout history, I think politicians have avoided trying to tie their wealth to the stock market as a signal of their policies or anything, because the market goes up and down all over the place,” Zandi said.
“Former President Trump is the first to do this,” added Zandi. “I’m confused by it.”
When Trump was president in March 2020, the S&P 500 suffered several steep declines, including a 12% drop on March 16, 2020, as fears of the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States grew. This was one of the worst declines in S&P history.
The former president has lost his lead in the polls since Biden withdrew from the election in July and endorsed Harris as the Democratic nominee.
A CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday found Harris one percentage point ahead of Trump with likely voters in a head-to-head matchup, a lead that is within the poll’s margin of error. The poll polled 3,102 registered voters from Tuesday to Friday.
As Harris moves past that early base of support, Trump is working to tie her candidacy to Biden’s record, which some voters blame for their high costs of living.
Trump, as a result, tried to spin Monday’s market crash and subsequent recession panic into a broader case against Harris’s economic record.
But Zandi said markets are in correction territory and that Monday’s decline is not necessarily reflective of the broader economic downturn that Trump described on social media.
“The stock market, based on my experience, could end up in the green by the end of the day,” Zandi said, noting that the market is still up for the year.
“So I would say, what fall?”
The Harris campaign, when asked for comment on Trump’s posts, pointed to a campaign speech the vice president gave last week in Atlanta.
Trump “intends to give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations. He intends to destroy our investments in clean energy jobs. He intends to end the Affordable Care Act,” Harris said in that speech.
“To take us back to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with pre-existing conditions,” the vice president said.
“Do you remember what that was? Children with asthma. Breast cancer survivors. Grandparents with diabetes. Georgia, America has tried these failed policies before and we’re not going back. We’re not going back. No we’ll go back.”
– Additional reporting from CNBC Kevin Breuninger.