As we now know, 2018 was the worst year for the Dow Jones and S&P 500 since 2008, with extreme volatility in December leading to the S&P recording its worst performances for the month since 1931. While some of the factors that have contributed to the markets’ (ongoing!) decline are entirely outside the control of one Donald J. Trump, others can be directly attributed to the former Miss Universe owner, including his decision to shut down the government over a pointless and financially irresponsible border wall; his ongoing trade war with China; his abrupt geopolitical about-faces; and his constant bashing of the Federal Reserve, all of which have terrified investors. But according to Trump, the blame for any and all market woes lies not with him but another party entirely:

Of course, this particular strain of presidential bullshit is a familiar one. In the run-up to the midterms, Trump began warning that if the Democrats flipped the House, markets would collapse, tweeting that the stock market was “taking a little pause” to see how elections turned out. “If you want your Stocks to go down, I strongly suggest voting Democrat,” he wrote. “They like the Venezuela financial model, High Taxes & Open Borders!” Like all of his fearmongering leading up to the election—most of which centered around lying about immigrants and asylum-seekers—this claim was designed to 1) scare voters into casting ballots for Republicans, and 2) deflect blame for present and future market misery. (Obviously, it’s also trademark Trump, who is pathologically incapable of taking responsibility for anything, even if it is unquestionably his fault.) When the market dipped precipitously in the days after midterms, Trump blamed the “prospect of Presidential Harassment by the Dems.” And it has long been presumed that he will attempt to pin any economic downturn on the opposing party, in a bid to score re-election in 2020.

As my colleague T.A. Frank pointed out back in November, the odds of this succeeding are something like 50-50: although Democrats will have the upper hand since the blame for any nationwide woes historically falls on the executive branch, Trump, he pointed out, “might be able to argue that things were going great until a Democratic House majority stood in his way.” So far, though, he’s not getting a lot of help from his own administration. On Thursday, his top economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, said in an interview that an unusually negative earnings projection from Apple, which scared the bejesus out of all the major indices, happened as a direct result of Trump’s trade war. He also warned that the pain was far from over, though strangely that analysis didn’t make it into the president’s Friday morning tweet.