During his State of the Union speech last Tuesday night, President Trump bragged about how under his stewardship, the stock market “smashed one record after another, gaining $8 trillion in value.” Those comments were just the most recent of many examples of the president trying to take credit for a strong stock market.

The Stock Market has been creating tremendous benefits for our country in the form of not only Record Setting Stock Prices, but present and future Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. Seven TRILLION dollars of value created since our big election win! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 7, 2018

Six days later, Fox News interrupted a live broadcast of a speech Trump delivered in Ohio on Monday to tout the tax cut bill to instead cover a historic drop in the Dow Jones industrial average.

During the speech, Trump said that the tax cut bill “set off a tidal wave of good news that continues to grow every single day.” But his message was contradicted by chyrons detailing the Dow’s plunge.

Strong visual for Trump pic.twitter.com/vfl0Q9xl8e — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 5, 2018

Monday’s stock market losses come on the heels of the Dow dropping 666 points on Friday. Not coincidentally, Trump avoided any mention of the stock market during his speech in Ohio. Instead, he accused Democrats who didn’t applaud him during the State of the Union of treason, and bragged about how no players protested the national anthem at the Super Bowl.


“We’re saluting one great American flag and everybody stood up yesterday, there was nobody kneeling at the beginning of the Super Bowl,” Trump said. “We’ve made a lot of improvement, haven’t we? That’s a big improvement, and on top of that it was a good game, so a lot of good things happen.”

Trump’s conflation of the stock market and the broader economy was problematic to begin with, given that nearly half of the country has nothing invested in the market. And it never made sense for Trump to take credit for a stock market that has been gaining steadily since it recovered from the financial collapse of 2008.

While the stock market made steady gains during Trump’s first year in office, other metrics indicated that the economy wasn’t booming as much as he wanted believe to people. Job growth in 2017, for instance, was the most anemic since 2011, when the economy was still recovering from a recession. But that didn’t stop Trump from pretending in recent speeches that he presided over a jobs boom.

Likewise, even as the market tanked on Monday, Trump bragged about the impact the tax cut bill is having on the economy.

Thanks to the historic TAX CUTS that I signed into law, your paychecks are going way UP, your taxes are going way DOWN, and America is once again OPEN FOR BUSINESS! pic.twitter.com/GISFbDDGXX — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2018

At close, the Dow Jones average was down over 1,100 points on Monday, the largest single day loss in history. The previous record was a 778 point drop on September 29, 2008, when the financial markets were in meltdown.