Trump Created an Economic Sinkhole. He Doesn’t Care
There is no strategy behind the tariff chaos — it’s all about personal grievances and settling scores.
President Donald Trump doesn’t care about the market chaos.
Photographer: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The stock market soared after Donald Trump secured the presidency last November, with the S&P 500 hitting an all-time high and staging its biggest post-Election Day rally in history. Market pros, including an investor named Scott Bessent, predicted that happy days were here again. “Recent days prove markets’ unambiguous embrace of the Trump 2.0 economic vision,” Bessent noted at the time. “Markets are signaling expectations of higher growth, lower volatility and inflation, and a revitalized economy for all Americans.”
Those assumptions were grounded in the idea that Trump, hardly a classic conservative, would still embrace establishment approaches to markets and the economy. Lighter regulation, torrid deal-making and lower taxes were in the cards, and that alone promised better growth than the gangbusters economic performance of the Biden years. Or so the argument went.