Donald Trump Addresses Whether He Crashed Markets On Purpose

President Donald Trump has denied that he intended to crash the stock market after he previously posted a video on Truth Social about him crashing the market on purpose.

The president addressed the matter while aboard Air Force One, during a press gaggle with reporters as he returned to Washington, D.C., after playing golf all weekend in Florida.

Why It Matters

Last week, Trump announced new tariffs on all imported goods from 180 countries as well as a list of “reciprocal duties” targeting China and other countries, claiming to combat trade imbalances and restore America’s manufacturing industry. He hailed the tariffs as the country’s “declaration of economic independence.”

However, Trump’s tariffs and shakeup of global trade has rattled global and domestic markets, with Wall Street tanking over the past few days, marking the worst days for the U.S. stock markets since 2020. The president has insisted that markets will “boom” as a result of his trade war.

Vice President JD Vance also told Newsmax on Thursday, as stock futures continued dropping, that things “could be worse.”

What To Know

Trump posted a TikTok video on Friday, claiming he is playing a “secret game” that could “make you rich.”

The video claimed that Trump is looking to “push cash into treasuries, which forces the Fed to slash interest rates in May, and those lower rates give the Fed the ability to refinance trillions of debt very inexpensively.”

“It also weakens the dollar and drops mortgage rates,” TikTok user @wnnsa11 said in voiceover. “Now, it’s a wild chess move, but it’s working,” they said, adding that Trump’s tariff plan “actually forces companies to build here to dodge them, it also forces farmers to sell more of their products here.”

When confronted on Sunday about the video, Trump said “that’s not so,” and stressed that he wants to “solve the deficit problem that we have with China.”

China has accumulated the highest aggregate tariffs of all the countries, with a 34 percent tariff added to a previously announced 20 percent tariff.

The president also turned confrontational when asked about whether he has a point at which he would say he’s “unwilling to tolerate the idea of ‘Trump put us there'” when it came to the market slump, calling it a “stupid” question.

“I don’t want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” Trump said before again listing trade grievance against China, Mexico and Canada, calling the current trade dynamics “unsustainable.”

“We have hundreds of millions of dollars is pouring into our country on a monthly basis. It’s pouring it’s already started because they put tariffs on and eventually it’s going to straighten out, and our country will be solid and strong again,” Trump said.

Trump touted the tariffs as the reason the U.S. has “$7 trillion already committed to be invested in the United States – building auto plants, building chip companies, and all sorts of companies are coming into our country at levels that we’ve never seen before.”

Part of that included the claim – which the administration has pushed out across news outlets throughout the Sunday talk shows and news programs – that the president has spoken with “a lot of leaders – European, Asian, from all over the world” that are “dying to make a deal.”

“Now, what’s going to happen with the market? I can’t tell you, but I can tell you, our country has gotten a lot stronger, and eventually it’ll be a country like no other. It’ll be the most dominant country economically in the world,” Trump said.

What Happens Next

Trump has not indicated whether he will repeal the tariffs or tweak them in the coming days. Meanwhile, trading futures for the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Nasdaq continue to trend further down ahead of the markets opening on Monday morning.

This is a developing story and more information will be added as it becomes available.