MAGA Mouthpieces Rush to Absolve Trump From Stock Market Crash

Strong economic gains in the long term are worth the short-term stock market volatility Americans experienced this week, allies of President Donald Trump tried to argue Thursday as they fanned out across cable news and a number of media outlets to spread their perspective.

A number of Trumpworld insiders even went so far as to say that the stock market crash this week, which officially veered into “correction” territory Thursday, had nothing to do with the president or his chaotic tariff policies. They instead blamed President Joe Biden using a highly questionable economic theory—namely, that “excess” government spending distorted the country’s economic picture.

In fact, government spending actually went up slightly during Trump’s first six weeks.

The S&P 500 fell 1.4 percent and closed in correction territory on Thursday, while the Nasdaq 100 dropped 1.9 percent and the Dow slid 1.3 percent. The reaction came hours after Trump threatened to slap a 200-percent tariff on European alcohol in the latest salvo of his sprawling trade war.

On Monday, Trump went on a Truth Social posting spree as the Nasdaq fell 4 percent to its worst day since 2022 and the S&P 500 dropped almost 3 percent.

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As Americans worry about the impact of the stock market volatility on their retirement accounts and grocery expenses, the Trump administration put up a united, and entirely unbothered front.

“I’m not concerned about a little bit of volatility over three weeks,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC. “The reason stocks are a safe and great investment is because you’re looking over the long term. If you start looking at micro horizon, stocks become very risky, so we are focused over the medium, long term.”

“We’re focused on the real economy,” Bessent added. “Can we create an environment where there are long-term gains in the market and long-term gains for the American people? I think, having been in the markets for 35 years, I know the market is prone to big unwinds like this.”

Vice President JD Vance acknowledged that it was difficult to predict the future but insisted that “the fundamentals of the economy are actually quite strong right now.”

“I think that by inducing more businesses to invest in American workers, by reshoring some of those critical supply chains, we are going to make this economy stronger over the long haul, and that is the president’s ultimate goal,” he said on Fox News.

Even Fox News’ Martha MacCallum grilled Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the administration’s scapegoat of choice for the recent chaos, over the tariffs on Canada.

“The starting point is we care about America first,” Lutnick countered. “We care about American workers first. And we want to bring back those jobs to America. So we’re going to bring back more and more jobs to America. We don’t want to buy 60 percent of our aluminum from Canada.”

On Newsmax, conservative anchor Chris Salcedo accused the Democrats of making it appear “like we were doing better than we actually were” through what he described as government overspending.

Investor and author Mitch Feierstein agreed, claiming that the Magnificent 7 tech stocks—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—lost over $4 trillion in three months because they were “overvalued.”

“They were overvalued because of the Biden administration’s money printing, the Federal Reserve’s money printing,” he told Salcedo. “I was talking about a correction that would happen in early 2025 so this correction is overdue. Nothing to do with Trump, nothing to do with tariffs.”

Republican Senator Tim Sheehy echoed claims about “excess” government spending distorting the country’s economic picture.

“As you well know, our economy has been on a sugar high for a long time,” he said in an interview with Fox Business. “I think what we’re seeing here from this administration, and we’re going to see from this Congress, is re-disciplining to ensure that our economy is based on private investment and free market growth, not public sector spending short work.”

Trump himself was more cautious in reacting to the stock market plunge. Over the weekend, the president refused to rule out the possibility of a recession this year: “I hate to predict things like that,” he told Fox News. “There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big.”

Outside MAGAworld, however, there’s growing concern over the Trump administration’s tariffs and their effects on the broader economy.

“I’m going to say this at risk of my job,” CNBC senior economics reporter Steve Liesman said Tuesday. “But what President Trump is doing is insane. It is absolutely insane.”

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CNBC host Jim Cramer also said the stock market slide is a “screaming” warning for the Trump administration to change course.

“The stock market is beginning to say to President Trump, look, it’s just not worth it,” he said. “Even if you want to bring back jobs to America—manufacturing jobs—there’s a way to do this without causing a collapse in consumer confidence in the service economy.”