On Wednesday afternoon, in a move that garnered global attention, Donald Trump announced a 90-day “pause” to much of his agenda on trade tariffs, which, not surprisingly, sent the major Wall Street indexes soaring. But a few hours earlier, the president — who’d publicly insisted that his trade tariffs were “here to stay” and would “never change“ — had published a related item to his social media platform.
“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” he wrote. It came four minutes after Trump also wrote, “BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well.”
It didn’t take long before many started connecting those two dots: The president encouraged people to start investing shortly before he made an unexpected move that benefited investors. As NBC News reported, some important questions soon followed.
In the wake of President Donald Trump’s announcement Wednesday afternoon that he was pausing country-by-country tariffs by 90 days, some experts — as well as critics of Trump and social media users — are raising questions about a statement he posted earlier in the day that may have indicated the massive sell-off in stocks in recent days was coming to an end.
Though no public evidence has emerged that the president was engaged in market manipulation, and the White House has explicitly denied anything untoward, the circumstances have generated some inevitable concerns.
“This is a scenario that could expose the president to accusations that he engaged in market manipulation,” Richard Painter, former President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who now teaches government ethics and security regulation at the University of Minnesota’s law school, told NBC News. Painter added that Trump’s online items were “a terrible idea.”
A variety of congressional Democrats in the House and Senate had similar reactions, and the morning after the president’s move, Sens. Adam Schiff of California and Ruben Gallego of Arizona wrote to the Office of Government Ethics demanding an investigation. Time will tell what, if anything, comes of this, though the president’s record seems relevant. In 2018, The New York Times published a devastating series of reports about Trump’s financial background, including the apparent fact that he became wealthy though alleged instances of “outright fraud.” One of the Times reports included this tidbit: “During the 1980s, Donald Trump became notorious for leaking word that he was taking positions in stocks, hinting of a possible takeover, and then either selling on the run-up or trying to extract lucrative concessions from the target company to make him go away. It was a form of stock manipulation with an unsavory label: ‘greenmailing.’” Trump has long denied any wrongdoing. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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