With just a couple of weeks remaining before Election Day 2020, Donald Trump and Joe Biden faced off in their final debate, which included a rather specific prediction from the then-incumbent.
“They say the stock market will rule if I’m elected,” Trump said, failing to identify who “they” might be. He added, in reference to Joe Biden: “If he’s elected, the stock market will crash.”
The prediction, of course, turned out to be absurd, which led the Republican to roll out a dramatically different pitch in 2023: Sure, the stock market was soaring under Biden, the Republican said, but voters should credit Trump and not the Democratic president who was in office at the time. The talking point was rooted in the outlandish idea that investors were so excited about the prospect of a second Trump term that they sent markets soaring — more than a year in advance — with their gleeful anticipation.
“THIS IS THE TRUMP STOCK MARKET,” the Republican wrote to this social media platform in January 2024, roughly a year before Inauguration Day 2025, “BECAUSE MY POLLS AGAINST BIDEN ARE SO GOOD THAT INVESTORS ARE PROJECTING THAT I WILL WIN, AND THAT WILL DRIVE THE MARKET UP.”
After Trump returned to the White House, and his radical agenda and misguided trade policies did dramatic economic harm, the president switched gears again. “You can’t really watch the stock market,” Trump said in March, despite his years-long fixation on the stock market.
As his second term reached the 100-day benchmark, and the market’s performance became even more humiliating, the president decided that it’s no longer “the Trump stock market.” Instead, he declared online, “This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s.”
In other words, Americans were supposed to believe last year that markets were up because investors expected Trump to eventually return to power, and Americans are now supposed to believe that markets are down because investors recently remembered that Biden used to be in power.
The New York Times summarized the ham-fisted rhetorical tactics in a tidy way:
President Trump seems to have two opposing messages about the economy. Anything good should be credited to him. Anything bad is Joe Biden’s fault.
That might seem overly simplistic. It is not. Rather, this is exactly the framing the incumbent president has embraced with unnerving enthusiasm.
Indeed, the push isn’t limited to messaging about Wall Street. After the Commerce Department released the latest GDP data, which showed the U.S. economy shrinking in the first quarter of 2025 for the first time in years, Trump said these discouraging developments were Biden’s fault, too.
Trump on economy: “You probably saw some numbers today—that’s Biden, that’s not Trump.”
— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) 2025-04-30T15:46:18.121Z
Perhaps realizing that his trade tariffs were likely to have a sustained negative effect on the domestic economy, the Republican added that if the economy continues to shrink in the second quarter, the public should also hold Biden accountable for that.
Trump suggests he's going to blame Biden for bad Q2 economic numbers: "You could even say the next quarter is sort of Biden."
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-04-30T17:28:27.451Z
In the ensuing hours, Trump continued to insist that his immediate predecessor was responsible for the poor economic conditions again and again.
Remember when Trump told voters last summer, “When I win the election, we will immediately begin a brand new Trump economic boom. It’ll be a boom. We’re going to turn this country around so fast”? Evidently, he’s forgotten all about it.
As a political matter, the broader question is whether these tactics will work or not. If the president and his allies are expecting his pitch to work, they should probably lower their expectations. There are a few elements to this that are worth keeping in mind.
First, Trump’s efforts to shift blame are likely to fail because they’re rooted in obvious nonsense. As a factual matter, the economy is struggling as a direct result of Trump’s policies. To the extent that reality affects public attitudes, the president’s arguments will fall short because they’re wrong.
Second, Trump’s attempts will probably prove unpersuasive because they’re meandering and incoherent. The more he careens wildly between “give me credit for apparent good news” and “blame the guy who isn’t in office for bad news,” the more people will simply tune out his palaver.
And third, the president’s pitiful attempt at the blame game will almost certainly fail because it’s far too late to work. As New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore explained, “Rarely if ever, and certainly not since FDR, has a new administration taken office more determined to own the country, its policies, and its overall direction.”
Trump and his team made a choice: Move fast and break things. Throw caution to the wind. Shock and awe. Overwhelm the opposition. Caution is for losers.
This agenda carried real-world consequences that they’re responsible for — and the phrase “you broke it, you bought it” now hangs over the White House and its economic agenda.
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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