Trump struggles to respond as markets take a tumble
WASHINGTON — President Trump, in defiance of precedent and warnings from advisors, repeatedly has tied his political fortunes to the stock market, taking credit for three years of steady growth and pointing to people’s healthy 401(k) accounts as he makes his case for reelection.
As the market plunged on Monday, ending with the Dow Jones industrial average down nearly 8%, the president struggled to respond — tweeting the usual attacks on Democrats, attending a fundraiser in Florida and generally downplaying the rising public health emergency, projecting a determined and wishful calm increasingly at odds with an agitated public.
After meeting Monday with advisors, Trump appeared in the White House briefing room alongside members of the administration’s coronavirus task force and said that he would meet with lawmakers Tuesday about taking “very major” actions to mitigate the impact, including a possible payroll tax cut and additional steps to provide relief for affected industries and small businesses and employees being forced to stay home from work.
“It’s not their fault, it’s not our country’s fault,” he said, glumly. “It’s something we were thrown into. We’re handling it and we have been handling it.”
“This blindsided the world, and I think we’ve handled it very, very well,” he added.
Trump left after just a few minutes and without taking questions, leaving Vice President Mike Pence and health officials behind to deliver the administration’s guidance to the public about how best to avoid the virus and slow its spread.
Roughly a million tests for the coronavirus have been distributed and are now available “in every state,” Pence said. But Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar could not say how many Americans had so far been tested or if the president had undergone one.
These new efforts to acknowledge and respond to a growing public health, economic and political threat come as some of Trump’s outside allies and advisors have grown more concerned about his stubborn projection of nonchalance.
“He’s a wartime president now, and he has to get into that mode,” said Steve Cortes, a spokesman for the pro-Trump America First PAC and a former Wall Street trader and analyst. “The enemy isn’t a foreign country, it’s a virus. We need a commander in chief who is really front and center, warning about risks and being transparent about the risks, but also reassuring the people that America can handle this.”
Transparency, reassurance and steadiness, however, have never been traits at which Trump excels, and in dealing with the current crisis, he faces problems that he’s not accustomed to.
One is that after three constantly chaotic and controversial years in the White House, the president’s power to move Wall Street with his words alone has greatly diminished.
“Markets are forward looking and today they look terrified,” said Justin Wolfers, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan and an administration critic. “The markets are making a joint bet about how the virus plays out and how it affects the economy. It’s probably a bet on their lack of confidence that the government is going to manage this well.”
A second problem is that despite the president’s repeated assurances that the spread of the disease has been contained, its impact has begun to hit people in his own circle — since Sunday, six conservative Republican members of Congress, including Trump’s newly announced White House chief of staff, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), have announced that they are quarantining themselves after coming into contact with a man at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference last week who has since tested positive for the virus.
Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, said late Monday that Trump had not been tested for the virus “because he has neither had prolonged close contact with any known confirmed COVID-19 patients, nor does he have any symptoms.”