Fire me!? Poor idea
Stocks will crash & you’ll all be sorry, rants Don amid mayhem
President Trump painted a doomsday picture of the U.S. economy in which “everybody would be very poor” should Congress move to impeach him — but economists and history disagree.
"If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash, I think everybody would be very poor," Trump told Fox News' Ainsley Earhardt in a taped interview that aired Thursday. “You would see numbers that you wouldn't believe.”
Trump's Republican Party currently holds a majority in the Senate and House, where articles of impeachment originate. But Democrats are mounting a bid to take the lead in the upcoming midterm elections in November.
“I don't know how you can impeach somebody who's done a great job,” Trump said.
However, impeachment talk has reached a fever pitch in recent days after Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, implicated him in a campaign finance crime and his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was nearly simultaneously convicted on eight counts of tax-and bankfraud charges stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.
The stock market has barely flinched amid the possibility of legal troubles for the commander-inchief.
The S&P 500 is up 7% for the year — and Wednesday marked the longest bull market on record, whichstarted in March 2009.
Economists said Trump is overestimating his impact on Wall Street.
“He seems to think he's the only reason the market is doing well, but the tax plan is already law and it has to do with a certain amount of economic stability that was built up during the Obama administration,” said Stan Collender, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and the founder of @thebudgetguy blog.
Should Trump get booted from the Oval Office, Collender added, investors could potentially view Vice President Pence as a more stable force in Washington.
“The transition would be Trump to Pence and you wouldn't get much of a difference in policy,” he said. “Markets don't like uncertainty. To the extent that it would get rid of some of the could over the Trump administration, it could be viewed as a move to the possible stability of a Pence presidency.”
There is little historical evidence that markets would crash in response to Trump's impeachment.
Only two U.S. Presidents — Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998 — have faced impeachment proceedings.
In the month prior to Johnson being impeached there was a 10% gain on Wall St. In the months following his being acquitted by the Senate, markets jumped another 6%, according to Forbes.
In 1998, from when the House voted to start the proceedings to the Senate's acquittal four months later, the S&P 500 Index rose 28%, according to FactSet data.