Trump: If I lose in ’20, market will tank

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump, gearing up for the official start of his 2020 campaign, warned that the U.S. would face an epic stock market crash if he’s not re-elected.

“If anyone but me takes over,” Trump told his Twitter followers Saturday, “there will be a Market Crash the likes of which has not been seen before!”

The tweet came a day after Trump said he had no intention of ending his public attacks on the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policies even though he knows he has made Chairman Jerome Powell’s job more difficult.

Trump told ABC News in an interview released Friday that he thinks economic growth and stock market indexes would be substantially higher if the chairman “wouldn’t have raised interest rates so much.” The Fed raised rates four times last year. Powell has signaled that the Fed is prepared to cut rates should it decide that Trump’s trade war with China threatened the economic expansion.

Trump officially starts his 2020 campaign on Tuesday with a rally in Orlando, Florida, and appears to be road-testing some of the themes he’ll be touching on in the next 18 months, including stoking fear of a market meltdown.

“Tuesday will be a Big Crowd and Big Day,” he said in another tweet.

He also tweeted in February that “had the opposition party” won in 2016, “the Stock Market would be down at least 10,000 points by now” — an unprovable assertion.

Research by Macrotrends shows the Dow Jones’ performance so far in Trump’s term has been middling compared with his predecessors, and trails the gains made under Democrats Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.