He is getting worse.
President Trump, by dint of both his vanity trade war with China and his increasingly senile Twitter tantrums, had single-handedly driven the Dow into a 400-plus point tailspin.
….better off without them. The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the United States, year after year, for decades, will and must STOP. Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019
This came after Trump impugning his personally appointed Fed chairman as more evil than the dictator of a nation that’s thrown millions of minorities in concentration camps and torturing its own people.
….My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the direct costs of the trade war will reduce household income by a little less than half of a percentage point, or as National Review’s Robert Verbruggen translated, $240 per year for the median household income of $60,000, or roughtly an Xbox One. That’s not great, but it’s also not egregious.
However, it is egregious for him to tank the stock market, thus messing (even if only temporarily) with the retirement savings of the majority of American households.
54% of Americans own stocks. Of the $23 trillion outstanding American corporate stock, retirement plans such as IRAs and 401(k) plans comprise one-third of all holdings. Individual investors and other taxable funders own another 25%. When the president plays politics with the market through sophomoric Twitter declarations that American companies bend the knee to his demands, he’s not just jeopardizing the valuation of companies owned by Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg; he’s threatening the life savings of ordinary Americans.
Just 80,000 Americans in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan handed Trump the White House. He may have won those votes with the promise of his trade war. But he now runs the risk of decimating the savings of pivotal suburbs outside of Philadelphia and Dallas, repeating the losses of 2018 and suicide-bombing his own reelection prospects through sheer hubris.
