Hanging by a thread
When the stock market opens about twenty minutes from now, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the trajectory of the Trump presidency will hinge on what happens with it. Just seven weeks in, things have reached a breaking point already. And now we get to find out what happens after that breaking point.
Donald Trump and his people spent yesterday trying to calm down Republican members of the House and Senate who are now in a full blown panic over how badly Trump is tanking the stock market and the economy. Even as this was playing out, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped another 900 points yesterday. Things have gotten so jarringly bad that even Fox News is directly blaming the slump on Trump and his policies.
So what, exactly, is Trump going to be able to stand on if the stock market plummets again today? The day he took office, he had the entire Republican House and Senate squarely under his thumb. Now he’s at risk of losing them already, because they’re absolutely panicked about losing their seats in the midterms. And when a Republican President has lost Fox News… well, you know what that means.
If the Dow Jones drops another thousand points today, Donald Trump is not going to magically fall through a trap door. There’s no stock market number at which Trump suddenly ceases to be President. But there is a point where Trump gets so thoroughly tagged with a tanking stock market and economy that his political muscle begins to dry up entirely. And we’re firmly headed there.
What’s astonishing is that Trump has watched what’s played out over the past fifty days and still hasn’t seen fit to correct his course. He’s losing his own party. He’s losing his own propaganda channel. These are things that should be impossible. That’s how badly Trump is screwing this up for himself. We’ll see if there’s a point at which he finally accepts that his tariff wars are a mistake, or if he stubbornly clings to being wrong the entire way down.
