In the more than 100 days since President Donald Trump launched a war with Iran, he has offered a shifting list of reasons for why he started the conflict. But in explaining his push for peace, he named a priority much closer to home: protecting the stock market.
“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe,” Trump told reporters gathered in the Alpine spa town of Évian-les-Bains, France, after the Group of Seven summit. “If you kept this going, that could have happened, but all I know is every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship.”
The remarks provide the starkest example to date of Trump describing Wall Street as the barometer for consequential decisions of his presidency. They gave the public a glimpse of a dynamic that administration officials have often described: Whether he grapples with war, the rapid advance of artificial intelligence or the economic fallout from his effort to remake global trade, Trump considers market reaction a key measure of success.
“The stock market is more brilliant than anybody there is, including the people on this stage, other than me, of course,” he said, flanked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other top administration officials.
The gains Trump has celebrated, however, are not shared equally. A majority of Americans have some exposure to the stock market, but ownership is heavily concentrated among the wealthy.
The richest 1 percent of Americans held nearly half of the country’s stock market wealth at the end of 2025, according to the Federal Reserve Board. The bottom half of Americans own about 1 percent of stock market wealth.
At the same time, the war, Trump’s AI agenda and his tariffs have contributed to inflationary pressures that fall most heavily on lower-income households, which spend a larger share of their income on essentials such as food and gasoline.
At Wednesday’s news conference, Trump claimed the term “affordability” was invented by the Democrats to disparage his economic policies, and he predicted that prices would quickly plummet as oil became cheaper.
Trump has at times tied his reliance on the stock market to concerns about his broader legacy, and he regularly claims that he presided over the “greatest” stock market in history during his first term while glossing over the negative impact of the covid pandemic on the market.
“The one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover,” he said Wednesday, referencing the president who was in office at the time of the 1929 stock market crash. Trump went on to accuse Hoover of causing the Great Depression by raising taxes and interest rates too quickly. There is no consensus among historians and economists about the exact cause of the Depression, though many note the negative impact of tariffs, bank failures and the rise of purchasing stocks with borrowed money.
Trump’s reverence for Wall Street has roots in his rise to prominence as a real estate developer in the 1980s, amid a market boom that fundamentally redefined wealth creation in the United States. In his second term, he has shattered ethical norms for modern presidents by maintaining an active portfolio in the market. His investment accounts made more than 3,600 transactions worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the first quarter of 2026, according to an analysis by CBS News.
The Trump Organization has told The Washington Post that the president and his family do not play “any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments.”
Presidents have long been attentive to the economic consequences of their decisions to wage war, seek peace and reshape the world. But Trump has been especially transparent that market feedback guides his foreign policy decisions — including at moments when at least some of his allies feel there is significant strategic downside to doing so.
Advocates of maximal pressure on Iran, including many who praised Trump’s initial decision to wage war against the country, say that in his quest to keep the market high, the president seems prepared to make concessions to Tehran that they view as dangerous.
Presidents have long tried to play down the idea that they are susceptible to economic pressure when they make their foreign policy decisions, so that they can maintain maximum deterrence against potential foes.
Iranians “recognized how critical market reaction was to U.S. decision-making, and it gave them leverage, especially as the U.S. strategic reserves were approaching dangerously low levels,” said Suzanne Maloney, an expert on U.S.-Iran relations at the Brookings Institution. “Time was on their side and ultimately produced a much more generous set of initial trade-offs.”
Trump said Wednesday that he was ready to restart hostilities if he felt Iran was straying from the agreement or otherwise negotiating in bad faith.
Iran hawks have noted several points in the deal that they believe concede too much to Iran. They criticized the Obama-era nuclear deal, for example, because it allowed Iran access to previously frozen cash that they said paid for years of investments in proxy militias, terrorism and the country’s ballistic missile program. On Wednesday, Trump defended once again unfreezing Iranian assets.
“After U.S. and Israeli military successes, the [memorandum of understanding] looks like a diplomatic win for the regime in Iran,” wrote Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a group that advocates a tough line against Iran.
Trump defended allowing Iran access to the cash on the grounds that it would be bad for the dollar if countries worried they could suffer by storing their reserves in U.S. currency. He sidestepped the possibility that unfreezing Iranian assets might fuel security challenges for the U.S. and its allies.
“It’s not our money, it’s their money, and we froze it at a certain point in time. I guess we’re going to have to give it back. You know, if we didn’t give it back, nobody would ever invest in the dollar again,” he told reporters.
He also said that the world would run out of oil reserves in about four weeks if the Strait of Hormuz was not reopened, suggesting such a shortage could lead to “bedlam.” Gas and oil executives have been warning the White House that prices could surge soon because of low inventories if the conflict continued.
Trump has frequently criticized former president Joe Biden’s Russia policy as too “weak,” saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin would never have invaded Ukraine in 2022 had Trump been in power. As with the attack on Iran this year, the invasion of Ukraine sent global energy prices soaring. That forced the Biden administration to balance economic costs against how much pressure to apply on Russia.
The administration ultimately imposed a range of sanctions on Russian industries and tried to help Europe wean itself from dependence on Russian natural gas. But it held back from some measures against the Russian oil industry to spare energy prices.
Iran is not the only topic on which Trump’s market focus has clearly influenced his decision-making.
Trump recently postponed signing an executive order that would place new guardrails on artificial intelligence, in part because of concerns about how the action would affect tech stocks, which have driven much of the stock market’s gains this year.
“I really thought that could have been a blocker,” Trump said, noting the benefits of AI to the U.S. economy.
Trump signed the order after some minor changes were made.
Last year, he backed off a plan to launch sweeping tariffs after the S&P 500 responded to the levies by wiping away 12 percent of its value in a week. He also said his decision was motivated by the bond markets, where he said investors were getting “queasy.”
“I guess they say it was the biggest day in financial history,” Trump said, after markets soared in response to his decision to pause the tariffs.
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