President Donald Trump’s markets boast has been hit by a crushing reality check as fresh data delivered an awkward verdict on his second White House stint.
U.S. stock markets delivered weaker gains during the first year of President Trump’s second term than during the same period of his first presidency, according to an Axios analysis published Wednesday.
The S&P 500 rose 15.7 percent from Trump’s second inauguration through Jan. 16, the final trading day of his first year back in office. That gain fell short of the 24.1 percent jump during the first year of Trump’s previous term. It also lagged behind the 19.3 percent increase posted during his predecessor Joe Biden’s first year and trailed far behind former President Barack Obama’s 35.9 percent surge, Axios reported.
Other major indexes painted a more mixed picture. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 13.5 percent over the past year, roughly matching Biden’s 13.3 percent first-year performance but trailing Trump’s first-term gain of 32.1 percent and Obama’s 58 percent jump. The Nasdaq climbed 19.8 percent during Trump’s second stint, outperforming Biden’s 9.9 percent and Obama’s 4.5 percent, but still below the 32.4 percent surge Trump enjoyed during his first term.
The reality check comes just weeks after Trump claimed that the U.S. has “the greatest stock market in history.”
In a statement to the Daily Beast, White House deputy press secretary Kush Desai said, “Joe Biden inherited three COVID-19 vaccines from President Trump and an economy that had been artificially depressed by Democrat state officials implementing draconian pandemic shutdowns.”
“President Trump, on the other hand, inherited the worst inflation crisis and most cumbersome regulatory regime in a decade, with the American economy shedding over 100,000 manufacturing jobs in Biden’s last year in office.
“The stock market hitting multiple all-time highs, real wages rising, and inflation cooling all prove that President Trump is delivering for both Main Street and Wall Street,” Desai added.
Market turbulence intensified this week amid rising geopolitical tensions, including the president’s threats involving Greenland. On closing Tuesday, the Dow was down 870 points, the S&P 500 lost 2.1 percent, while the Nasdaq slid 2.4 percent, marking the worst daily performance for all three since October.
The president has doubled down on his threat to forcibly annex Greenland, the semiautonomous island that is part of Denmark. He has declared the U.S. needs the territory for “national security and even international security” and has even threatened imposing tariffs on a slew of European countries until the territory is handed to the U.S.
Trump arrived in Davos on Wednesday to attend the World Economic Forum, where he is set to hold talks with members of the NATO military alliance on Greenland. “We’ll probably be able to work something out,” he told NewsNation before departing.
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