Vibe Shift: White House Says Stock Market ‘Not Driving Force’

“These are countries and companies – foreign companies – that have been ripping us off, and no president did anything about it, until I came along, and then I did a lot about it,” he continued.

Presidents of both parties generally have two responses to Wall Street. When stocks go up, they seek to take credit for a booming economy. When the market dips, they blame other factors. This applied to Trump previously. He was thrilled, for instance, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average surpassed 30,000 in November 2020. He even made a trip to the White House briefing room to celebrate in person what he called a “sacred number.”

But ahead of his latest trade war, the president seems to be opening the economic aperture to focus not just on figures like gross domestic product but on the quality of the economy. He is much more populist in his tone since returning to power. This is a change for Republicans who have long been the party of big business, often arguing that whatever is good for Wall Street must be good for Main Street.

The remarks about markets from the president were not haphazard. They followed a similarly blunt message delivered by his Cabinet. 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said earlier in the day at the Economic Club of New York that the strength of the country goes beyond just low prices.

“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream,” Bessent told investors gathered there. “The American Dream is rooted in the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, and economic security. For too long, the designers of multilateral trade deals have lost sight of this. International economic relations that do not work for the American people must be reexamined.”

Those words were already raising eyebrows on Wall Street when Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick doubled down on the sentiment. “The president wants American growth and American prosperity,” he told reporters early Thursday afternoon. “The fact that the stock market goes up or down a half percent on any given day is not the driving force of our outcomes.”

The outcomes that this administration seeks, however, aren’t exactly easy to plot on a spreadsheet. They include a “blossoming” of employment in sectors like manufacturing in the United States and an end to the flow of fentanyl across U.S. borders.

Trump has promised that reciprocal tariffs will be put in place by April 2, a vow that has roiled markets and threatened to harsh hiring and investment stateside. The question for his administration now is if they can achieve their goals before Wall Street goes haywire. The S&P 500 has already dropped 6% this month.

The message from the administration delighted the more populist corners of the conservative movement, who have long complained that the GOP is too libertarian and deferential to business.

“This is a meaningful rhetorical shift from many decades of seeing the stock market and GDP as the sole measures of our nation’s economic prosperity,” Abigail Ball, the executive director of the conservative American Compass, told RealClearPolitics. “I don’t think we’re going to see a total disregard for the market in the long term, but it is notable that Republicans are no longer willing to worship Wall Street at the expense of American families and workers.”

The populist shift comes as Trump promises to usher in a new “golden age of America” and even as his own administration, led by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, takes a libertarian view to slashing the federal bureaucracy. Wall Street, meanwhile, wants one thing: certainty. This was the argument from former Trump administration Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who delivered that message to the White House via a recent interview with Bloomberg.

“The market really wants certainty, and it will adjust to whatever they are,” Mnuchin said at the Bloomberg Invest conference in New York on Wednesday. “The problem right now is we don’t have certainty.”