Thanks, Trump: Stock market tanks amid new tariffs and crappy jobs report
The stock market is once again in free fall, after President Donald Trump announced a new round of tariffs on imports from dozens of countries and a new report showed that job growth has been virtually nonexistent over the last three months.
For months, Wall Street investors have buried their heads in the sand and continued to make the markets climb, both banking on their belief that Trump would chicken out on his tariffs and that the economic data wasn’t showing the armageddon economists had predicted was coming.
Yet that hope crashed into reality this week, as Trump implemented new ridiculous tariffs, and economic data—including a stagnating jobs market and rising inflation—finally showed the damage that had long been predicted.
As of publishing time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen more than 400 points, and the S&P 500 lost nearly 1.5% of its value.
“Today’s release is best characterized as ‘bad news is bad news’ in our view. With job creation at stall speed levels and the tariff headwind lying ahead, there’s a strong possibility of a negative payroll print in the coming months which may conjure up fears of a recession,” Jeffrey Schulze, head of economic and market strategy at ClearBridge Investments, told CNBC.
As for the tariffs, which will now go into effect as of Aug. 7, the most damaging is a 35% tariff on imports from Canada, America’s third-largest trading partner that supplies critical goods like crude oil, fertilizer ingredients that are necessary for U.S. farmers, and lumber. Those tariffs will make it more expensive for Americans to heat and build homes, as well as purchase produce.
As the economy falters, Democrats are slamming Trump and his GOP enablers.
“Today’s jobs report is a stark warning for America’s economy. With unemployment rising and costs skyrocketing, working families across the country are left paying the price for Trump and Republicans’ reckless tariffs and economic chaos,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote in a post on X.
Related | New jobs numbers hint at Great Recession 2.0
Other Democrats were quick to point out that the only sector adding jobs is health care—but that too is about to take a massive hit as Trump and the GOP’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” kicks in and makes massive cuts to Medicaid.
“An incredibly bad jobs report in which most of the jobs added in July were in health care—an industry soon to be decimated by Trump’s Big, Ugly Bill. But don’t worry, he’s putting in a $200M ballroom at the White House,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) wrote in a post on X.
Meanwhile, GOP lawmakers are virtually silent, unable to polish the turd that was the July jobs report.
“Trust in Trump,” Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX) declared in a post on X.
Given that Trump is directly responsible for the economic decline, we’ll take a pass on that one. Instead, they are parroting Dear Leader and blaming the bad data on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
“Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell needs to quit playing games and lower the rate!” Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) wrote in a post on X.
But at the end of the day, lowering rates can only do so much when businesses are being crippled by idiotic tariffs, forcing them to either raise prices on consumers—which many are doing—or cut jobs to make up for the hits to their profit margins.
Trump should change his slogan to Make America go through a Great Recession Again.