The Trump Put is undefeated

The President of the United States judges himself — seemingly every day — on the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

He is a person that can’t stand to see stock markets go down, even for a brief period. He has utterly convinced himself — and not entirely without reason — that American progress is whatever number is on the index, preferably with non-stop record highs.

Just after Liberation Day, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared “it’s main street’s turn now” but that lasted about three days before the long, slow walkback on tariffs began. Notably, the earliest tariff U-turns were hinted at by Trump in tweets and likely front-run.

This is nothing new, I’ve been writing about it since Covid when Trump signed a copy of an intraday reversal on March 13, 2020 at the peak of virus panic. I wrote about it many times when he was running for re-election again.

It’s the north star of trading in the Trump era.

Now we get the White House floating that they’re thinking about letting Nvidia sell chips to China. This was an idea that was also floated during China negotiations and you have to wonder if it wasn’t always in the works. Or if it’s a tactic to halt market slumps. If it’s the later, you can only float it so many times before it doesn’t work any more.

None of that undermines the idea that Trump can’t stand to see the market go down and that dynamic will be increasingly important as we head towards the midterms in just under a year.

Of course, no man can control the market and covid showed that nature can inflict some real pain (at least for awhile) but Trump has plenty of ammunition with tariff waivers now and he’s going to try and stack the Fed. That’s a powerful mix.

Update: In terms of it being a deliberate leak to turn markets, Reuters sources are now also out with the same report. This is obviously a strategy; the only question is whether they mean it or not.