WASHINGTON (AP) — When the stock market was climbing in January 2024, Donald Trump knew exactly who deserved credit: He did.
Nearly a year before his return to the White House, he declared on his Truth Social platform that investors were celebrating his lead in the polls against President Joe Biden.
When the stock market fell Wednesday on news that the American economy had gone backward during the first three months of 2025, Trump knew exactly who to blame: Biden.
“This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s,’’ he posted, adding that Biden “left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!’’
Trump also said, “Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden ‘Overhang.’ This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS.”
Yet for economists puzzling out how prices and hiring will change in the coming months, or businesses struggling with a starkly uncertain future, Trump’s massive and unpredictable import taxes on almost every country do in fact bear much of the blame. Rarely have a new president’s policies had such a sharp, immediate impact on the economy.
To Georgia Tech University’s Mark Zachary Taylor, who studies the economic policies of the American presidents, Trump’s assertions sound like a brazen double standard. “He cannot have it both ways,’’ Taylor said by email, “though he always tries.’’
Trump’s attempt to shift blame for bad economic news to his predecessor raises a question: At what point in a four-year term does a new president assume responsibility for the economy’s performance?
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said in interviews that the benefits of Trump’s policies will be felt in the second half of this year, particularly in the fourth quarter.
And Taylor notes that for a typical president, “it might take six months to two years for us to accurately call the economy ‘theirs.’”
But the threshold is different for presidents who enter the White House with big ambitions to reshape the economy from the get-go.
“The more boldly an incoming president acts (and the stronger his Congressional support), the sooner the economy becomes ‘his,’ ” Taylor said.
The most notable example is President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who pushed through major legislation — including a bill that effectively established deposit insurance to calm a banking crisis – to combat the Great Depression during his first 100 days in office. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama also entered office during economic crises and moved swiftly to deal with them.
But even they did not move the economic data as quickly or sharply as Trump. On Wednesday, the government reported that imports surged 41%, the biggest jump — excluding the pandemic — since 1972. Companies rushed to bring in goods in the first quarter to beat the impending tariffs.
