It's not that Trump doesn't care about markets. He just cares about tariffs more.
March 12, 2025
Investors are trying to make sense of President Trump's willingness to shrug off market losses in recent days.
A review of the president's commentary suggests perhaps a simple answer: He just cares more about tariffs during his second go-around in the White House so far.
"Markets are going to go up, and they're going to go down, but you know what: We have to rebuild our country," he said Tuesday afternoon in a trade-focused refrain that the president has sharpened in recent days even as market pressure has mounted.
And the economic fallout is clearly in evidence with markets in correction territory, a trade war breaking out on multiple fronts, Wall Street
increasingly worried about stagflation
, and Trump being peppered with questions on the topic at nearly every public appearance in recent days.
Trump has pivoted on plenty of tariff specifics — including a proposed 50% tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum
that lasted less than 8 hours on Tuesday
— but the longtime "tariff man" has remained remarkably consistent about what he sees as his ultimate goal of significant long-term tariff revenues and a reorientation of the US trading system.
It's a tariff-first focus that is perhaps not surprising to observers of Trump who saw him prioritize tariffs above all else at nearly every campaign stop in 2024. But it clearly represents a whiplash for traders who expected the president to pivot quickly once in office in deference to the markets (as he often did during his first term).
This time around, Trump is clearly choosing tariffs so far, with markets repeatedly underestimating his pain tolerance.
In his first 50 or so days in office — in spite of
what one observer quipped
was "Ross and Rachel" levels of uncertainty — Trump has already enacted a tariff agenda that will dwarf the economic impact of his first term if it's simply left in place.
New blanket tariffs of 20% on China have been enacted on top of existing duties. The world's second-largest economy is now facing overall duties of about 30% with Trump 1.0 tariffs still in place.
Also in place are 25% duties on a range of goods from Mexico and Canada. And the new entrant this week is a 25% tariff on global imports of steel and aluminum that
took effect Wednesday.
Trump's 'one fixed point'
"The one fixed point for Donald Trump is he loves tariffs," Jason Furman of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, said
in a recent Yahoo Finance Live appearance
in a common refrain of close Trump trade observers.
"That's the one thing that there's no whipsawing on," he added.
Indeed, it is the topic of markets that Trump is more likely to change his tune on.
Yahoo Finance
once isolated five different stages
of how Trump talked about markets while President Biden was in office, and his rhetoric changed dramatically depending on Wall Street's ups and downs.
Trump has also passed up opportunity after opportunity to soften the edges of his tariff rhetoric, even before wary business audiences that are clearly looking for some relief.
"It may go up higher," Trump even warned of duties on Tuesday evening before a group of CEOs assembled by the Business Roundtable.
He added that tariffs represent "a big win, that's a lot of money" while also telling the business leaders that "the biggest win is if they move into our country and produce jobs."
The president addressed the Business Roundtable — which calls itself "the voice of America's leading CEOs in Washington" — at the group's offices Tuesday evening.
About 230 of America's top CEOs are members of the group, with many prominent and perhaps tariff-wary names — from Google (
GOOG
) CEO Sundar Pichai, Verizon (
VZ
) CEO Hans Vestberg to JPMorgan (
JPM
) CEO Jamie Dimon — in attendance Tuesday.
It comes after a flurry of CEO warnings about tariffs across a range of sectors.
One of the most colorful comments came from Ford (
F
) CEO Jim Farley,
who has warned
Trump tariffs threaten to "blow a hole" in the US auto industry.
White House officials and Trump himself have often countered that recent turbulence is part of an economic "transition" that will see the economy come out stronger in the end. They have also
often touted
reports of companies eyeing possible expansion in the United States to avoid the duties.
Indeed, the somewhat new "no pain, no gain" message from Trump has led to a wide array of euphemisms from the president and his allies to wave away market troubles — from a "detox period" to "a little turbulence" to "growing pains" — but with a single message that the president clearly thinks the current turbulence is a sort of medicine that's worth taking in the service of the higher calling of tariffs.
"I think our country had to do this," Trump added Tuesday.
Harvard University executive fellow Bill George noted Tuesday afternoon that one of the best things CEOs
can do at the moment
, given Trump's approach, "is to stay below the radar."
The president has suggested he is in for the long run with his tariff-focused approach but, Trump being Trump, he couldn't avoid a bit of market punditry this week suggesting people buy the dip.
"I have a lot of very smart people, friends of mine and great businessmen," he told reporters this week. "They're now investing."
Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
