Relax, I’m ‘Purposely Crashing the Market’ – Charm

Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

After President Trump announced sweeping tariffs this week the financial markets saw their steepest one-day declines since 2020, Americans started panic buying everything from TVs to soy sauce, and financial analysts warned that we’re facing “economic Armageddon.” Like many people, I was feeling pretty jittery about the collapse of the post-World War II economic order. But then I took a look at Donald Trump’s Truth Social feed and learned everything is going exactly according to plan!

I’ll admit: I did not find the “truth” pinned to the top of Trump’s feed all that reassuring. It’s a video (replicated below on X) of the present declaring on Thursday that the markets are “going to BOOM,” while in reality, they were doing the exact opposite:

But after scrolling down Trump’s feed, I realized the markets actually aren’t supposed to “BOOM” — or at least, not yet. You see, “Trump is playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers,” according to an X post the president shared. The accompanying TikTok video was eye-opening: we aren’t just spiraling into an unnecessary economic downturn, “Trump is Purposely CRASHING The Market”:

To be clear, Trump did not say this himself. But presumably he agrees with the sentiment, as that would be an utterly insane thing for a president to highlight in a tense economic moment if he didn’t mean it.

So what’s the “secret game” Trump is playing that could “make you rich”? Here’s the full text of the TikTok video (as Mediaite notes, the voice over appears to be from an Instagram post filmed by crypto and finance influencer Brian Decker two weeks ago):

Trump is crashing the stock market by 20 percent this month but he’s doing it on purpose. And this is why Warren Buffet just said Trump is making the best economic moves he’s seen in over 50 years. Now here’s the secret game he’s playing and it could make you rich.

So why is he doing this? To push cash into treasuries, which forces the Fed to slash interest rates in May and those lower rates give the Fed the ability to refinance trillions of debt very inexpensively. It also weakens the dollar and drops mortgage rates. Now it’s a wild chess move but it’s working.

Now you’re probably wondering, what about his tariffs? Well I’ll tell you, it’s a genius play. It actually forces companies to build here to dodge them. It also forces farmers to sell more of their products here in the U.S. to bring grocery prices way down. We’ve already seen this with eggs.

Now remember, 94 percent of all stocks are owned only by 8 percent of Americans. So Trump, he’s taking from the rich short term and handing it to the middle class through lower prices.

Now, I can’t find any evidence that Warren Buffet praised Trump’s economic moves (in fact, Buffet recently called tariffs “an act of war to some degree,” that eventually become “a tax on goods.”) And I feel like I’ve heard experts say that’s not how any of this works; in fact, Trump’s policies would actually “shift the tax burden away from the well-off and toward the poor and middle class.” But hey, I’m not an economist! And I definitely like the idea that the president knows what he’s doing, and isn’t upending the economy because he has a fifth grader’s understanding of how tariffs work.

From there, Trump’s Monday morning missives just kept getting more and more reassuring. He declared, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH, RICHER THAN EVER BEFORE!!!” This must be true because he shouted it in all caps, with three exclamation points:

And Trump clarified that while his “POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE” he is open to changing them if other nations offer him something good:

Finally, Trump touted Friday’s better-than-expected jobs report as evidence that “IT’S ALREADY WORKING.” (I assume “it’s” refers to his entire economic plan, not this week’s tariffs specifically, as the jobs in question were added in March.)

So while things might seem a little grim right now, Trump has convinced me that all we need to do is “HANK TOUGH!”