| | | | BY PHILIP ELLIOTT
Senior Correspondent, TIME | It's been a week of searing reversals coming out of the White House, making it difficult to take anything it says at face value. The most conspicuous example of this was the nebulous state of President Donald Trump's tariffs with Canada and Mexico, which seesawed over a matter of days from being unequivocally on, to mostly off, and then maybe, sort of, on again. Amid all that, the President boasted of Elon Musk's free hand to fire thousands of government workers in a speech to Congress that was rife with obfuscations and fabrications. Two days later, after a hastily called Cabinet meeting, Trump announced some new restraints on his fellow billionaire. | But even in a truly head-spinning week in this new era in Washington, one Trump remark stands out in how utterly unbelievable it was. "I'm not even looking at the market," the President said Thursday in a fib that left even his defenders with little response. | | One top aide in Republican Leadership perhaps summed up all of D.C.'s reaction best when he messaged me back on an encrypted app with an eye-roll emoji. A second Republican who worked in Trump's first administration suggested we had perhaps fallen into a parallel universe: "We are on Earth 10,000." | This is, after all, a President who spent most of his first term using Wall Street as a proxy for not only the economy's health, but his overall success as the nation's leader. "That big Stock Market increase must be credited to me," Trump insisted in what was then called a tweet in 2019. "If Hillary won - a Big Crash!" | So despite what Trump claimed on Thursday when asked about the impact of his confusing tariff policies, this is an administration that lives by the markets and dies by them, and right now that barometer is falling fast. | Friday's jobs report had been expected to help Wall Street recover, after its gains since Trump's election in November evaporated in short order. Since reaching a peak on Dec. 16, the tech-heavy Nasdaq is now down 10% from its high-record mark that Trump once promoted. The broader Dow is down more than 5%. A panicked investor-class selloff put the markets on pace for the worst week since September. As one political adviser to the financial services sector, here in town for a conference of credit union execs, told me in an exasperated clip: "We are exhausted, and it's still Q1." | | The news in Friday's jobs report was seen as a decidedly mixed bag. The U.S. economy added 151,000 jobs but unemployment ticked up to 4.1%. The numbers were slightly below expectations, but the real fear came in what wasn't counted: the bulk of mass firings and downsizing of federal workers that had not yet shown up on the ledger. And the report wasn't strong enough to mitigate all the tariff turmoil, which is zapping confidence that investments today will be worth more down the line. | It's not especially clever, but it is nonetheless accurate: the so-called "Trump Bump" after he won a second, non-consecutive term in power has become a "Trump Slump." A whopping $3 trillion in wealth created since Election Day disappeared just this week. | The length of that slump is an open question. Friday's jobs report was just the latest brick in a monument to Trump's second-term economic record. Whether it's a dour subbasement or a glass-and-steel office tower is still T.B.D. | But investors are losing patience with the ways in which no one in Trump's orbit can be counted on to know what they're talking about. Billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told a business broadcast that the tariffs would stick, only to be humiliated days later by his boss, who said they were going to be booted down the calendar. Then, on Friday, Trump resurrected the tariffs and threatened a 250% tariff on Canadian dairy and timber. | Undergirding much of this market turmoil is Trump's capricious nature, and those he has empowered like Musk. It's why so many government contractors are spending their days refreshing Musk's DOGE account to see if they will be paid for work already approved and completed. | More to the point, Washington may be slowly adjusting to the on-again-off-again nature of so many things emanating from this White House, but Wall Street is decidedly not. It truly has become an hour-to-hour crisis; market-moving decisions can come between phone calls, and then revert back soon after. And we haven't yet seen an official jobs report that reflects the cutting across federal agencies, or the way in which the potential degradation of services like food safety inspections or weather forecasting might ripple across the U.S. or world economy. We are all on this merry-go-round watching as the mechanics who keep it lubricated are evicted. | READ THE STORY » | | | | |
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