A trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America
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Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America
Wall Street has been whipsawed for more than a week by President Trump’s every word about tariffs. Now he’s facing accusations of using his power to deliberately manipulate the markets.
The scrutiny started with a tale of two social-media posts. On Wednesday, shortly after the U.S. stock market opened, Trump posted on his Truth Social network in all caps: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!”
Less than four hours after his post, Trump said on Truth Social that he would pause the harshest of his tariffs on most countries.
Stocks immediately skyrocketed in relief, with the Dow closing up almost 3,000 points — meaning that any investors who had followed Trump’s advice in the morning and bought into the stock market right away would have made quite a bit of money by the end of the day.
Prior to his post, share prices had been plummeting for days, as fears mounted about the economic damage Trump’s new trade policies could cause. Powerful investors and billionaire business leaders had increasingly gone public airing their worries about the new tariffs, and the resulting financial panic.
By Wednesday afternoon, Trump seemed to hear them when he hit pause.
Now some Democratic lawmakers and government ethics experts are calling for investigations into whether Trump was attempting to deliberately manipulate the markets, or to enable others to trade on insider information.
Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat from California and Ruben Gallego, Democrat from Arizona, sent a letter to the White House on Wednesday, requesting “an urgent inquiry into whether President Trump, his family, or other members of the administration engaged in insider trading or other illegal financial transactions, informed by advanced knowledge” of his tariff policy changes.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat from Massachusetts, also called for an investigation, asking on the floor of Congress if this was “corruption in plain sight.”
White House spokesperson Kush Desai accused Democrats of “playing partisan games,” and tells NPR that Trump’s early-morning post was merely meant to calm investors’ fears.
“”It is the responsibility of the President of the United States to reassure the markets and Americans about their economic security,” he wrote in an emailed statement.
