Tumbling stock market creates 'tough split screen' for White House optimism: analysis

Even as President Donald Trump labored to sell confidence in the U.S. economy at his pre-Davos speech the hard math at the bottom of news screens appeared to troll him.

Trump blamed “fake news” when a reporter asked him why the U.S. voting public wasn’t buying his economic optimism at his Tuesday speech. But numbers indicating a hard drop in the DOW Jones market during the second hour of his press undermined his claim.

“A lot of people are listening to the fake news a little bit, and I'm not blaming anybody. I think I blame ourselves. I think we've done a much better job than we're able to promote. We're not promoting, we're doing a great job, and we're sort of letting the promotion take care of itself,” Trump rambled as DOW numbers continued to dip. “One of the reasons I'm doing this news conference, I think it's important we have taken a mess and made it really good. It's going to get even better. But if you look at prices from a year or a year and a half ago, you look at the Biden prices, they were way up through the sky.”

“And, you know, they use the word ‘affordability’. They just say ‘affordability’ and they don't talk about it. They created the affordability problem. And we have we are solving it. We have solved a lot of it,” Trump insisted as the DOW indicators remained in the red and continued to slide.

“Tough split screen for the White House as Trump passes the 1-hour mark of his remarks (on the left of the screen),” posted CBS News Justice Correspondent Scott MacFarlane, on X. “The DOW is down more than 900 points (on the bottom right).”

“He tanked the economy his first time around and it took President Biden 3 years to dig us out,” responded a commenter under MacFarlane’s post. “And here we go again - what Dem will be elected in 2028 to put us right again?”

Trump declared at one point during his speech that the job he did on the U.S. economy in his first year was "a miracle," despite nagging voter dissatisfaction with the Trump economy.

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