- The stock market under Trump has seen one of its worst performances on record in the first 100 days of a U.S. presidency. It’s the worst start to a year since Gerald Ford took over for Richard Nixon 50 years ago, and the fifth-worst performance in the equity markets over nearly a century—a time period that includes the Great Depression, major wars, and the stagflationary 1970s.
President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in the White House have been historically bad for the stock market.
From January 20 to late April, the S&P 500 has dropped almost 8%. That’s the worst start to a presidential term since Gerald Ford took the reins of the executive branch after Richard Nixon resigned in 1974. And it’s the fifth-worst start since 1928, the earliest date for which S&P Global Market Intelligence has data.
(While the S&P 500 in its current incarnation has only existed since 1957, S&P Global Intelligence has comparable data going back to 1928 from previous stock indices that Standard & Poor has developed.)
The stock market’s lackluster performance under Trump only ranks ahead of the starts of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s terms in 1933 and 1937, during the depths of the Great Depression. It also outstrips both Ford and the start of Nixon’s second term in 1973, when the U.S. confronted another economic crisis in the form of stagflation.
Add to that the dollar’s stumble and a selloff in the traditional safe-haven investment of Treasury notes, and the first 100 days in the markets have been uniquely unsettling for investors.
“The U.S. stock market and the dollar have fared worse over the last hundred days than they fared during the first hundred days of all other presidential terms since 1980,” John Higgins, chief markets economist at Capital Economics, wrote Monday in a research note titled, “Surely the next 100 days won’t be as turbulent as the last?”
Meanwhile, in the first 100 days of Joe Biden’s turn in the Oval Office, as global markets rebounded from the damage inflicted by COVID-19, the S&P 500 jumped more than 9%. That ranks as the third-best start for a commander-in-chief since 1928.
Tariffs, DOGE, and DeepSeek
The struggling stock market comes as Trump’s tariff plans have sown economic chaos over the past month. In early April, the president called for a baseline 10% tariff on all imported goods and instituted additional “reciprocal tariffs” on almost 60 countries and territories as well as the European Union. He also prompted a tit-for-tat tariff battle with China and raised taxes on imports from the People’s Republic to 145%.
“The USA lost Billions of Dollars A DAY in International Trade under Sleepy Joe Biden. I have now stemmed that tide, and will be making a fortune, very soon,” Trump posted Monday on Truth Social, his own social media app.
The U.S. stock markets did not respond well to Trump’s stemming of the “tide.” After “Liberation Day,” when the president first unveiled his suite of historically severe tariffs on April 2, the S&P 500 tanked 10% in a two-day span. “Never before has an hour of presidential rhetoric cost so many people so much,” former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers wrote in a post on X, shortly after Trump displayed a cardboard chart outlining increased taxes on foreign imports.
The President also notably gutted the federal government with the help of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a new organization designed to eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Analysts have worried about how cuts in federal spending may affect private contractors. “It’s a massive source of revenue for many different types of firms, not just government firms, but also private firms,” Abigail Blanco, an associate professor of economics at the University of Tampa, previously told Fortune.
While the president’s policymaking bears a large share of the blame for the market turbulence, it’s not the only cause for the downfall. Stocks were trading at historically high values at the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, leading some economists to worry that the market was overvalued or over-concentrated in a handful of tech companies. And the AI hype driving much of the market exuberance took a dive when China’s DeepSeek released a large language model earlier this spring that matched that of OpenAI, wiping trillions from the market cap of U.S.-based firms.
