Trump, who tied himself to stock market when it rose, struggles to respond to its plunge – By Eli Stokols, Noah Bierman (LA Times) / March 9 2020
WASHINGTON — President Trump, in defiance of precedent and warnings from advisors, repeatedly has tied his political fortunes to the stock market, taking credit for three years of steady growth and pointing to people’s healthy 401(k) accounts as he makes his case for reelection.
As the market plunged on Monday, ending with the Dow Jones industrial average down nearly 8%, the president struggled to respond — tweeting the usual attacks on Democrats, attending a fundraiser in Florida and generally downplaying the rising public health emergency, projecting a determined and wishful calm increasingly at odds with an agitated public.
The president is set to meet Monday afternoon with advisors about potential bailouts and other mitigating measures, and some Wall Street executives have been invited to the White House to meet with Trump later this week, according to two people with knowledge of the plans. These new, stepped-up efforts to acknowledge and respond to a growing public health, economic and political threat come as some of Trump’s outside allies and advisors have grown more concerned about his stubborn projection of nonchalance.
“He’s a wartime president now, and he has to get into that mode,” said Steve Cortes, a spokesman for the pro-Trump America First PAC and a former Wall Street trader and analyst. “The enemy isn’t a foreign country, it’s a virus. We need a commander-in-chief who is really front and center, warning about risks and being transparent about the risks, but also reassuring the people that America can handle this.”
Transparency, reassurance and steadiness, however, have never been traits at which Trump excels, and in dealing with the current crisis, he faces several problems that he’s not accustomed to.
Continue to article: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-03-09/
