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As his tariff plans were melting global markets this week, Donald Trump was defiant.
“I am proud to be the president for the workers . . . the president who stands up for Main Street, not Wall Street,” he said in a speech on Tuesday.
Turmoil in equities or bonds — even on Wednesday, as markets soared after the president paused some of his tariffs — was a problem for the moneyed globalists, Trump’s loyalists argued.
“The billionaires seem very upset,” said Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday. “Now do any of these Chicken Littles stop to think past their portfolios?”
They do in Staten Island, the conservative blue-collar New York borough that voted for Trump by 30 points in the presidential election last year.
In a small commercial district on its north shore, not far from the Statue of Liberty, Trump’s tariffs have hit hard for people such as Joy Ghigliotti, the owner of Hypno-Tronic Comics — a shop jammed with merchandise but empty of customers.
“All the printing is done in other countries, all the toys that we get are from other countries,” said Ghigliotti, who has run the store for 12 years. “It’s going to decimate my business.”
Ghigliotti said many of her comics were printed in Canada — “which does not like us any more” — and most of her toys were from China. She was already paying 10-25 per cent more for them than she planned, upending her budget. She has stopped buying new comics.
“It’s an existential threat to a lot of businesses,” Ghigliotti said. “And [Trump] is golfing.”
The turbulence in global markets in the past week has come alongside other evidence that Americans are growing disenchanted with their economy, with consumer sentiment dropping steeply as people brace for trade disruption.
Joanne Hsu, an economist who directs the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey, said Americans’ economic outlook had been darkening before Trump launched the trade war. “People were waiting for the other shoe to drop with respect to tariffs . . . they were very worried about what was about to happen,” she said.
As the president on Wednesday explained his decision to temporarily suspend the levies he had announced just a week earlier, he acknowledged that people were getting “a little bit afraid”.
A survey by the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) on Tuesday revealed that in March — even before Trump’s tariff-announcing “liberation day” — small business optimism took its sharpest drop since 2020, although it found that Republicans were more optimistic than Democrats.
The Fox News host Jesse Watters this week alluded to how differently Trump’s supporters might respond if the trade war had been caused by Joe Biden.
“If Biden was golfing during a stock market like this, I’m sure I wouldn’t say a word,” he said.
While Trump and others have tried to depict the havoc on the S&P 500 in recent days as a parlour game for elites, ordinary Americans tend to be more attuned to gyrations in the stock exchange — and their pensions — than people in other countries.
About 62 per cent of US adults owned stocks, either directly or through their pensions, last year, according to Gallup, the highest level since 2008.
Even so, other factors were more significant to sentiment than share prices, Hsu said.
“We’ve been on a downward trend [in sentiment] for three months now. With deterioration in views of labour markets, business conditions, personal incomes, inflation, pretty much everything,” she said.
“The stock market doing what it’s doing certainly doesn’t help, but it would be unlikely to, by itself, drive declines in sentiment,” she added.
But David Hayes, a Colorado bison rancher who voted for Trump last year, says he was “not worried” by the sharp share price swings in the past few weeks.
“You know that stock market goes up and down . . . people are so volatile,” he said. “I used to do the stock market and I haven’t touched that in years . . . I have real stock in my pasture, they’re called bison.”
Trump had “gone overboard” with the tariffs, he said. But “as long as Canada doesn’t raise the price of my Crown Royal [whiskey] and Mexico doesn’t raise the price of tequila, I guess [the tariffs] ain’t gonna bother me”.
Data visualisation by Sam Learner
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