The stock market dropped on Thursday — two days after Democrats seized control of both the House and Senate, flipping seats in Texas and South Carolina that Republicans had held for years.
President Trump had three words for the voters who made it happen: blame yourselves.
"Such a sad thing to watch!" Trump wrote on Truth Social. "It took so much work to get us to a level that no one has ever seen before, and then this."
He wasn't done. A second post landed minutes later, aimed squarely at the electorate: "Tuesday — So sad to see, you only have yourselves to blame!"
Markets process information faster than pundits do. While cable news was still sorting through exit polls and spinning narratives about what the results "really meant," Wall Street had already done the math. A Democrat-controlled Congress means new spending proposals, regulatory expansion, and the reversal of the deregulation agenda that fueled the Trump-era market surge. Traders didn't need a focus group to figure that out.
Trump attributed the decline to what he called the fallout "based on the results of the Election," per Just the News reporting from chief political correspondent Ben Whedon. No hedging, no diplomatic cushion. The market went down because voters handed power to the party that treats the private sector like a piñata at a fundraiser.
The usual response from the left will be that presidents don't control the stock market. Funny — they had no trouble crediting Biden's "Bidenomics" when the Dow ticked up for a single quarter in 2023. The market doesn't vote, but it prices in expectations. And right now it's pricing in a Congress that will spend the next two years trying to undo everything from tax reform to energy deregulation.
Texas and South Carolina flipping tells you something deeper than one bad election night. These weren't swing districts that got caught in a wave. These were strongholds. The kind of seats where showing up was supposed to be enough. It wasn't. And the market's Thursday session was the receipt.
Trump's Truth Social posts did what Trump's Truth Social posts always do — said the thing everyone in Washington was thinking but packaging differently. Republican consultants will spend months writing postmortems full of phrases like "messaging gap" and "turnout model failure." Trump skipped the consultant class and went straight to the scoreboard.
The market didn't crash because of a trade war or a bank failure or a pandemic. It dropped because voters changed the people who write the rules, and the new rule-writers have a track record. Regulation goes up. Compliance costs go up. Hiring slows. Capital moves sideways.