Stock futures drop again as Trump remains defiant on tariffs plan roiling international markets
Despite markets being expected to open lower on Monday, the president told reporters that his tariffs were ‘a beautiful thing to behold’ and claimed unspecified countries were calling him ‘dying to make a deal’
U.S. stock futures dropped again on Sunday evening after the markets suffered a bloodbath during the week following President Donald Trump’s tariffs announcement.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were down 4.1 percent, or 1,531 points, late on Sunday, while S&P 500 futures dropped 4.6% and Nasdaq 100 futures fell 5.3 percent.
In early trading in Japan, the Nikkei 225 dropped nearly 8 percent.
As the news emerged, Trump put out a statement on his social media platform insisting that he would follow through on his policies, despite them roiling the markets and threatening to disrupt the global financial order.
He wrote: “We have massive Financial Deficits with China, the European Union, and many others. The only way this problem can be cured is with TARIFFS, which are now bringing Tens of Billions of Dollars into the U.S.A. They are already in effect, and a beautiful thing to behold. The Surplus with these Countries has grown during the “Presidency” of Sleepy Joe Biden. We are going to reverse it, and reverse it QUICKLY. Some day people will realize that Tariffs, for the United States of America, are a very beautiful thing!”
Stocks were expected to open lower on Monday.
The crisis was sparked on Wednesday when Trump unveiled a wide-ranging plan to impose a range of tariffs on most countries across the world on what he called “Liberation Day.” While the announcement was long expected, the details were more severe than anticipated, sending markets into a spiral and prompting retaliatory tariffs from China. Revelations about how the U.S. tariffs had been calculated undermined confidence in the policy.
On Sunday’s political shows, cabinet members struggled to outline a coherent vision for the administration’s economic policies, but insisted ordinary Americans would not feel any “big effect.”
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Sunday evening as he flew back to Washington, D.C. after a weekend golfing in Florida, Trump said multiple world leaders had been calling him and being very “solicitous” in discussions about his new tariffs regime. He also said he had spoken to leading tech moguls who had assured him that “we don’t blame you.”
However, he declined to name exactly who he had spoken to, saying he did not know whether the conversations had been private or not.
“I spoke to a lot of Europeans, Asians, all over the world. They’re dying to make a deal. But I said we’re not going to have deficits with your country. We’re not going to do that because to me a deficit is a loss.
“What’s going to happen to the markets I can’t tell you. But our country is much stronger.”
He added: “They are coming to the table. They want to talk but there’s no talk unless they pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis.”
However, he bridled at a question of whether that meant his talks with foreign countries represented a “negotiation.” Referring to the reporter who asked him, he said: “Another question please. She asks too many questions.”
Asked if he had crashed the markets on purpose, after he shared a video on his Truth Social platform suggesting this was a deliberate part of his economic strategy to weaken the dollar, he replied: “No that‘s not so. But I do want to solve the deficit we have with China, the European Union and other nations.”
And questioned on whether he had a threshold in mind for how low he was willing to see the stock market drop, he said: “I think your question is so stupid. I don’t want anything to go down. But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”
The stock market had closed on Friday with the Dow Jones losing 2,231 points and the S&P 500 dropping 6 percent in response to Trump’s tariff plan.
Last week was the worst for the stock market since 2020. Market-wide losses over the last two days now total a record-breaking $6.4 trillion, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Speaking on Air Force One, Trump also said he did not anticipate inflation being an issue.
“Because if you look at me, I took in hundreds of billions of dollars. This is not new to me. I took it during my four years, hundreds of billions of dollars from China, and we also took in a lot of money from other countries, but in particular China, because it was just getting started and there was – we had no inflation. Who had inflation was Biden. Biden had the worst inflation in the history of our country. I had no inflation.
“We had a perfect country. We had no wars. I ended them all. I defeated ISIS. Everything was good. And then when this numbskull got in, as they really call themselves now, numbskulls, but when he got in, bad things happened to our country.”
He once again defended the reasoning for the swingeing tariffs program. “This is not sustainable. The United States can't lose $1.9 trillion on trade. We can't do that and also spend a lot of money on NATO in order to protect European nations, we cover them with military and we lose money on trade.
“The whole thing is crazy, and I got elected on that basis. We explained it. You know, the American people understand it a lot better than the media, but the media understands it, and much of the media writes correctly about it."
On Saturday, tens of thousands of people across the U.S. – and around the world – marched in protest at Trump and Elon Musk’s policies on everything from DOGE cuts, tariffs, immigration and free speech.
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