The Volatility Trump Makes

Market turbulence caused by the president’s own controllable decisions, 1990 to 2026

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I open up my investments to take a look and see what insanity might have occurred, today.

This isn’t normal. I’ve been watching investments for decades, through administrations, in up times and down times. But lately the difference is, you have no idea what in the world might happen on any given day – not because of anything the market would do on its own! But because Trump either:

• Doesn’t care what he says or does, or what happens as a result.
• Is intentionally spiking the market so he and his buddies can take advantage of it.
• Or both.

We call this volatility. And there is a measure for it, a market index called VIX – the volatility index. Since it’s tracked, we have the history of the index to review and draw conclusions on. And since we also have actual history, we can determine if the President himself, or other forces, have caused volatility.

It turns out that once you separate the volatility a president causes from the volatility that merely happens on his watch, the picture is one-sided.

• Trump is the only one who does it. Across every major market-volatility episode since the VIX began in 1990, the sitting president’s own discretionary policy was the primary trigger in 17 cases. All 17 are Trump’s (8 in his first term, 9 so far in his second). Every other president since 1990, across more than 27 years in office combined, registers exactly zero.
• You don’t have to guess his intent. He narrates it. He has said on the record that he isn’t even looking at the market, that the resulting losses are just “medicine,” and he told the public it was “a great time to buy” hours before a move that sent stocks up 9.5%, which led four U.S. senators to formally request a market-manipulation investigation. His own words carry this part of the argument.

The rest of this report is the evidence: the catalog, the charts, and the quotes.

What Counts as “Self-Inflicted”

The test is causation and control.

A self-inflicted event is one where the president’s own discretionary act (a tariff, a tweet, a public attack on the Fed, a shutdown he forces) is the documented primary reason markets convulsed.

Things no president controls are deliberately left out and are not charged to anyone: the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID crash, 9/11, the 1998 Russia/LTCM blowup, foreign shocks like the 2024 yen unwind, and market-structure accidents like the 2018 “Volmageddon” ETN implosion.

Notably, that means Trump’s single biggest VIX reading (the COVID spike of March 2020) is not counted as his doing. The 17 events below are only the ones his own decisions set off, attributed using contemporaneous reporting from the day each move happened.

The Finding in One Chart

Figure 1. Major volatility episodes caused by the president’s own policy. Trump’s two terms account for all of them.

This is the whole thesis in a single picture. It isn’t close, and it isn’t a matter of degree. The difference between Trump and every other modern president on this measure is the difference between a number and zero.

Figure 2. The same events scaled to time in office. In barely 18 months, Trump 2 is already generating self-inflicted shocks at roughly 6 per year.

Trump has held office for about 5.5 of the 36 years the VIX has existed, roughly 15% of the period, yet he owns 100% of the president-caused volatility in it. Give the other presidents Trump’s exact number of days and they still sit at zero, because none of them ever did this even once.

Every Trump-era Spike Has His Fingerprints On It

Figure 3. The VIX from 2017 to 2026. The labeled spikes are policy decisions, not accidents. (The tall 2020 peak is COVID and is deliberately left unlabeled, since it wasn’t his doing.)

The table below is the catalog: each Trump decision and what the fear gauge did that day. These are his choices, made when he had every option to do otherwise.

VIX = closing level that day. 1-day = the one-day percentage change in the VIX. April 9, 2025 shows a large drop because that’s the day he paused the tariffs and the market snapped back.

Figure 4. The one-day jump in the fear gauge on each of Trump’s self-inflicted days. Tariff announcements repeatedly spiked the VIX 20% to 50% in a session.

In His Own Words: Intent, Not Inference

With Trump, nobody has to interpret body language or infer motives from a price chart, because he says it out loud. On the record, in 2025, he covered the full range from open indifference to behavior that drew formal manipulation allegations.

He says he doesn’t care what it does to the market

“I’m not even looking at the market, because long term the United States will be very strong with what is happening here.”  — Donald Trump, March 6, 2025 (CNBC)

“I don’t want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”  — Donald Trump, April 6, 2025, on the tariff selloff (CNBC)

He watched trillions in value evaporate and called it medicine.

And then the timing that drew manipulation allegations

On the morning of April 9, 2025, with markets still reeling from his tariffs, he posted to Truth Social:

“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT”  — Donald Trump, 9:37 a.m., April 9, 2025 (PBS NewsHour)

Less than four hours later he announced a 90-day pause on most of the tariffs. The S&P 500 closed up 9.52%, its biggest day since 2008, recovering about $4 trillion.

Trump Media (ticker DJT, which he signed the post with) jumped about 23%.

Senators Schumer, Wyden, Warren, and Schiff wrote to state attorneys general asking them to investigate the administration for possible insider trading or market manipulation tied to the tariff whiplash. It’s documented fact that the President’s own posts moved the market by trillions, in both directions, within a single day.

He can move the market with a single sentence

This isn’t confined to formal policy. On October 11, 2025, one Trump social-media post about China erased roughly $2 trillion in market value in a single day (CNBC). No other president in the VIX era has been, by his own hand and his own words, this kind of repeated, deliberate market event.

The Norm Everyone Else Kept, And He Discarded

The reason the other presidents score zero isn’t luck. It’s that they observed a bipartisan norm, followed by both parties for decades, that a president does not try to move markets and does not publicly dictate to the Federal Reserve, precisely because doing so is destabilizing and corrosive to confidence in the institutions.

Clinton’s, Bush’s, Obama’s, and Biden’s teams guarded that restraint on purpose. Trump broke from it openly, attacking the Fed chair by name, demanding rate cuts, threatening firings, and using tariffs and tweets as instruments he could fire at will. He does these things because he can, and he doesn’t hide it. The data and his own statements both say the same thing.

Bottom Line

Stripped of the crises no president controls, the record shows that president-caused market volatility in the VIX era is, in effect, a Trump-only phenomenon: 17 self-inflicted shocks to zero, generated in a fraction of the time the others had, accompanied by his own statements of indifference and a tariff-pause episode that drew formal manipulation complaints.

I just hope he isn’t setting a new precedence for Presidents to come…