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In his latest rambling press conference, Donald Trump warned that the US would plunge into a 1929-style stock market crash if his Democratic presidential rival Kamala Harris wins in November – only to have his argument undermined by an awkwardly-timed Fox News ticker showing up on screen.
The former president laid into the vice president on Thursday in front of a handpicked group of reporters at his luxury golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, hitting her over inflation and the economy.
“We are going to have a crash and we’re going to have a crash like a 1929 crash if she gets in,” the Republican nominee warned, referring to the Great Depression.
“You saw a gentleman yesterday who got up, one of the top analysts in the world, frankly, and said that if Trump isn’t elected he predicts, and he’s predicting you have a stock market crash like 1929.”
Trump’s address was being broadcast live by several channels, including Fox News, which routinely runs a ticker carrying the latest stock prices on screen.
At the precise moment that he made his apocalyptic forecast, the Fox News ticker revealed that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was actually in rude health at 40,563.06, up 554.67 points or 1.39 per cent.
With the near-record high level directly contradicting his argument, eagle-eyed viewers were quick to mock the former president on social media.
Others meanwhile accused the channel of quickly dropping the ticker from the screen to help Trump in his line of attack.
During his speech, Trump stood alongside a display table lined with instant coffee cans and boxes of Cheerios, Wheaties, Froot Loops and Cinnamon Toast and packets of bacon, intended to illustrate the rising cost of living on American consumers.
But he failed to allude to the props and instead resorted to his usual personal broadsides against Harris – whom he said he felt “entitled” to attack because she had called him and his running mate JD Vance “weird” – and hsi familiar obsessions including wind turbines killing innocent birds and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 emails.
Trump did return to the economy to accuse Harris of being part of an administration that had allowed “beyond the number of 100 per cent” of newly-created jobs in the US to go to migrants – a false statistic.
Trump has repeatedly warned of an imminent stock market crash should he lose in November, doing so earlier this week during his rally in North Carolina and in a Truth Social post on August 5.
Conversely, he has also sought to take credit for any major market gains or sudden bounces – something he did outside of his New York hush money trial on May 10.
In January, Trump created an outcry by telling Mike Lindell’s TV venture that he hoped any coming crash would happen before the election for the sake of his own political legacy.
“When there’s a crash, I hope it’s going to be during the next 12 months because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover,” he told the pillow magnate.
“The one president – I just don’t want to be Herbert Hoover.”
Responding to Trump’s economic attacks and this week’s “Kamalanomics” campaign attempting to tie Democrats to the inflation Biden’s administration has had to contend with in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Harris War Room social media account pointed out that the stock market is “up over 14,000 points (and an all time record high) since the Biden-Harris inauguration” in January 2021.
