Nervous investors seeking news about the plunging markets on Monday afternoon would have been out of luck if they turned to the websites of The New York Post, The Daily Caller, One America News or The Blaze. Not one of those right-leaning outlets featured articles about the sell-off as the closing bell rang, cementing Wall Street’s steepest decline of the year.
And Fox Business Network, which pledges to “deliver content focused on investing, optimism and the American dream,” placed coverage of the drop on its site below a story about temporary outages on Elon Musk’s social media site, X.
As President Trump’s unpredictable and halting tariff policies rattled investors this week, many of his most loyal supporters in the media and on Capitol Hill chose to barely mention the news — or to frame it as a potentially good thing.
“Profits are still rising. It’s very hard for me to see a recession,” said Larry Kudlow, the Fox Business host and former Trump adviser, who filmed his show in the Indian Treaty Room of the Old Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House, on Monday afternoon. “I’d kind of suggest people keep their powder dry and pay attention to a well-thought-out economic plan that will indeed make America great again.”
During Mr. Trump’s first term, he regularly pointed to the stock market as a kind of scoreboard for his policies. But in recent weeks he has often refused to dispel worries of a slowdown or recession, telling the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, “I hate to predict things like that,” and calling this moment “a period of transition.” He added that the United States should look to China’s long-term-planning approach to economics, rather than the quarterly-results focus of Wall Street. “You can’t really watch the stock market,” he said.
That new position was quickly echoed by some online influencers.
Jack Posobiec, who recently traveled with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to Europe, dismissed the fears, encouraging people to “pump the brakes” on their financial jitters in a podcast appearance on Tuesday. Chaya Raichik, a right-wing activist known for her Libs of TikTok account, posted on Tuesday that Mr. Trump’s economic positions were “exactly what I voted for.” (She didn’t mention the declining stock market.)
Lawmakers joined in, too. Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, claimed the retrenchment was overdue.
“We were probably overbloated with the stock market,” he told Mr. Kudlow of Fox Business soon after Monday’s market close. “I don’t think President Trump needs to be concerned about it.”
That remark was in sharp contrast to Mr. Tuberville’s past feelings about financial gyrations. Last August, when stocks suffered a similar one-day decline, he took to X to decry President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President Kamala Harris’s handling of the economy. “We need steady leadership,” Mr. Tuberville said at the time.
Some conservative outlets expressed concern about the market shock, with the Fox News host John Roberts, for example, noting on Tuesday that “the Dow is 1,500 points below where it was when Trump took office.”
“That’s not a good look,” he added.
But the right’s overall unperturbed response to the stock market illustrates how fully many have absorbed the party line when it comes to the administration’s agenda, even if it hurts their own pocketbooks. And those who did seem to notice the declines have been bending over backward to place blame elsewhere.
“This is happening because we have a president with the balls to undo a globalist economic agenda that’s decimated American wages and quality of life,” Rob Schmitt, a host on Newsmax, said on X. “This is the pain that comes from real change.”
The Fox News host Will Cain likened the country to a person addicted to heroin who was trying to quit.
“Our economy has been addicted to government spending,” Mr. Cain said during his afternoon show on Monday. “The withdrawal of that government spending can send the patient, our economy, into a health crisis. But, ultimately, it has to withdraw to once again get healthy.”
Others rose in support of Tesla, Mr. Musk’s electric car company, which has lost just shy of half its value, or more than $750 billion, in total market capitalization since mid-December, including a 15 percent drop on Monday alone.
“His company and his products are under constant attack, all because he is daring to expose waste, fraud and abuse, and auditing the federal government,” the Fox News host Sean Hannity said on Monday. He made no mention of prolonged sales declines for Tesla in Europe, Australia and California, but pledged to buy a souped-up Model S sedan as a “gesture on my part.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump followed his lead, committing to buy a Tesla “as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American.” He later held a news conference with Mr. Musk outside the White House featuring a row of Tesla vehicles, and selected a red Model S for himself. “When somebody is a great patriot, they shouldn’t be hurt,” he said.
Not everyone on the political right seemed quite so blasé about the market’s downturn.
Stephen Moore, an economic adviser to Mr. Trump during his first administration, called the tariffs “misguided” over the weekend, adding that “the economy looks like it might be headed to a recession.”
Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, cautioned the public not to bury its head in the sand. “The market indexes are a distillation of sentiment,” he said. “When the markets tumble like this in response to tariffs, it pays to listen.”
But that pushback was largely drowned out by those eager to downplay the news.
“If you read the morning headlines, you’d think the economy — shoot, the whole nation — was going to hell in a handbasket,” Dagen McDowell, a Fox Business host, said late on Monday. She called talk of a recession “fear mongering.”
Ben Shapiro, a conservative who frequently expounds on economic matters to his 7.23 million subscribers on YouTube, laid out the stakes in purely political terms on Tuesday afternoon.
“If President Trump is blamed for an economic downturn, the effects of that could be disastrous,” he said. “Signals matter an awful lot when it comes to the economy these days.”
