In keeping with his usual manner of confusing big and small, past and present, and up and down, Donald Trump is confused about the movements in the stock market since he took office, and especially in the current year. I recently did a piece pointing out that since Donald Trump took office, the U.S. stock market has had one of the worst performances of any major stock market.

But the story is even worse in the current year. In the first two months of this year, while foreign stock markets have shot ahead, the S&P 500 is just barely in positive territory, rising by less than 0.5 percent. That might not sound great, but it’s better than the return in the formerly high-flying NASDAQ, home of the big tech companies. The NASDAQ fell by 2.5 percent since the start of the year.

Compare that to 4.2 percent gain someone would have had in the Italian stock market since the start of the year, the 5.3 percent gain in the French market, or the 9.9 percent gain in the U.K. If investors wanted to go to a bit more exotic realms they would have gotten an 11.1 percent gain in Mexico, a 16.9 percent return in Japan, and a 17.2 percent return in Brazil. And then there is the grand prize winner for the first two months of 2026, South Korea with a 49.7 percent return.

Source: Yahoo Finance

Last weekend in Texas, Trump told a story about a big strong man with tears in his eyes said that he had to thank him. According to Trump, the man began with the obligatory “sir,” and then said he had made so much money with his 401(k) that it even improved his sex life with his wife.

Given how the stock market has performed under Trump, we must assume that the big guy shorted the market.

Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the 2016 book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Dean Baker.