Trump’s dollar déjà vu: what an uncanny chart about the greenback shows about American exceptionalism

Back in January 2025, Adam Turnquist built a chart. LPL Financial’s chief technical strategist had overlaid the U.S. Dollar Index’s trajectory across Donald Trump’s two presidential terms — a simple comparison, he figured, to see how the second was shaping up against the first. He’s been updating it every couple of months since, sharing it with his head of macro research each time with the same running joke: why do we even try to predict?

“It’s the exact same pattern,” he told Fortune. “Last week, I started refreshing data, and here it is.”

The pattern matters now because of where it says the dollar is. After a 13% decline over 269 trading days from its January 2025 peak, the Dollar Index has broken out above resistance near the 100 level — the same stage-three move that followed the Trump first-term bottom in early 2018. If that playbook holds, Turnquist thinks the dollar may be entering another sustained climb.

Two terms, one script

The symmetry in the chart is almost uncomfortable to look at. “The dollar has tracked so closely, not only in the magnitude but the duration of the moves,” he said. After Trump’s 2016 victory, the Dollar Index rallied roughly 8% into a January 2017 peak, then reversed hard — falling about 15% over 293 trading days before bottoming in early 2018. From there, it staged a 17% climb into a 2020 high, a run that ended only when the pandemic arrived.

The 2024 election replay: a rally into a January 2025 peak, a 13% decline over 269 trading days, a bottom in early 2026. The percentages are close. The trading-day counts are close. The shape is close enough that Turnquist keeps making the same joke.

He’s also the first to say it doesn’t quite make sense. The macro backdrops look nothing alike. The 2016 reflation trade ran on an accommodative Federal Reserve and inflation running well below target — conditions with no analog in the current cycle, where the Fed is still wrestling with an inflation rate that refuses to return to 2%. The only macro overlap Turnquist can find is elevated oil prices. Everything else has changed.

So if the conditions are different, what’s running the same script?

One possibility Turnquist considered: Trump wanted it that way. He ruled it out quickly. “We haven’t heard him talk about the dollar lately,” he said. The better explanation is structural. “Initial excitement of Trump’s policies being implemented, the big reflation trade in 2016, then reality sets in —........

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