President Donald Trump brought the stock market to the edge of a bear market (i.e., a sustained 20 percent drop) by imposing ridiculously high tariffs indiscriminately around the globe. That was so much fun that on Friday he shared a video on Truth Social titled “Trump is PURPOSELY Crashing the Market.” Then, on Wednesday, Trump put those tariffs on hold for 90 days for those countries willing to negotiate over trade barriers real or imagined (though Trump’s 10 percent “everybody tariff” will remain, and China will be punished for its defiance by raising its tariff to 125 percent). After Trump announced the tariff suspension on Truth Social, the S&P 500 recorded its third-biggest gain since World War II. Trump must have felt like Moses parting the Red Sea.

We can all be grateful that Trump was willing to undo, at least temporarily, the worst of the damage he inflicted. But it would be wrong to conclude, as Wall Street likely will, that there’s a “Trump put” after all. The “Trump put” is a fancy way of saying that whenever Trump does something that inadvertently sends stock prices down he can be counted on to reverse course and push them back up. (A put is an options contract that limits losses in a down market to a fixed amount.) The long-standing presumption of a Trump put is why 52 billionaires, including Timothy Mellon, Steve Wynn, and the Winklevoss twins, backed Trump in 2024.

These plutocrats, or others like them, exerted as much pressure as they could on the Trump administration to reverse course. Some, including Bill Ackman,

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