Amid the global market meltdown sparked by Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs that have wiped out trillions of dollars of wealth in a matter of days, the president has defended his escalating trade war and the financial panic it’s unleashed by pointing to plunging energy prices.
But a former Trump economic adviser is warning that could be an ominous sign.
“Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION, and the long-time abused USA is bringing in Billions of Dollars a week from the abusing countries on Tariffs that are already in place,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Monday morning.
During a Fox News appearance hours later, however, Trump’s former economic adviser Stephen Moore said that the decline in the cost of oil over the past few days may not be a silver lining in the market but actually a warning sign of a large-scale economic downturn.
“You can make the case costs are going down right now – these markets are tough to keep track of,” Fox News anchor Sandra Smith noted in an interview with Moore. “We are watching the stock market, but obviously oil and energy prices as well! And President Trump made this point that it is bringing these prices down, and I’m looking at oil – more than a buck [down] right now, and it dropped below $60 in overnight trading. What do you make of that, and what does that mean to the American consumer?”
Moore, who advised the president’s 2016 presidential campaign and was an architect of the Trump tax cuts, pumped the brakes on whether this was something the president should be boasting about.
“I'm worried, a little bit, that the decline in the price of oil is that [investors] think demand is going to be down because this could have a shock to the real economy,” Moore noted.
As Chris Wright explained in The Independent this week, “an unintended casualty” of Trump’s sweeping tariffs – which include crippling import taxes on vehicles and auto parts – could be America’s energy security and Trump’s “Drill, Baby, Drill” promise to ramp up domestic oil production.
“Not only do analysts sense that Americans might buy fewer cars and burn less oil, but China’s retaliatory tariffs could accelerate the country’s already remarkable drop in oil consumption, driven by its shift to Chinese-made electric vehicles,” Wright wrote.
Moore also seemed to take issue with the recent spin from MAGA media figures and the Trump administration that the tanking stock market wasn’t impacting working class Americans and could actually be a “political winner” for the president.
“I don’t like this line that somehow there is a kind of Wall Street versus Main Street in America; 160 million Americans own stock [and] 64 percent of households do,” he concluded. “Look, everybody owns stock in the country and everybody wants a good economy and our businesses to succeed, and so we’re all in this together. I don’t like the division being talked about.”
This isn’t the first time that Moore, who Trump once unsuccessfully tried to appoint to the Federal Reserve, has disagreed with the president.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Moore was caught criticizing Trump’s interruption-laden debate against Joe Biden, saying he felt it was a “pretty crappy performance.” He also said in 2019 that whenever Trump “says things that are false,” it tends to “undermine his presidential authority,” adding that he thinks Trump “should stop doing it.”
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