Trump’s Greenland Tariff Threats Tanks Stock Markets

Jan 21, 2026 09:25 PM EST, Wed

Stock market suffers big losses as investors respond to Trump’s threats, tariffs

On the anniversary of the president’s second inaugural, the White House picked an unfortunate time to boast about stock market growth.

Jan. 20, 2026, 4:52 PM EST By Steve Benen

In recognition of the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s second inaugural, the White House released a list of “365 wins” from the past year. One of the entries gave the president credit for delivering “a historic stock-market rebound, with the major stock indices all hitting repeated new record highs.”

It was a flawed boast for a variety of reasons. For one thing, while the major indexes improved in 2025, nothing about the results was “historic.” For another, given that the U.S. stock market had a very good year in 2024, characterizing that growth as a “rebound” didn’t make sense, either. (Also left unsaid is the fact that several major economies internationally fared better than the United States on stock market growth.)

But perhaps most notable of all was the problem the White House didn’t see coming: the bad timing of the boast. The New York Times reported:

President Trump’s intensifying standoff with European leaders over the fate of Greenland prompted a sharp response from investors Tuesday, with the value of U.S. stocks, the dollar and government bonds all falling.

The S&P 500 dropped over 2 percent for the first time since October, as investors reacted to Mr. Trump’s increasing threat of higher tariffs on European allies unless they supported his plans for America to take control of Greenland.

It’s worth emphasizing that the Vix index — sometimes referred to in financial circles as the “panic index” — jumped, reaching levels unseen in months.

As an NBC News report, assessing the overall losses, noted, “The S&P 500 ended lower by around 2.1%, while the Nasdaq Composite plunged more than 2.4%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped around 870 points. The S&P 500’s losses Tuesday erased the index’s gains for the year so far. The Nasdaq is now down more than 1% in 2026.”

The same report added that the sell-off “amounted to more than $1 trillion in value wiped out from the S&P 500.”

Happy Anniversary, Mr. President.

If recent history is any guide, the White House will suggest the downturn is unrelated to Trump, his radical Greenland crusade or to the tariffs that risk a trade war with U.S. partners in Europe.

But there’s no great mystery as to what drove Tuesday’s events on Wall Street. “This is ‘sell America’ again within a much broader global risk,” Krishna Guha, head of global policy and central banking strategy at Evercore ISI, wrote in a message to clients.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

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