Trump defends tariffs, claiming 'the patient lived' amid meltdown

Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News on Apr 3, 2025

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President Donald Trump on Thursday defended his shocking plan for massive tariffs by claiming “the patient lived,” a less-than-reassuring message about the American economy as global markets melted down in a stunning selloff that knocked more than 1,600 points off the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

“The operation is over. The patent lived, and is healing,” Trump wrote on his social media site. “The prognosis is that the patient will be far stronger, bigger, better, and more resilient than ever before.”

Trump delivered his verdict just minutes before Wall Street opened with a stunning plunge.

Market indexes kept dropping through the day with the Dow Jones Industrial Average ending down about 4% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq losing about 6% in their worst day since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The president later repeated the sick patient analogy as he left the White House to attend a Saudi golf gala at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

“The markets are going to boom,” Trump said. “I think it’s going to be unbelievable. You’ll see how it’s going to turn out.”

Critics wasted no time trashing Trump’s odd comparison of the currently booming American economy to an ailing patient on the operating table.

“So we’re in post-op?” asked stock market guru Jim Cramer on CNBC. “Are we in intensive care or are we going to be able to go home at the end of the day?”

“Seems like a bad analogy,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehead, D-R.I., deadpanned. “The roof just fell in on American families.”

Trump stunned investors and American consumers by imposing a minimum tariff of 10% on all imports, with the tax rate running much higher on products from major trading partners like China, the European Union and Asian economic powerhouses.

Economists say the tariff mounts to the biggest tax increase to hit Americans in decades.

Some analysts say the import taxes, which would put them at levels unseen for roughly a century, could knock down U.S. economic growth by 2 percentage points this year and raise inflation close to 5%.

“Markets may actually be underreacting ... given the potential knock-on effects to global consumption and trade,” said Sean Sun, a portfolio manager at Thornburg Investment Management.

Wall Street had long assumed Trump would use tariffs merely as a tool for negotiations with other countries. Investors now worry he sees them as a good thing for the U.S.

Vice President JD Vance sought to shift the blame to former President Joe Biden, and ominously conceded things might not get better anytime soon.

“We need a big change in this country because what we’ve done, what we did under the Biden administration, it just wasn’t working,” Vance said. “We’re fighting as quickly as we can to fix what was left to us but it’s not going to happen immediately.”

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