As Markets Whipsaw, Conservative Media Shrugs

Nervous investors seeking news about the plunging markets on Monday afternoon would have been out of luck if they turned to the websites of The New York Post, The Daily Caller, One America News or The Blaze. Not one of those right-leaning outlets featured articles about the sell-off as the closing bell rang, cementing Wall Street’s steepest decline of the year.

And Fox Business Network, which pledges to “deliver content focused on investing, optimism and the American dream,” placed coverage of the drop on its site below a story about temporary outages on Elon Musk’s social media site, X.

As President Trump’s unpredictable and halting tariff policies rattled investors this week, many of his most loyal supporters in the media and on Capitol Hill chose to barely mention the news — or to frame it as a potentially good thing.

“Profits are still rising. It’s very hard for me to see a recession,” said Larry Kudlow, the Fox Business host and former Trump adviser, who filmed his show in the Indian Treaty Room of the Old Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House, on Monday afternoon. “I’d kind of suggest people keep their powder dry and pay attention to a well-thought-out economic plan that will indeed make America great again.”

During Mr. Trump’s first term, he regularly pointed to the stock market as a kind of scoreboard for his policies. But in recent weeks he has often refused to dispel worries of a slowdown or recession, telling the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, “I hate to predict things like that,” and calling this moment “a period of transition.” He added that the United States should look to China’s long-term-planning approach to economics, rather than the quarterly-results focus of Wall Street. “You can’t really watch the stock market,” he said.

That new position was quickly echoed by some online influencers.

Jack Posobiec, who recently traveled with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to Europe, dismissed the fears, encouraging people to “pump the brakes” on their financial jitters in a podcast appearance on Tuesday. Chaya Raichik, a right-wing activist known for her Libs of TikTok account, posted on Tuesday that Mr. Trump’s economic positions were “exactly what I voted for.” (She didn’t mention the declining stock market.)