“The stock market has skyrocketed since Liberation Day.”

The market did rise sharply from Liberation Day: the S&P 500 closed at 5,670.97 on April 2, 2025 and at 6,939.03 on January 30, 2026, the day of the op-ed, a gain of about 22%. But the starting point flatters it. The April 2 close was already about 5% below the last close before his inauguration, and after his tariff announcement that evening the S&P 500 fell about 12% in four days, to 4,982.77 on April 8, before regaining the lost ground. CNN called the op-ed's case one built on "cherry-picked beginning and ending points."

Measured honestly from before his inauguration, the S&P 500 rose 14.5% from January 17, 2025 through February 18, 2026, only slightly better than the roughly 12% gain Wall Street strategists had already forecast for 2025 before Trump took office, and well below the 20%plus annual gains in each of Biden's final two years. Over Biden's full term the S&P 500 grew nearly 58%.

Even on Trump's own cherry-picked timeline, the Dow rose about 17% from Liberation Day through February 2, 2026, and many foreign stock markets outperformed the Dow over that same period, undercutting the idea that tariffs gave U.S. stocks a special boost. "Trump's case was based in part on figures that are plain false or highly misleading, using cherry-picked beginning and ending points for various calculations to serve the president's argument." — CNN Fact Check, Feb. 3, 2026