Donald Trump has spent the better part of two years treating the stock market like his personal report card, his LinkedIn endorsement, and his therapy all rolled into one. So here is the number he probably does not want you to see: his own first term is beating him.
The Scoreboard Trump Built Is Now Scoring Him
According to Axios, the S&P 500 rose nearly 27.6% between inauguration day and last Friday's close during Trump's second term. That sounds like a genuinely strong number, because it is. A 27-point gain in 20 months is not something you sneeze at.
Except Trump 1.0 posted 28.5% over the same window. Which means the standard Trump set for himself — the one he has been screaming about from every podium and Truth Social post since January 2025 — is the exact standard he is currently failing to meet. By almost a full percentage point. His own legacy is outrunning him.
He Did Lap Biden, For Whatever That's Worth
To be fair, and we will be fair exactly once, Axios notes that Trump 2.0 has pulled ahead of where Biden stood at the same 20-month mark. Trump's team will absolutely lead with that. Expect it in a press release by Tuesday morning, if not sooner.
But this is a little like finishing second in a two-man race and announcing you beat the guy who dropped out. Biden's economic record on markets was complicated by inflation, rate hikes, and a Federal Reserve that spent two years squeezing the economy like a stress ball. Using Biden as your benchmark when you spent four years calling him the worst president in American history is a rhetorical choice that requires a certain kind of shamelessness.
Trump has never lacked for that.
The Closing Gap Nobody Wants to Talk About
What Axios's data actually shows, when you read it carefully, is that this gap has been narrowing. At the one-year mark, Trump 2.0 was trailing Trump 1.0 by a wider margin. The last few months have seen some catch-up. Whether that trend continues, reverses, or flatlines depends on factors that have nothing to do with whatever Trump posts at 3 a.m.
The stock market is not the economy. This is not a radical left-wing position — it is what most economists will tell you if you ask them, as Axios points out. The S&P 500 is a measure of how 500 large companies' shares are priced on a given day. It tells you a lot about investor sentiment and corporate earnings. It tells you considerably less about whether people can afford groceries, whether wages are keeping pace with rent, or whether the middle class has any savings left after the last decade of whiplash.
Why Trump Made This Bed and Now Has to Sleep In It
Here is the trap Trump built for himself: he chose the stock market as his primary economic metric when it was going up, and he has repeated that choice so many times and so loudly that there is no walking it away now. Every time markets dipped during his second term, his critics cited the same dashboard he installed.
That is what happens when you govern by vibes and vanity metrics. You pick the number that flatters you in the moment, you enshrine it as the one true measure of your success, and then you are stuck with it forever. The market is up nearly 28%. Good! Also, the market you promised would be better than ever is technically underperforming the market under the earlier version of you. Both things are true simultaneously, and one of them is funnier than the other.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that a 27.6% gain is a triumph, and fine, in isolation it is a solid number. But Trump has never operated in isolation. He has operated in constant, exhausting comparison — to Obama, to Biden, to anyone he could frame as weaker. He made those comparisons the terms of the debate. So when the data comes back and the best available comparison is his own previous self, and he loses that one too, the framing he built doesn't suddenly stop applying.
The stock market was always a stupid way to measure a presidency. It rewards the already-wealthy, it swings on sentiment and speculation, and it has essentially no correlation to whether working people's lives are improving. Economists have been saying this for decades. Trump ignored them because the number was going up. Now the number is going up slightly less than it was under him before, and suddenly we are all supposed to appreciate nuance.
The cruelest part is that 27.6% would have been a perfectly fine thing to run on, if Trump were capable of perfectly fine. He is not. He went all-in on 'greatest economy in the history of economies,' which means anything short of that is failure on his own terms. Losing to yourself is a specific kind of embarrassing. It does not have a great historical precedent, mostly because most presidents do not construct the scoreboard and then finish second on it.
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