Watch: Trump flees questions about the stock market after historic plunge

Donald Trump, who has spent much of his presidency taking credit for gains in the stock market, suddenly became camera shy on Monday, refusing to answer questions about the market as the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its largest single-day point drop ever.

As the stock market entered a free-fall, Trump was in Ohio delivering a speech about the economy. At one point during his speech, the Dow Jones plunged 1600 points before eventually settling in for a record loss of 1175 points.

Trump didn’t hesitate to tout recent figures on job creation and wages as he spoke to the crowd — but when reporters tried to ask him about the stock market, he had much less to say.

Actually, as CNN highlighted, Trump had nothing to say.

“President Trump [refused] to answer questions about the historic plunge in the market today,” CNN’s Erin Burnett reported. “That’s because the dow plunged 1175 points. At one point it was down nearly 1600 points and, no matter which way you look at it, it was the biggest drop in history.”

The 4.6 percent loss “took away all the gains for this year so far for 2018,” Burnett added.

Showing footage from his speech in Ohio, Burnett pointed out the painfully awkward splitscreen image that Americans that Americans saw Monday, with Trump bragging about the economy as the stock market’s free-fall accelerated.

“This is what it looked like on split screen — just continuing to go down,” she noted. 

Trump may be ignoring the stock market’s historic drop, but the rest of the country isn’t. Even Fox News — a veritable propaganda arm of the Trump White House — cut away from Trump’s speech in Ohio when the stock market plunge hit 1000 points. Throughout Monday afternoon, Fox continued to flash a banner reading “DOW, S&P turn negative for the year.”

Trump’s refusal to answer questions about the stock market stands in stark contrast to his frequent boasts about record highs on Wall Street. As CNN noted, Trump personally took credit for recent gains in the stock market during a speech in December, “as if he had repeatedly steered the Dow through a year of smashed record highs.”

“We broke it 84 times this year. The stock market hit a new high 84 times since we won the election on November 8 of last year, so that’s something we can all be proud of,” Trump said.

The stock market is still setting records — but not in the right direction. And now that its performance is down, Trump suddenly isn’t so keen on taking credit for it — or even acknowledging that it’s happening.