President Donald Trump’s tariff threats once again rattled the stock market this week, and CNBC’s Jim Cramer said that may be exactly when investors should strike.
“There are huge stock market ramifications to almost everything things president does, and I think he knows it,” Cramer said Wednesday night on “Mad Money.” But Cramer said there’s a key difference now compared with Trump’s first term in the Oval Office from 2017 to 2021.
“Trump [in his second term] is far more comfortable taking the market down, not up,” Cramer said. “Just be ready. You should get plenty of good buying opportunities over the next three years.”
Investors learned last year that Wall Street moves sharply in response to Trump’s policies — whether they are merely threatened or actually implemented. “From trade policy, to tax policy, to capital return policy or military policy, the ramifications to the stock market are more important than anything other than the direction of interest rates,” Cramer said.
That was evident Wednesday when stocks snapped back after Trump ruled out military action to acquire Greenland and then, later in the session, said he reached a deal “framework” on Greenland with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. All three major U.S. indexes — the S&P 500, Nasdaq and Dow Jones Industrial Average — popped more than 1% on Wednesday.
The rebound halted the “sell America” trade that dominated Tuesday’s session, when markets sank on concerns over Trump threatening a new round of tariffs on European nations. However, alongside Wednesday’s deal framework, Trump called off the European tariffs that he had pledged to implement next month.
Cramer said investors have seen this movie before – and the ending tends to be the same.
“I remember when he called the bottom after the Liberation Day fracas literally posting on Truth Social that it was time to buy stocks,” Cramer said, referencing to Trump’s social-media post on April 9, shortly after the opening bell on Wall Street. Hours later, Trump walked back many of the steeper-than-expected tariffs that he had rolled out a week earlier, which had sparked a dramatic sell-off stocks and prompted retaliatory tariffs from countries such as China.
“It turned out to be an amazing buying opportunity,” Cramer said Wednesday. Indeed, the market rebound solidified in late April and into May as progress on trade deals eased uncertainty. Stocks had fully recouped their early April losses by mid-May.
Cramer’s takeaway to investors is while expecting more volatility ahead, stay prepared to pick up quality stocks at discounts.
“He’s giving you so many buying opportunities in this game of international and domestic chicken since he took over that all you got to do is wait for the hot ones and then do some buying,” Cramer said.
