President Donald Trump announced extremely high tariffs on goods coming from virtually every country around the world Wednesday, sending global markets into the toilet. The Dow was down over 1,600 points Thursday and a tweet that appeared to come from Trump has gone viral in the wake of the president’s inexplicable actions to crater the U.S. economy. But we regret to inform you that the one tweet you’re seeing everywhere is completely fake.
A screenshot of the supposed Trump tweet reads, “If the Dow drops 1000 points in two days, the President should be impeached immediately!” The tweet appears to have a date of Nov. 6, 2012, when Barack Obama was president. But there’s absolutely no evidence that this one is real.
Snopes actually first debunked it back in 2018, when this fake screenshot of that Trump tweet appears to have been created. At the time, around Oct. 11, 2018, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had just lost 1,378 points. And Trump was famously critical of President Obama, even claiming falsely that he wasn’t born in the U.S. and was therefore disqualified from being president.
Trump was president in 2018, so an ironic tweet surfacing from 2012 claiming that he should be impeached seemed suitably hilarious, given his penchant for constantly being hypocritical. But this one was too good to be true.
Trump has a long history of tweeting completely unhinged things, however, he now uses Truth Social as his primary vehicle for unleashing idiotic musings into the world. Just this morning, Trump tweeted a bizarre all-caps screed that appeared to be a message about his tariffs.
“THE OPERATION IS OVER! THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING. THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” Trump wrote around 8:33 a.m. ET, about an hour before markets in the U.S. opened.
Trump seemed to be trying to say that his tariff plan was some kind of surgical procedure that would be painful at first, but deliver good results. The president tried to use the same analogy Thursday afternoon as he was leaving for the LIV golf tournament at his Doral resort in Miami, Florida.
REPORTER: The markets today are way down. The worst day in years. Because of the tariffs. So, how’s it going?
TRUMP: I think it’s going very well. It was an operation like when a patient gets operated on.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 3, 2025 at 11:52 AM
But he’s the only one making that argument. Economists pretty universally agree that his tariff plan makes no sense. Trump is slapping tariffs of about 10-50% on all goods coming into the U.S., something that’s guaranteed to raise prices.
The idea, as Trump argues it, is that high tariffs will force countries to bring manufacturing jobs to the U.S., creating jobs. But in a globalized economic environment, you don’t want one country trying to be completely self-sustaining and producing literally everything it makes. Trump doesn’t seem like he’s going to back down from the tariffs, which are scheduled to go into effect at 12:01 a.m. ET on Saturday, April 5.
The U.S. is going to become much poorer if Trump gets his way. But it’s also important to keep focused on the real things coming out of our garbage president’s mouth if only to have a proper understanding of the world. Trump didn’t say that if the Dow drops 1000 points, the president should be impeached immediately. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.
