Trump is shaking up the stock market and can still prove naysayers wrong

Wall Street’s Trump supporters — and they are legion — were riding high.They cheered a completely sentient president who took office promising to enact a bold agenda of tax cuts, deregulation and un-woking college campuses, including Ivy League institutions many of them attended.Then came the trade war.Trump is not only blowing up the markets (aka their livelihoods), they fear, but the economy and probably his presidency along with GOP control of Congress when the midterms come next year.He could even be paving the way for the word-salad queen, Kamala Harris to re-emerge in 2028.I’m not saying I subscribe to this doom and gloom.

I hold out hope that The Donald will live up to his wheeler-dealer rep and make sure those very stiff tariffs on every trading partner in the world really are “reciprocal,” as he said they would be when announcing the move this past week.The hope is they will be modified downward amid a flurry of negotiation with countries that should have as much to lose as we do.Markets will rebound as fast as they’ve been tanking.

The economy will solidify around his tax cuts and deregulation.But here’s what the naysayers keep reminding me: China could suck it up for a while.They’ve hit us with their own sanctions, hoping to crater our economy while it plays a long game.

After all, their “president for life,” Xi Jinping, isn’t exactly ­going anywhere.Europe might do the same, as could Canada and Mexico.They might think they can get more out of Trump if he has a severely compromised economy to work with.Even scarier, say these tariffs aren’t a “reciprocal” negotiating tool for Trump to take down our perpetually large trade deficits.

He really believes they’re great for the economy.Their nightmare scenario has Trump firmly in the camp of his ideologically rigid economic adviser Peter Navarro, a tariff evangelist, who for years has been predicting how the levies will magically restore all those lost factory jobs and rem...