US President Donald Trump warned Thursday of a stock market crash if he were removed from office, playing his ace card – the economy – to stave off talk of impeachment.
He said said he doesn’t see a reason for Congress to impeach him but that the stock market would plummet and Americans would be poorer if lawmakers did so. “I don’t know how you can impeach somebody who’s done a great job,” Trump said in a wide-ranging interview with Fox News broadcast on Thursday.
ALSO READ: Major trouble for Trump after ex-attorney Cohen testifies
“I’ll tell you what, if I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash,” Trump added. “I think everybody would be very poor. Because without this thinking you would see numbers that you wouldn’t believe, in reverse.”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2018
Trump went on Fox News to deal with the fall-out from back-to-back court debacles this week that carry serious legal and political consequence
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2018
On Tuesday, his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was found guilty on multiple counts of fraud, in the first case sent to trial by the special prosecutor probing Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Almost simultaneously, Michael Cohen, Trump’s fixer for decades, pleaded guilty to election fraud and in a shock move pointed to Trump as a co-conspirator.
Cohen told a federal judge that he made secret payments to two women during the 2016 presidential campaign to keep them from speaking publicly about affairs they had said they had with Trump.
Because the hush payments were intended to influence the outcome of the elections, they violated US laws governing campaign contributions.
The president’s story about Cohen’s payments has changed multiple times over the past year, and in the Fox interview he tried several ways of defusing the allegations.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2018
Trump claimed his former lawyer “made the deals,” and insisted that Cohen’s actions were “not a crime,” while going on to claim that “campaign violations are considered not a big deal, frankly.”
Trump then said the hush payments were financed with his own money — to which Cohen had access — and that while he had no knowledge of them at the time, he had since been fully transparent.
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