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A fluke of social media rumor-mongering just served up the closest thing to a crystal ball as you can get on Wall Street. And for President Donald Trump, it’s a glimpse at a future where he can be the market hero. If he’s paying attention.

Stocks tumbled Monday as investors around the world tried to digest just how devastating Trump’s self-inflicted tariff pain will be to the global economy. On Wall Street, major indexes opened more than 3% lower, in so-called bear-market territory — more than 20% off their most recent high just seven weeks ago.

It looked like yet another day of hemorrhaging market value in response to last week’s tariff announcement.

But less than an hour after the market opened, stocks abruptly reversed course, surging 8% in a matter of minutes. (Which, just to be clear, does not happen on a normal day.)

The jolt into positive territory was short-lived — a spark of hope kindled by a bogus rumor that Trump was weighing a three-month delay on tariffs. (The unsourced headline appears to have come from a tiny account on X, though as of Monday evening it was still unclear how it ultimately ended up on a CNBC chyron.) Once traders realized there was no truth to it, they sold off once again and returned stock tickers to a sea of red.

Weird. But potentially instructive, if Trump is paying attention.

That fleeting moment of buying enthusiasm represented a potential off-ramp that we rarely (never?) see in a market sell-off this severe. It was Trump — not a pandemic, or a war, or the collapse of a financial house of cards — that created this mess. And with one sentence, he could undo all of it.

Traders pounced on the fake headline because they are desperate for a sign — any sign — that a voice of sanity will make it into Trump’s ear. Any kind of delay would buy corporations some time to rearrange their supply chains and blunt the shock of tariffs. Even an indication that the White House is willing to negotiate with trading partners could help stem the losses.

But the cavalry of sanity isn’t coming. At least not yet. And at this point, the White House is already getting blamed for the financial market losses anyway, so there’s no real point in reversing course now, Mike O’Rourke, chief markets strategist at Jones Trading, told me Monday.

To its credit, the Trump administration is doing exactly what it has said it would do for months. It’s just that Wall Street didn’t expect the tariffs to be as harsh as they are, and they didn’t expect Trump to be so reckless with the stock market — the institution he once viewed as a real-time report card on his presidency.