In response to Trump basically crashing the market a few times, is was said by many that people who voted for him should have seen this coming. Maybe not that exact tariff policy, but surely ones very similar to it. I'm skeptical of this though, because if it was obvious that Trump's policies would cause the market to go down, then this should have been priced in, and the market should have crashed as soon as he was elected. Instead, it went up significantly. You could say that investors are just dumb, but the market naturally weeds out dumb investors as they keep losing money on investments. It's extremely difficult to predict market movements, and only a few people in the world can reliably do it. If you knew the market was about to go down, you could just short it and wait for Trump to do something stupid. Or at least withdraw money from the market during his term.
Now, maybe the argument is that all Trump's actions that didn't affect the market were predictable, but I'm skeptical of that as well. His other policies don't seem much more predictable than the tariff stuff. And the tariff policies specifically are one that a lot of people were saying we should have seen coming. I'm open to the idea that we should have anticipated some tariff-themed policy, but not one that would move the market unless we were smarter than Warren Buffett.