Did Trump claim president should be impeached if Dow Jones falls? Fact Check

In the midst of significant plummet of the Dow Jones stock market index to the backdrop of the coronavirus outbreak in the US, a number of screenshots of old tweets apparently made by Trump before he took office about what should happen to a sitting president should such a stock market drop occur are spreading online.

FALSE

One tweet claims a sitting president should be launched from a cannon should the Dow “Joans” drop more than 1000 points in a single day.

If the Dow Joans ever falls more than 1000 “points” in a Single Day the sitting president should be “loaded” into a very big cannon and Shot into the sun at TREMENDOUS SPEED! No excuses!

Another claims Trump had once tweeted that the president should be impeached if the Dow drops over 1000 points over 2 days.

If the Dow drops 1,000 points in two days the President should be impeached immediately!

As the coronavirus outbreak spreads across the United States, the Dow Jones – a stock market index that measures the stock market performance of 30 large companies on US stock exchanges – dropped dramatically.

Amid that news, screenshots of tweets apparently made by Trump before he took office aimed at President Obama began to spread on Twitter claiming a president should either be impeached or shot out of a cannon should the Dow Jones suffer a sharp decline. One such tweet goes as far as impersonating Trump’s speech style, including his penchant for capitalising the first letter of random words, his frequent spelling mistakes and even matching his talking style.

Twitter users often poke fun at tweets posted by President Trump before taking office that had been intended towards his predecessor which can subsequently be recycled to criticize Trump’s own administration’s perceived shortcomings (often referred to as “there’s a tweet for that“.) However in this particular instance, the tweets regarding the Dow Jones stock market index are not real. We could find no record of either of these tweets actually being posted by Trump at any point in time.

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In fact, the tweet where Trump apparently misspells “Dow Jones” and claims the president should be shot out of a cannon appears to have originated during a Dow Jones “crash” that occurred in February 2018, and was created by Twitter user Shaun Usher who later admitted the tweet wasn’t a genuine Trump tweet.

The impeachment tweet appears to have also originated later in 2018 since there is absolutely no mention of those words on Twitter before October 2018, which there invariably would be if Trump really had made that claim.

Additionally, neither tweet appears in any Twitter archive service (which record tweets made by high profile accounts even if they are subsequently deleted by the user.)

We rank both tweets apparently made by Trump before he took office as false.