Following last Friday’s sell-off, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,200 points on Monday morning, and the Nasdaq had the biggest daily point loss in its history, plunging over 1,000 points. Last week’s jobs report came in cooler than expected as unemployment rose to 4.3%.

Oil prices fell despite fears that the Gaza war could soon turn into a larger regional conflict, or worse, and the crypto market took a bath; bitcoin is down 20% in the past five days. The Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index, better known as the “fear index,” was up 120% on Monday, the worst number since the beginning of the COVID lockdowns in March 2020. 

“Traders wasted no time in running for the exits as a weak manufacturing survey on Thursday caused some jitters and an unexpected 0.2% jump in the unemployment rate on Friday resulted in panic,” Chris Zaccarelli, the chief investment officer for Independent Advisor Alliance, said. “Oftentimes, the weekend is a time for cooler heads to prevail and for calm to reassert itself, but based on futures trading this morning, the opposite is occurring.”

Fairly or unfairly, incumbents take the credit for good economies and take the blame for bad ones, especially when there is an economic downturn only three months from a presidential election. The GOP is rightfully hitting Kamala Harris’s campaign for the part the vice president played in bringing the economy to its knees. The Biden-Harris administration crushed the American energy sector, prolonged COVID lockdowns as long as it could, pushed fiscally illiterate diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, and printed a trillion dollars out of thin air to pay off its political allies and had the audacity to call it the Inflation Reduction Act. 

History has proven that Democrats are terrible for the economy, but the GOP’s case against Harris would have a lot more teeth if Republicans hadn’t spent the last several decades proving that they don’t understand economics either. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump both campaigned on sound economics, at least partially, and added $4.2 trillion and $6.7 trillion to the national debt, respectively. Trump cut taxes in 2017, but unlike previous tax-cutting Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he made no effort to cut spending. 

Conservatives brag about the Trump economy, sometimes explicitly ignoring anything that happened post-March 2020. Unfortunately for that narrative, Trump was indeed president of the United States when he handed the power of his office to Dr. Anthony Fauci and company and when he signed the largest financial bailout in U.S. history into law, adding $2 trillion to the national debt in one fell swoop. Trump even attacked conservative Govs. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Brian Kemp (R-GA) for refusing to destroy their states’ economies. 

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The GOP scrubbed all serious talk of fiscal responsibility from its 2024 platform, and the Trump-Vance campaign is promoting protectionist policies that would make the economy worse. Omnibus after omnibus, bailout after bailout: Republicans have been complicit in the tax and spend policies that have made the American dream unaffordable to many young people. 

Republicans can and should hit the Harris campaign hard. She is basically the incumbent president, and she should own the economy “Bidenomics” created. But Republicans have no leg to stand on economically, and their hypocrisy will become evident under even the mildest scrutiny. 

Brady Leonard (@bradyleonard) is a musician, political strategist, and host of The No Gimmicks Podcast.