Updated February 06, 2018 10:20:52

Photo: Donald Trump was in Ohio celebrating his tax cuts as the Dow Jones was plunging. (AP: Evan Vucci)

The problem with claiming credit for something on the way up is that you'll get the blame when it inevitably falls back to earth.

That truism came home to roost for President Donald Trump today with record stock market surges ending emphatically with the biggest one-day points fall in history in real terms.

The President was speaking at a factory in Ohio when the share market was at its worst today.

It was a media event called to celebrate his tax cuts and Mr Trump would not have been pleased that as he started speaking networks put up a strap at the bottom of the screen on the Dow Jones plunge.

It got even worse when the TV networks dumped his speech altogether to move to rolling coverage of the stock exchange in New York.

The irony is the President often falsely accuses TV networks of turning off the cameras to censor him when he is saying something politically incorrect.

Today it actually happened and he would be especially unhappy that it was on his favourite topic for brags — the economy — that led him to be bumped from his favourite medium.

The flash of the historical graphs and old photos of depression era footage are not the visuals a President who has promised to Make America Great Again wants to see.

A sustained economic downturn after promises the country would win so much it would get sick of winning would probably be politically fatal.

This is a look at the SOTU lines that were true, the ones that had some truth to them and those that didn't get close.

It's early days but no-one is predicting that.

The consensus from analysts is that this is a correction rather than a recession.

Mr Trump is never one to back down and he is unlikely to stop plugging what he regards as the most significant achievement of his presidency.

As the share market was falling today he was telling the crowd he thought the tax cuts some blame for the stock market overheating would deliver him historic results in this years mid-term elections.

And the Dow is still well up on what it was when Mr Trump won office, finishing today at 24,375, up from 18,589 in November 2016.

Unemployment is also continuing to fall and Mr Trump can keep celebrating a high point of his presidency.

If it moves from Wall Street to Main Street though, there's trouble ahead.

Topics: globalisation---economy, government-and-politics, world-politics, donald-trump, united-states

First posted February 06, 2018 10:05:17