U.S. stocks on Monday suffered one of their worst trading days since the depths of the 2008 financial crisis as investors panicked over the steadily growing coronavirus outbreak and a burgeoning oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closed down 2,001 points, a 7.7-percent dive that marked the index’s worst day percentage-wise since October 2008. The Dow also shattered its record for largest loss as measured by points, which was set at 1,191 on Feb. 27.

The S&P 500 closed with a loss of 7.6 percent and the Nasdaq composite ended Monday with a loss of 7.3 percent.

While this horrible day on Wall Street was going on, our forever-impeached president was hobnobbing with rich Republicans at a fundraiser in Sanford, Florida.

He returned to the White House around 4pm, right when the markets were closing, but didn’t seem to want to talk to the media or answer any question.

This is isn’t surprising, because reports are that Trump is planning on blaming the media for the market’s collapse.

According to Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, “Trump wants the Department of Justice to open investigations of the media for market manipulation.”

Such a move would be stunning in both its audacity and unprecedented nature. Launching a full-frontal legal assault on the corporate media ecosystem, however, would also likely be fraught with potential political downsides—Trump would immediately open himself up to charges of attempting to control the flow of information.

There’s also likely no way for any such charges to stick in the first place; nor is there a guarantee that Attorney General William Barr would entertain pursuing this.

From Law & Crime:

University of Minnesota Law Professor and former White House ethics counsel Richard Painter called the idea ”outrageous” and explained the unfeasibility of Trump’s would-be ploy during a phone call.

”The only way they could be prosecuted is if they shorted stock and ran deliberately false news stories to manipulate the market—which they’re not,” he said. “Absent that, there’s absolutely no way a media company could be prosecuted. There would have to be a conspiracy to make trades and the news stories would have to be deliberately false—you’d have to have both to make a prosecution.”

”Markets trade on tons of information,” Painter continued. “The idea that one or stories impact the market is ludicrous. That’s just not how markets work.“