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(Bloomberg) -- It was the clearest sign yet that, this time around, the “Trump Put” may be little more than wishful thinking.

And the message was delivered by none other than Donald Trump himself.

“I’m not even looking at the stock market,” he responded on Thursday when asked about the sharp selloff in US stocks.

Trump dismissed the idea that his latest flip-flop on tariffs against Mexico and Canada had anything to do with the unease pervading Wall Street, or vice versa, and as is his wont, was quick to find someone else to blame. (This time, it was the “globalists” — a slur with antisemitic origins — who were responsible.)

Still, this week’s stock market rout, the deepest since Trump was re-elected four months ago, has raised two competing, but related worries on Wall Street.

One is that just maybe Trump, who famously made stock prices a real-time barometer of success during his first term in the White House, is actually willing to sacrifice the bull market and the economy he inherited, at least for now, to bring about his vision for a new age of American exceptionalism.

The other is that, even if Trump’s 48-hour reversal on tariffs was meant to arrest the downturn, and his tough talk on trade and the markets was just that, the constant “will he, won’t he” has made the president such an unreliable actor that investors have little choice but to prepare for the worst.

“Consensus interpretation of what his second term would look like both at the policy level and its impact on the equity market has been wrong,” said Michael Shaoul, chief executive officer and founding partner at Ion Macro Management.

As for Trump’s policy reversals, “there’s a limit to how many times you can feel relief. We’re sort of in Charlie Brown and Lucy territory, the football keeps being put down and swiped away,” he added. “It is tiresome.”

The developments fly in the face of initial expectations that Trump would do whatever it took to prop up the stock market. Since Trump’s victory on Nov. 5, investors have piled into technology giants and other companies on optimism his administration’s pro-growth policies would boost the economy.

That view is now on shaky footing. The president’s on-again-off-again trade war and Elon Musk’s DOGE-driven government cuts have conspired with worries about a suddenly weakening economy and still too-high inflation to dent investor sentiment.

What had been a seemingly unstoppable US stock market has now fallen more than 6% since peaking on Feb. 19, punctuated by recurring bouts of volatility and chop. Even Friday’s US jobs report did little to calm nerves as the S&P 500 Index sank as much as 1.3%, before rebounding to end the day higher.

Investors have now endured seven straight days in which the S&P 500 has swung at least 1% during the trading session.

Technology shares like Nvidia Corp. and Tesla Inc., which led the market higher over the past three months, have come in for a beating. A Bloomberg index that tracks the so-called Magnificent Seven that also includes Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., and Amazon.com Inc., is down 12% over the same span and 16% from an all-time high in December.

On Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reinforced the view that Trump’s “America First” policies were a necessary antidote to remedy the Biden administration’s spending excesses.

He also emphasized that this administration is more than willing to tolerate any near-term pain in the stock market to implement the structural changes in global trade and international relations that would amount to nothing less than the wholesale dismantling of the post-World War II world order.

‘No Put’

“There is no put,” Bessent said in an interview Friday on CNBC, referring to the idea that Trump would roll back policies to support the stock market.

Keith Lerner, co-chief investment officer and chief market strategist at Truist Financial, doesn’t quite buy that there isn’t any “Trump Put,” especially if stocks continue to fall, say, 10% or 15%, or more. However, even he concedes that Trump’s priorities, and ambitions, have grown beyond the ups and downs of the market.

“There likely is a Trump put, it’s just probably somewhat lower than the perception of where it had been,” Lerner said. Still, “his first go around there was so much focus on new highs for the market and this time I would say it’s a more holistic picture. It’s not just the stock market, it’s also Main Street.”

And even if Trump was willing to swoop in and try to head off a selloff, it’s unclear how effective he could be, according to Michael Purves, chief executive officer at Tallbacken Capital Advisors. That’s because of how reliably unpredictable Trump has become.

“There is a key risk in assuming that a Trump Put will actually work if it is actually exercised,” he said. “It’s hard to visualize Trump suddenly becoming a trade dove, or that he will concede points to foreign countries quickly just to get a definitive deal done.”

Whatever the case, what’s clear is that the back-and-forth on tariffs has frazzled investors in ways few expected just a few short months ago.

“Friday afternoon didn’t used to be about work,” Shaoul said. Before, “I had a pretty good idea of where the market was going to close.”

After the recent topsy-turvy trading sessions, he’s not so certain anymore.