"And it is a nightmare. It's a nightmare. And you're going to stop inflation, but we're going to have a crash, and we're going to have a crash like a 1929 crash if she gets in."
Well, I can’t see votes because I turned them off. Everyone should try it, it makes life wonderful.
To answer your question, if you have a group of people following your every word, and you start making predictions about things. Those people might take you seriously, and start pulling their money out of the stock market, which would cause it to drop.
Realistically, even if that happened the chances of a “crash” are pretty minimal because he’s full of shit.
However, trying to manipulate the stock market, successful or not, could be considered illegal.
My comment is really 80% humor, 15% mocking the judicial system, and 5% serious.
Claiming there'll be a stock crash if someone is elected is not stock manipulation.
If he made materially false statements, about a stock itself, deliberately meant to cause the economy to crash, then it would be a different story, but nothing he said was materially false, as he was just saying an elected candidate would be bad for the economy, in his opinion.
It would be stock manipulation if he acted upon insider information to manipulate the stock price, or used proven, materially false statements about the reality of a company/stock to deliberately drive the stock down in price.
It's not even entirely a matter of if what he said can be disproven in this case, because he didn't even reference a specific stock.
Speculating that the general market will go down, even if you use lies to say so, doesn't count as stock manipulation.
And even if he had singled out a specific stock, speculating on what would happen if an administration with opposing political views comes into office is not the same as saying, for instance, "the CEO of this company actually just stole 20 million bucks and it's gonna tank valuations" while shorting the stock.