The stock market kicked off the week with more steep losses after President Trump spent the weekend defending his new tariffs amid growing blowback at home and abroad.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down roughly 1,400 points shortly after the market opened, falling 3.5 percent. The S&P 500 index was down 3.7 percent and the Nasdaq composite was down 3.7 percent as the market opened.

Wall Street was bracing for another bloody Monday after stocks plunged throughout the week following Trump’s sweeping tariff proposal. The president announced Wednesday he would be imposing roughly $600 billion in new taxes on foreign goods, with rates ranging as high as 54 percent for Chinese products.

The scale of Trump’s tariffs and administration’s refusal to back down stunned the stock market, which had expected the president to propose a smaller package aimed at spurring trade talks.

Trump, however, insisted over the weekend that the stock market plunge was a necessary price to pay for fairer trade. The president argued that the U.S. could not afford it’s steep trade deficit with China, and needed to accept the costs of bringing manufacturing back the country.

“Hundreds of billions of dollars a year we lose with China. And unless we solve that problem, I’m not going to make a deal,” Trump told reporters traveling with him on Air Force One as he returned from Florida to Washington, D.C., on Sunday evening.

When asked how far markets could fall before Trump would change course, the president dismissed the question.

“I think your question is so stupid. I don’t want anything to go down. But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” Trump said.

While most Republican lawmakers have urged Americans to give Trump the benefit of the doubt on the economy, even some of his most ardent financial industry supporters are expressing alarm.

“Business is a confidence game. The president is losing the confidence of business leaders around the globe,” hedge fund chief Bill Ackman wrote Sunday on X.

“The consequences for our country and the millions of our citizens who have supported the president — in particular low-income consumers who are already under a huge amount of economic stress — are going to be severely negative,” he wrote.

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