Jesse Watters, a host on Fox News, criticized President Donald Trump for playing golf over the weekend right after his tariff announcement led to a market downturn.

In an unexpected moment during The Five, Watters broke away from his usual support for Trump to comment on the timing of the golf outing while financial markets were in turmoil and investors were feeling anxious.

Watters’ remarks surprised viewers as he, known for his conservative and pro-Trump stance, openly acknowledged the questionable optics of Trump’s actions and his own biases as a supporter of the President.

Watters sarcastically commented how he would have never been critical of former President Joe Biden if the roles had been reversed.

Co-host Dana Perino picked up on the criticism of Trump golfing, saying: ‘Jesse, one of the things I cannot stand is complaints about golf.’ 

‘Me too,’ Watters agreed. ‘And that’s not a middle finger to middle America. That’s a middle finger to all these foreign countries who are trying to get on the phone and negotiate these tariffs down. 

‘But if Biden was golfing during a stock market like this… I’m sure I wouldn’t say a word,’ Watters said, tongue firmly in cheek.

Fellow co-host Greg Gutfeld joked: ‘You wouldn’t!’

Watters then revealed how he was coping with how the markets had been performing.

‘I know I’m not panicking, Dana, because I’m not looking. I haven’t looked at my bank account. I’m afraid,’ Watters chuckled nervously.

The segment represented a subtle but significant moment: a Fox News star, in prime time, admitting that Trump’s behavior in a moment of national volatility would be indefensible – if it were happening under a Democrat. 

Viewers were also acutely aware of the sarcasm being doled out on the show.

‘It’s true…he’d say a LOT MORE that just one word,’ one viewer commented.

‘This level of sarcasm should come with a laugh track,’ added another.

‘Jessie wouldn’t say a word, he would say several hundred if this were Biden,’ perceived a third.  

‘Mixed feelings when they humanize themselves for a moment. Relief that they know…anger that they can carry on like it’s a game,’ tweeted a frustrated X user.

Trump spent the weekend hitting the links at his South Florida golf resort, even skipping the solemn return of four fallen US soldiers in order to attend a political event at one of his courses. 

The weekend tee times followed a brutal two-day bloodletting on Wall Street as a consequence of the president’s announcement of sweeping reciprocal tariffs. 

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 1,600 points on Thursday and a staggering 2,200 on Friday, triggering renewed fears of a recession.

The optics around Trump and golf have traditionally not hurt the Republican president politically – despite the fact that he criticized President Barack Obama for golfing during the Democrat’s eight years in office. 

But once Trump came into office in 2017, he played golf at either his West Palm Beach course in Florida or in Bedminster, New Jersey almost every weekend. 

Since returning to office in January, Trump has only spent one weekend in Washington, D.C. 

On Wednesday, Trump announced his tariff plan in the White House Rose Garden. 

And then on Thursday, he flew to Miami for a dinner marking the start of the LIV Golf tournament. 

On Friday, he played golf at his West Palm Beach course – the closest to Mar-a-Lago before riding in his motorcade on Saturday to the Trump National Golf Club Jupiter – marking the first time he played that particular course during his second term. 

On Sunday, Trump returned to the Jupiter, Florida course to finish the championship. 

Asked by DailyMail.com on board Air Force One Sunday evening how the golf tournament went, Trump confirmed a win. 

It was ‘very good, because I won,’ the president said. ‘It was good to win,’ he added. 

He then bristled at a Bloomberg reporter for asking if there was an amount of ‘pain in the market at some point you’re unwilling to tolerate.’ 

‘I think your question is so stupid,’ the president told the journalist. 

Aside from Watters subtle dig at the president, other notably MAGA loyalists have been quietly breaking away from the Trump stable.

Elon Musk split with Donald Trump on tariffs after personally losing billions in following the market’s reaction.

He made his feelings known on Saturday by going after White House advisor Peter Navarro after he insisted that the tariffs would eventually pay off.

The world’s richest man took to his X social media platform to respond to a post that noted Navarro has a PhD in economics from Harvard. 

‘A PhD in Econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing. Results in the ego/brains>>1 problem,’ Musk wrote.

Navarro, a staunch advocate of the tariffs, was particularly dismissive of Musk following the comments.

‘He’s got X. He’s got a big microphone. We don’t mind him saying whatever he wants, but the American people need to understand that we know what this is all about,’ Navarro said during an interview with Fox on Sunday.

‘Elon, when he’s in his DOGE lane, is great. But we understand what is going on here. Elon sells cars.’

Wall Street trader Bill Ackman, one of Trump’s most faithful backers in the financial world said on Sunday night that the president needed to put his tariff war on hold or risk a ‘self-induced, economic nuclear winter’.

The Pershing Square Capital Management CEO warned that Trump’s current trajectory could devastate businesses around the world, ‘destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business and as a market to invest capital’.

He urged the president to ‘call a 90-day timeout, negotiate and resolve unfair asymmetric tariff deals and induce trillions of dollars of new investment in our country.

‘If, on the other hand, on April 9, we launch economic nuclear war on every country in the world, business investment will grind to a halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocket books and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate,’ he added.

Trump denied he was intentionally engineering a market selloff and insisted he could not foresee market reactions, saying he would not make a deal with other countries unless trade deficits were solved.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz – who ran for re-election calling himself Trump’s ‘strongest supporter’ in the Senate – warned how the tariffs could ‘hurt jobs and hurt America.’

On his own podcast, he said that he’s not a fan of tariffs and was wary of Republicans defending Trump just to defend Trump.  

‘I’m seeing a lot of Republican cheerleaders reflexively defending what the White House is doing,’ Cruz said. 

Cruz warned that nations reciprocating Trump’s tariffs for lengthy periods of time could hurt the country.

‘If we’re in a scenario 30 days from now, 60 days from now, 90 days from now, with massive American tariffs, and massive tariffs on American goods in every other country on earth, that is a terrible outcome.’ 

He said that while ‘the upside could be massive,’ Republicans running to keep their seats next year may face a hostile environment if the plan doesn’t work.

‘If we go into a recession — particularly a bad recession — 2026 in all likelihood, politically would be a bloodbath,’ he said.