Donald Trump Losing Support of Millionaire Republicans as Stock Markets Experience Worst Christmas Eve Ever

President Donald Trump is losing the support of Republican millionaires and billionaires, a new CNBC survey has found.

The CNBC Millionaire Survey found that despite the president's tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, only 34 percent of the country's millionaires say that they would vote to re-elect Trump. Just 62 percent of Republican millionaires said they would vote for the Trump, while about 86 percent of all Republicans approved of the president, according to Gallup.

About 18 percent of the Republican millionaires surveyed did not believe that Trump would even be the Republican nominee in 2020. About 8 percent said it would be Ohio Governor John Kasich, and 7 percent said it would be Vice President Mike Pence.

Possible 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden received the plurality of hypothetical votes—about 38 percent—from the Democratic millionaires surveyed. Fifty-four percent of the Democrats surveyed and 28 percent of independents said that "voting President Trump out of office" was their number one political issue.

The results of the semiannual survey, which included the thoughts of 750 American millionaires, came as markets crashed into bear territory and top economists warned of an imminent recession.

The president, who has long hinged his success in the White House on the success of the stock market, has attempted multiple times to deflect the blame for recent drops to his Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, for raising rates.

In a bizarre occurrence on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin announced a call with the heads of the six largest U.S. banks to make sure that they all had enough liquidity to function. Such a call would typically be made by the Fed, and only in the midst of a large economic downturn. Although Mnuchin assured all the bank heads said they were well-off, the action caused market panic on Monday. The Dow, S&P and Nasdaq all fell more than 2 percent on one of the final trading days of 2018.

Mnuchin's statement, which was posted while the former Goldman Sachs executive was vacationing in Cabo, Mexico, said that executives told him "they have ample liquidity available for lending to consumer, business markets, and all other market operations." The executives, he added, told him "that they have not experienced any clearance or margin issues and that the markets continue to function properly."

News of the call took many investors, analysts and elected officials by surprise.

"Panic feeds panic, and this looks like panic in the administration," Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton, told The Washington Post. "Suggesting you might know something that no one else is worried about creates more unease."

Jared Bernstein, former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, told the Post that "if this weren't the end of December, I would have thought it was April Fools." He compared the situation to "sending out a message saying our space shields can intercept incoming asteroids. Uh, I didn't know there were any coming our way."

Rumors that the president was looking for a way to fire Powell, whom he personally nominated to head the Fed, also sent markets into turmoil. Markets broke the record Monday for their worst Christmas Eve performance in history.