Politics makes strange bedfellows, but not as strange as global economic meltdowns do.
“Alliance” is entirely the wrong word to describe what happened over the last week between the president and Never Trumpers like me, but it’s fair to call it an “alignment.” A meeting of the minds, if you will.
Trump voters are grousing that this [gesturing at the rubble] isn’t what they voted for. To which Donald Trump—and I—reply, “Oh yes it is.”
“The corrupt globalist establishment that ruled our country for decades is now complaining that I’m doing exactly what I pledged to do in the campaign,” the president said at a Republican event on Tuesday night of his new tariff scheme. He’s right. Last fall, his most prominent surrogate, Elon Musk, went as far as to warn Americans explicitly to expect “temporary hardship” once the new administration took power. When a Twitter user predicted that Trump’s economic agenda would trigger a “severe overreaction in the economy” causing “markets to tumble,” Musk agreed that that “sounds about right.”
Three weeks before Election Day, Trump himself told a group of business leaders in Chicago that “to me the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff” and mused about imposing “100, 200, 2,000 percent” taxes on imports from foreign automakers. “The higher the tariff, the more likely the company would come into the United States,” he reasoned. “So high, so horrible, so obnoxious.”
As markets have spiraled this week and the probability of a recession climbed, Republicans in Congress began to justify their paralysis by reminding voters that this is, in fact, what they voted for. When Senate Majority Leader John Thune was asked on Tuesday what he’d say to panicking investors, he replied, “I think everybody kind of knows my views on tariffs, but the fact of the matter is the president ran on this.”
He did. Americans knew damn well he was a snake before they took him in. They sowed the wind, says the embittered Never Trumper, and now they shall reap the whirlwind.
The president ran on this. He promised a revolution in global trade that would bring manufacturing back to the United States and open up a rich new vein of tax revenue for the federal government. Americans heard that and elected him. They said they want a revolution.
But now they’d all love to see the plan.
New polling finds that the share of Americans who believe the economy is getting worse has risen more than 20 points since Election Day. Among Republicans, 42 percent now describe themselves as “uneasy” about their personal financial situation, a double-digit increase since December. Trump’s net approval rating on the economy stands at -12, the worst rating for any president at this early stage of his term.
Some of his voters surely dismissed his tariff argle-bargle during the campaign as hot air, another item for the “seriously, not literally” annals. But I expect many, encouraged by the pre-COVID economic success of his first term, assumed that if he was serious about waging a revolutionary war on trade, then he must have a truly killer plan to win it.
There is no plan. Even the tariff “pause” he ordered on Wednesday afternoon was plainly less a matter of the president executing a clever strategy than hastily retreating to avert a further financial meltdown. There’s no plan—and over the past week, the world came to realize it.
‘Burn it down first.’
Here’s a potential epigraph for some ambitious author’s history of the Trump recession of 2025. It comes from Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis, grasping at straws to justify the chaos around her. “It’s something that we’ve never had a discussion about before,” she told Semafor, “in terms of: ‘Here’s a policy, let’s theorize about it—and then let’s try it and see what works.’ And that’s where we are. We’re at the try-it phase.”
We’re at the “try-it” phase. With the stability of the global economy.
Lummis is right, though. On Wednesday, the New York Times confirmed what should already have been painfully clear: The White House plunged into this debacle without any grand strategy to shape events going forward. Trump aides knew markets would decline, reporter Peter Baker explained, “but when pressed, several senior officials conceded that they had spent only a few days considering how the economic earthquake might have second-order effects.”
Trump didn’t speak to Xi Jinping before proceeding with “Liberation Day,” apparently, nor did any senior American officials meet with their Chinese counterparts. He ordered the economic equivalent of Pearl Harbor on nearly every country on Earth with no second-stage battle plan except to start calling nervous investors “Panicans.”
It pains me to indemnify Trump voters from any misery that their man has wrought, but, in fairness, I suspect most expected something more considered from the new administration than, “Let’s try nuking the entirety of global trade overnight and see what happens.” Everything about the “try-it phase” on tariffs has been ham-fisted, from the cockamamie formula used to calculate new rates to the endless mixed messaging from Trump’s Cabinet on their willingness to negotiate to the fact that U.S. importers were given no notice and now find themselves agonizing over what to do about orders they’d already placed.
There is no plan. I think the president’s voters assumed there would, at least, be a plan.
What they’ve gotten instead, in Baker’s words, is a “burn-it-down-first, figure-out-the-consequences-later” approach to policy. Trade is only the latest example: Grabbing wires by the fistful and yanking them out of a machine to see if it’ll still work has also been Musk’s approach to trimming the federal bureaucracy. The Times noted that when international relief teams began pouring into Myanmar after the recent earthquake, U.S. officials began putting together a team of their own … only to discover that DOGE had wrecked that capability. The best a diminished America could do was send three employees to survey the damage and make recommendations, and those three ended up being fired while they were there on the ground.
“Something I would like sane conservatives to consider,” columnist Matt Yglesias wrote, “is the possibility that DOGE cuts to medical research, the Social Security Administration, and foreign aid are conducted with the same level of care and rigor as we see in trade policy but without the market feedback.” I like to think of myself as a sane conservative, and I surmise that there’s really no doubt about it.
Winging it.
The “try-it phase” also describes how the president is handling Robert F. Kennedy Jr. According to Politico, Trump reassured pharmaceutical executives not long ago that he’d prevent America’s new top health bureaucrat from acting on his nuttiest ideas. Then he sat by and watched as Kennedy began firing scientists, shutting down divisions at Health and Human Services, and prioritizing crank hobby horses like the phantom link between vaccines and autism. “What was once a very robust place to work, that was trying to lead on innovation, is gone,” one former HHS official sighed. “It’s just gone.”
Our leaders are tearing wires willy-nilly out of America’s scientific mainframe to see what will happen. Maybe it’ll work out?
The “try-it phase” even extends to foreign policy. I can’t imagine there’s a grand strategy behind bullying Denmark and Canada; Trump will cost America more by offending allies and normalizing “spheres of influence” than he’ll gain by being domineering. He doesn’t even pretend to have a plan to make Greenland part of the U.S., in fact, typically muttering ominously when asked that we’ll get the island “one way or the other.” He’s going to try various things to bend Greenlanders to his will—bribery is next, it seems—and see what happens.
He’s winging it. But here’s the thing about winging it: You can’t adopt that as your M.O. and expect your country to remain the foundation of global stability in all things.
A strange thing happened overnight. Despite the steep slide in stocks over the past week, treasury yields rose, indicating a bond sell-off. Typically, investors who are nervous about equities will flee to Treasurys, the world’s safest investment, as a refuge. Not this time. “This highly unusual pattern suggests a generalized aversion to U.S. assets in global financial markets,” former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers observed, worrying that a “serious financial crisis” might be afoot. “We are being treated by global financial markets like a problematic emerging market.”
Hour by hour, day by day, it’s becoming clearer to investors that there is no plan. The rest of the world is treating us like an emerging market because our leader is the sort of impetuous, autocratic dullard typically found at the top of basket-case emerging-market cultures. You can indulge in a “try-it phase” if you’re the caudillo of a Latin American country that mostly exports bananas, but if you insist on it when your economy is the safe haven of the international financial order, then it won’t remain a safe haven forever. The Treasury sell-off was a vote of no confidence in America’s stability.
There’s no plan on trade—or on anything else. Politico claims that some pharmaceutical executives and investors have grown so pessimistic about the “try-it phase” at HHS persisting that they’ve begun to view vaccine development as “uninvestable.” “The perception is that every single vaccine now is going to get held up,” one industry adviser told the publication. “This is a watershed moment that we have never seen before.”
“Watershed moments” in medical regression, “highly unusual” market patterns resulting from Trump’s idiocy: You said you wanted a revolution, didn’t you?
MAGA Maoism.
Even diehard Trump supporters have begun to realize that there is no plan.
The mood among them initially was that the market dive following “Liberation Day” was an unfortunate (or even not-that-unfortunate) yet ephemeral consequence of reordering global trade. But as the dive continued and the new policy became harder to justify, many glommed onto a theory encouraged by the president himself that the crash had been orchestrated deliberately to drive interest rates downward and allow him to refinance America’s debt on the cheap. There was a plan! The great negotiator had a strategy after all.
He didn’t. Last night’s soaring Treasury yield put an end to the eight-dimensional-chess refinance argument.
Starved of economic rationales for what he’s doing, populist influencers have shifted to cultural arguments for protectionism instead. Some, unintentionally parodying the maudlin nostalgia of their movement, romanticized the drab kitchen interior of an ‘80s-era double-wide as something to which American workers might soon again aspire. Others envisioned the return of brawny blue-collar manufacturing jobs as a solution to the crisis of masculinity, just the thing needed to toughen up weak American soy boys. “When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman,” Fox News host Jesse Watters declared. “If you’re out working … you are around other guys; you’re not around HR ladies and lawyers. That gives you estrogen.”
Needless to say, Jesse will not be giving up his Fox job to work in the mines. But “MAGA Maoism,” as writer Rotimi Adeoye labeled it, helps Watters and other keyboard populists fill the vacuum of justifications for what Trump is doing. “Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” Adeoye explained, idealizing factory jobs “glorifies physical labor as moral purification, only now the purification is from the supposed ‘wokeness’ of desk work, filtered through TikTok, X, and Twitch. It’s not about creating jobs. It’s about creating vibes: strong men doing hard things, reshared until they become ideology.”
Go figure that an activist class whose only frame for politics is endless culture war in the service of lib-owning would end up interpreting trade policy as some sort of de-feminization project. With this afternoon’s announcement that Trump is “pausing” all tariffs except those on China for 90 days (even the details of this latest stage of the “try-it phase” aren’t entirely clear), I’m keen to learn whether the Maoists regret to see that very important project aborted or regard the president’s retreat from a week of needless financial bloodletting as the latest demonstration of his business genius.
Actually, never mind. I already have my answer.
But let’s lay the Maoists aside, especially grifters like Watters whose paycheck depends on sniffing political flatulence and insisting on how good it smells or pretending that it doesn’t smell at all. I have a question instead for the many conservatives who talked themselves into supporting Trump last fall and who now find themselves stuck in an endless postliberal “try-it phase.”
What are you getting out of voting Republican at this point?
Regrets.
I’ve asked that question before, but it’s worth revisiting after one of the most chaotic weeks in American financial history and the first to have been caused entirely by the president’s incompetence.
On Tuesday, news broke that Trump was asked during a meeting with senators how he’d feel about raising income taxes on higher earners—and he sounded receptive. A few hours later, at the same event where he reminded Republicans that he’s doing exactly what he pledged to do during the campaign, he informed his audience that “the states are just an agent of the federal government.”
Is that what you voted for? Tax hikes, centralized government, business-smashing tariffs, enormous deficits, and a pro-Russian foreign policy: How are my Reaganites feeling about supporting a party whose agenda grows more classically left-wing every day?
And not just left-wing—incompetently left-wing. You don’t need to admire Kamala Harris to believe that her presidency would not have required international banks to issue carefully worded statements less than three months in, noting that they’re no longer confident that the White House understands basic economics.
The main thing conservatives have gotten from Trump 2.0 is stronger enforcement of the southern border, but even the new immigration policy comes with lots of bitter to spoil the sweet for those who care about the law. And the price of that immigration success is steep and getting steeper: The United States has already lost enormous amounts of credibility morally, diplomatically, and economically. The American age is over, less than three months in.
Did conservative Trump voters not realize that they were voting for a postliberal revolution—a four-year “try-it phase” of the right’s worst ideas—and that this time there would be far fewer people around the president willing and able to talk him out of it when it inevitably went sideways?
I think they at least thought there would be a plan. Now they’re discovering that they handed the country over to a guy who seems to regard it as some sort of achievement that markets skyrocketed the moment he aborted his signature economic policy.
There is no plan. We’re going to have to live with that for the next four years. It would be good for Trump-supporting conservatives, and for America, to repent of their mistake and resolve not to continue to empower a Republican Party that now opposes most of their foundational beliefs.
