The Abyss

 And just like that, Trump backed off from most of his reciprocal tariffs. Once again, he held a gun to the head of the world economy—the material basis that supports all human life on this planet—and then got bored with the act and put the weapon away. Except that, yet again, the suspension is only "temporary." And the elevated base rate for tariffs will remain. And the uncertainty and instability generated by his actions will continue indefinitely. 

I guess it passes for "good news" these days that we are now going to destroy the global economy only a little bit at a time, rather than all at once. The stock market—desperate as always for any "comfort serves in a whirlwind" (Hopkins)—is certainly willing to treat it as such. I'm personally relieved we aren't immediately going to plunge ourselves into a gratuitous global depression. But one is also dismayed by the sheer madness of it. The absurdity. What on Earth did he think he was doing? 

Trump's waffling on his tariff threats—however preferable to the alternative—also ensures that no one will ever adjust their supply chains in response to his threats in future, since apparently they can just wait him out and call his bluff. It also completely torpedoes all of those pseudo-"sophisticated" rationalizations for the trade wars that Trump's more "intellectual" courtiers have been offering in recent days. So much for the "Mar-a-Lago summit," e.g. So much for correcting trade imbalances. Etc. 

The man's willingness to back off so quickly from his own threats suggests that, despite the Miran mirages, there is actually no clever plan behind all of this. There is no golden age that will dawn if we could just withstand the sacrifice of a few months of market turmoil to get there. All we are actually dealing with is a fool and a madman. The president is nothing other than an abyss of stupidity and lunacy—miles-deep, "no-man-fathomed," to borrow another phrase from G.M. Hopkins. 

Of course, before Trump undermined all of these arguments himself by changing course and ensuring no one will ever take his threats at face value again, there were various efforts to "steelman" his tariff plans; just as there had been efforts to "steelman" the ruinous DOGE cuts to the federal workforce before that. What was funny about all of these takes is that they required their proponents to pretend Trump "really" meant to do things that had nothing to do with his public statements. 

Trump "really" meant the DOGE cuts to result in lower deficits, we were told. But why, then, was he planning to raise military spending and cut taxes? Why was he going only after culture war targets like foreign aid that make up so little of the federal budget? We were told that this was because DOGE knew that meaningful budget cuts would be politically toxic, so they had to cut off a few low-hanging fruit in order to force people to confront the real source of the budget crisis. 

Which is funny—because the DOGE people were telling us publicly that they were acting because they had such a strong "democratic mandate," and because Trump had won the election by such a supposed landslide. You'd never guess that they knew full well their policies were extremely unpopular, and that they viewed the public as a bunch of slack-jawed saps who had to be hoodwinked into making budget cuts that they never actually wanted. (Again—this was the "steelman" version of DOGE!)

Then there was the "steelman" version of the tariff plan. One iteration of it held that maybe Trump was trying to trigger a global financial meltdown and retreat from the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency—because doing so would bring on the crisis that many felt was inevitable anyways. Again—then—the best version of the case that even the tariff proponents could present was that they were deliberately forcing something down the public's throat that they would never have accepted on honest terms. 

The through-line here, then, is the incredible anti-democratic impulse; the arrogant elitism of these self-appointed overlords; the belief that they, as DOGE creeps and chronically-online Thiel-reading MAGA pseudo-intellectuals, know better than the American people, and have no choice but to force policies upon us that could never win through a fair political hearing. To which I can only hope that "the people, the crowd, the mass" are about to wise up to their act. As Carl Sandburg once put it: 

"When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.

The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.