Ni Shocked Ni Awed

 In this third week of the second Trump presidency, the Big Man himself seems just as unhinged as ever. But he has also gotten suddenly less scary. 

The game-changer for me was seeing how quickly Trump chickened out on his own tariff war. To be sure, the whole situation was alarming. For twenty-four hours, Trump held a loaded gun to the head of the world economy. He took the global system to the brink—for no reason at all—by declaring an unprovoked trade war against our closest neighbors and allies. It was the economic equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

But then, Trump turned tail after only a single morning of plunging stock futures. From the sublime to the ridiculous. More absurdly still—Trump ended up just taking more-or-less the same offer from Canada that they had already put on the table weeks earlier. So, it’s entirely unclear what Trump thought he was gaining from this whole reckless exercise in brinksmanship. 

Canadian negotiators reportedly said it was impossible to determine what Trump even wanted from them. When asked this question in public, Trump has mostly just repeated that he wants to take over Canada and make it the 51st state. Which is not exactly a realistic bargaining position. 

The only conclusion one can draw for all this is simply that Trump is a massive idiot. And it’s hard to be terrified for long by a massive idiot. 

Of course, Trump has done many other bizarre and disturbing things since calling off his own trade war. He has also threatened similar unprovoked acts of economic aggression against our allies in Taiwan and Western Europe (both of which actions, if he took them, would play directly into the hands of our authoritarian adversaries, to state the obvious). 

Plus there was the staggering insanity of Trump’s comments last night—threatening to invade and occupy Gaza and commit an ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians living there. 

But at a certain point, it just becomes impossible to take any of this seriously. Trump can’t even tell anyone what he wants, from all of this chaos he has unleashed. Again, the only throughline here appears to be that he is an idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about. And an idiot is not scary. An idiot cannot convince anyone for long that they have real power. 

So, count all of this as a point in favor of Ezra Klein’s thesis. Klein—in an article that a friend sent my way—argued earlier this week, in effect, that Trump is a paper tiger. He talks a big game, but he has no real power. His actions do not have a sound legal basis. Many of these efforts are already being tied up in court. He just is not actually as scary or diabolically effective as he wants us to think he is. 

For all the talk of Trump’s “shock and awe” tactics in his first weeks, then—to quote Quinta Jurecic on the Rational Security podcast—“color me not shocked and not awed.” 

What is really happening here is that people are starting to see through Trump’s kayfabe game. We are realizing—as Heinrich Heine’s “Adam, the First” puts it: “I see how small and insignificant you are/ No matter how important you try to make yourself/ With all your death and thundering.”

We are finding it harder by the day to keep quaking at the death and the thundering. We are starting to perceive the outline of the little man behind the curtain.