Thomas L. Friedman
Trump’s Gilded Gut
Instinct
June 3, 2025
Wall Street analysts
recently began joking that
the best way to predict the behavior of President Trump — and make money in the
process — was by practicing the “TACO trade,” which stands for “Trump always
chickens out.” You can always bet on Trump rolling back a reckless tariff.
This mocking of Trump’s
inconsistency, which drives him nuts — “Don’t ever say what you said,” he told a reporter who
asked him about it — not only is accurate but also deserves to be more widely
applied.
One day he is pushing
Ukraine away; the next day he is shaking Ukraine down for its minerals; the
next day Ukraine is back in the fold. One day Vladimir Putin is Trump’s friend;
the next day he’s “crazy.” One day Canada will be the 51st state; the next day
it is the target of tariffs. One day he brags that he hires only “the best” people;
the next day more than 100 experts at
the National Security Council are pushed out just weeks after many were hired.
One day the president hosts a gala at his Virginia golf club for the biggest
buyers of his memecoin, who spent a combined $148 million for
the chance to hear him give a talk standing behind the
presidential seal, and the White House spokeswoman suggests it’s not
corruption because the president was “attending it in his personal time.”
Trump is governing by unchecked gut
impulses, with little or no homework or coordination among agencies. He
respects no real lines of authority, has his golfing buddy (Steve Witkoff) act
as secretary of state and his secretary of state (Marco Rubio) act as his
ambassador to Panama. He compels anyone who wants to stop him to take him to
court, while blurring all lines between his legal duties and personal
enrichment.
What is this telling us?
We are not being governed anymore by a traditional American administration. We
are being governed by the Trump Organization Inc.
In Trump I, the
president surrounded himself with some people of weight who could act as
buffers. In Trump II, he has surrounded himself only with sycophants who act
like amplifiers. In Trump I, he ran a standard, but chaotic, administration. In
Trump II, the president is unchained and running the U.S. government exactly
the way he ran his private company: out of his hip pocket and with only the
markets or the courts able to stop him.
That is especially true
because today Democrats are too weak, Republicans are too craven, big law firms
like Paul, Weiss and Skadden Arps are too morally
bankrupt and government bureaucrats are too defenseless to do anything.
So if the motto of Trump
I was “It’s our turn to rule,” the motto of Trump II is the kind preferred by
dictatorial African regimes: “It’s our turn to eat.”
If you think all of this is funny or
exaggerated, it’s not. Consider just a few examples of Trump’s
shoot-from-the-hip — “fire, ready, aim" — style of governance, where there
is zero second-order thinking.
Weeks after taking
office, Trump announced a series of global tariffs without any serious
consultation with the U.S. auto industry. Along the way, he discovered that
only about one-third of
the parts of the popular Ford F-150 are made in America and cannot be replaced
anytime soon. The tariffs have been such a blow to the whole auto industry that
Ford, General Motors and Stellantis announced they could not give
earning predictions for the rest of 2025, citing tariff
uncertainty and possible supply-chain disruptions.
Then China reacted
predictably to Trump’s 145 percent tariffs on all Chinese exports to America.
As the Times Beijing correspondent Keith Bradsher reported on Monday, Beijing abruptly halted exports of rare-earth magnets that
go into U.S.-made cars, drones, robots and missiles. If Trump doesn’t find a
way to strike a deal (“chicken out”) on some of his China tariffs, U.S. car
factories may have to cut back production “in the coming days and weeks,”
Bradsher reported.
What do you think are
the chances that Trump had gamed out in advance these second-order consequences
of his tariffs on China? I bet zero. He just shot from the hip.
It gets worse. As I have been arguing since Trump came to office,
his ridiculous right-wing woke obsession with destroying the U.S. electric
vehicle industry that President Joe Biden was trying to build up undermines
U.S. efforts to compete with China in electric batteries. Batteries are the new
oil; they will power the new industrial ecosystem of A.I.-infused self-driving
cars, robots, drones and clean tech.
The consequence of this, the economics writer Noah Smith
observed, is the weakening of America’s capacity to build the
kind of cheap, battery-powered drones that Ukraine just used to destroy part of
Russia’s air fleet — and that China could use the same way against our aircraft
carriers. “Trump and the G.O.P.,” Smith noted, “have decided to think of
batteries as a culture-war issue instead of one of national security. They
think they’re attacking hippie-dippy green energy, sticking it to the socialist
environmentalist kids and standing up for good old red-blooded American oil and
gas. Instead, what they’re actually doing is unilaterally disarming America’s
future drone force and ceding the key weapon of the modern battlefield to
China.”
Do you think Trump
connected any of these dots? Not a chance. It was fire, ready, aim.
Here’s another example
of that failing. Trump just announced that he would double U.S. steel tariffs to 50 percent. Surely
the president would not have made such a move without studying what happened in
his first term when he suddenly raised steel tariffs to 25 percent.
Fortunately, others have. It was a total failure.
At first, the 2018 Trump
steel tariffs added about 6,000 jobs to the U.S. steel industry’s work force,
according to the Census Bureau, The Wall Street Journal reported. But
by the end of 2019, it added, those gains evaporated, leading to the loss of
about 75,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs, according to a study by the Federal
Reserve Board of Governors. Why? Well, as The Journal wrote in a May 17, 2021,
editorial titled “How Trump’s Steel Tariffs Failed,” his 25
percent tariff “hurt industries that buy and use steel, plus their workers and
millions of consumers.” That’s because so many more American jobs are held by
people who use steel than make steel.
I challenge anyone in
this administration to show me that Trump gamed out his new 50 percent steel
tariff and proved that it would work better this time around.
How about Trump’s
education strategy? You cannot put up a meaningful trade wall against China
unless you also have an education strategy to increase our advanced
manufacturing.
China’s universities put so much
emphasis on STEM education — science, technology, engineering and math — that
every year China produces some
3.5 million STEM graduates, just under the number of graduates from associate,
bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. programs in all
disciplines in the United States.
To compete in the
A.I.-driven economy of the future, a country cannot have too many engineers.
But we have a glaring shortage. How have we been filling that hole? By
admitting tens of thousands of engineering students and engineers from China
and India in particular.
So, surely Trump thought
this all through in advance?
Fat chance. He started a
technology trade war with China — which controls about 30 percent of global
manufacturing, almost double that of the United States — at the same time that
he is trying to crush America’s premier research centers like the National Institutes of Health,
while having his secretary of state vow to “aggressively
revoke visas for Chinese students.” On top of it all, he has appointed a former
professional wrestling executive who once referred to
A.I. as “A1” — like the steak sauce — as education secretary.
Not just Chinese, but
now many other international STEM students, seeing all of this, are
deciding to stay away. The
United States will not feel the negative effects of that tomorrow while we
still reap the benefits of decades of welcoming the most brainy or energetic
immigrants. But we will a decade from now.
What has distinguished
and enriched the United States for so many years — and kept it the dominant
global economic and military power — has been the ability to consistently
attract that extra scientist or ambitious immigrant, that extra dollar of
investment and that extra dollop of trust from allies. As the biggest economy
in the world, we benefited disproportionately from a stable, global free
market.
“Any conventional understating of U.S.
power would say that we would be crazy to put all three at risk, but that is
exactly what we are doing today,” Nader Mousavizadeh, a founder of the
geopolitical consulting firm Macro Advisory Partners, told me.
“We are behaving as if
we are outsiders and outliers to a global order that we are in fact the
architects of,” he added. “For now, we are still the preferred destination for
savings, investment and talent, but the sound you hear out there today is the
beginning of a global workaround for all three. Because more and more people
are starting to wonder: Are we really the rock they thought we were?”
In sum, what you are
seeing from this Trump II administration, and its bended-knee Congress, is a
dangerous, undisciplined, intellectually inconsistent farce that we will pay
dearly for in the future. Major geoeconomic moves are being made by one man who
has done no homework, modeling or stress-testing and has fostered little apparent interagency
process, with no congressional oversight or apparent reference
to history.
If you think this is not dangerous,
just keep in mind that the Trump Organization Inc. over the years filed for
Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for six different businesses.
There was a reason for that: the operating style and values of its boss.
