Hindsight : April 2025

Be cool! Trump knows what he is doing!

Trump’s tariffs crashed the market — and crushed the Republican Party’s fear of him.

April 11, 2025 at 7:30 a.m. EDTToday at 7:30 a.m. EDT

Who’s afraid of Donald Trump? Fewer and fewer people, it appears.

After the president waved a white flag this week in the trade war, his aides and allies claimed the surrender was all part of the plan. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters “this was his strategy all along.” House Speaker Mike Johnson gushed: “Behold the ‘Art of the Deal.’”

But Trump, for once, was candid in explaining why he had suspended his “reciprocal tariffs” for 90 days. “Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line,” he said. “They were getting yippy, you know?”

I do know. There has been so much yipping and yapping of late that Republicans risk being rounded up by animal control.

Bill Ackman, a pro-Trump billionaire, had warned that “we are heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter” and that “the global economy is being taken down because of bad math.”

On Capitol Hill, seven Senate Republicans and a dozen House Republicans had signaled that they would try to wrest tariff power from the president. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina asked Trump’s trade representative about the strategy: “Whose throat do I get to choke if this proves to be wrong?” Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said the tariffs were based on “a fallacy that is going to make us lose our wealth.” MAGA Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told The Post: “I don’t quite understand the strategy, and I’m not sure anybody else does.”

A group funded by Charles Koch and Leonard Leo had filed a lawsuit against Trump’s tariffs. The Trump-faithful broadcaster Maria Bartiromo had challenged Bessent: “Why are we doing this?” And on, and on.

The yipping wasn’t just over the tariffs. Even as Trump retreated on trade on Wednesday, he faced a rebellion in the House GOP against the Senate GOP’s budget — briefly jeopardizing Trump’s entire legislative agenda. Trump pushed House Republicans hard, telling them to “close your eyes and get there” and “stop grandstanding,” and insisting that “it’s IMPERATIVE that Republicans in the House pass the Tax Cut Bill, NOW!” He hosted holdouts at the White House and reportedly phoned in to a meeting Johnson had with them on Wednesday night.

Yet on the House floor, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas called the Senate bill “a joke” written by legislators who couldn’t “pass a math test.” He said the plan “will destroy this country.” Also on the floor, Rep. Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania said the resolution was “not serious” and “not acceptable.”

Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, head of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, refused an invitation to meet with Trump over the bill. Even Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington of Texas, the Republican floor leader in favor of the budget plan, called it “unserious and disappointing.”

Ultimately, Roy, Smucker, Harris and the Freedom Caucus folded in the rescheduled vote on Thursday morning, abandoning their oft-professed piety about government spending in favor of party unity. By a single vote, House Republicans adopted the Senate plan, which would add nearly $7 trillion to the debt over 10 years while only cutting spending by a trivial $4 billion.

The sniping will only worsen as the congressional majority moves to draft the actual tax and spending bill outlined in the budget resolution. But if this week was any indication, it might be hard to make out that particular sniping over the general din of fratricide.

Peter Navarro, a White House trade adviser, told CNBC that Tesla chief Elon Musk, Trump’s top government slasher, is “not really a car manufacturer; he’s a car assembler.” Musk responded that “Navarro is truly a moron,” “dumber than a sack of bricks” and “dangerously dumb.”

Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former Senate GOP leader, voted against Trump’s nominee to be undersecretary of defense, saying: “Make no mistake: America will not be made great again by those who are content to manage our decline.” Vice President JD Vance shot back on X: “Mitch’s vote today — like so much of the last few years of his career — is one of the great acts of political pettiness I’ve ever seen.”

And Trump joined in the sniping. At a fundraising dinner for House Republicans, Trump took on Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, leader of the effort to take tariff authority from Trump. “I see some rebel Republican, some guy that wants to grandstand, say, ‘I think that Congress should take over negotiations,’” he said, using a mocking voice.

As Trump spoke, a reporter from NOTUS took a photo of Speaker Johnson sneaking a peek at his phone. On the screen was a Drudge headline: “Stocks Continue Plunge.”

That was surely the reason for Republicans’ newfound courage in taking on Trump. The man governs by bullying. But in this case, the world had punched the bully in the face. Stock and bond markets plunged, recession alarms sounded, and Trump’s approval ratings sank.

Recognizing his peril, Trump reversed himself on a dime, jettisoning the “REVOLUTION” that was the core of his economic agenda. In the hours and days before his retreat, he had been telling his supporters to “BE COOL!” and “HANG TOUGH” as he administered the necessary “medicine.” The day before the climbdown, his press secretary said, “He’s not considering an extension or delay.” The retreat happened so fast that U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, testifying to Tillis and other lawmakers in support of the tariffs at the moment Trump suspended them, was blindsided. “I understand the decision was made a few minutes ago,” he said.

Markets were briefly delighted by the de-escalation, soaring by about 10 percent on Wednesday before giving back about one-third of those gains on Thursday amid fears that the economic damage couldn’t be undone. Even with the 90-day “pause,” tariffs remain higher than they have been in nearly a century, with 145 percent duties on Chinese imports (met by China’s 125 percent retaliatory tariff); 25 percent tariffs on metals, cars and many Canadian and Mexican goods; and 10 percent tariffs on everybody and everything else. Next, Trump says he will be rolling out “a major tariff” on pharmaceuticals. Consumer confidence has been rocked and business investment frozen.

“You know, it’s like a patient is sick. You have to do surgery,” Trump explained after his climbdown on Wednesday. Yep — and he had just cut open the world economy, poked around inside with unwashed hands, accidentally nicked the aorta and sewed the patient back up.

“I know what the hell I’m doing,” he told Republican lawmakers this week. “I know what I’m doing.”

But that’s the thing: He has now proved beyond all doubt that he does not. Prepare for more yipping.

“We’re not going back,” Kamala Harris used to tell her supporters.

“We’re not going back,” they chanted in response.

But in the end, the voters decided that we are going back. Still, even Trump supporters probably didn’t realize just how far back. Trump appears to have vaulted over the past two decades, blown right past the 20th century and landed us squarely in the 19th.

He makes his intentions explicit on trade. “You know, our country was the strongest, believe it or not, from 1870 to 1913,” he noted, apocryphally, this week. “You know why? It was all tariff-based.”

But Trump’s time travel back to the Gilded Age goes well beyond trade. At the White House this week, Trump signed executive orders to “turbocharge coal mining in America.” Coal hasn’t been the dominant fuel in 75 years, but Trump boasted that “we’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned” even though, in his view, it’s “the single most reliable, durable, secure and powerful form of energy there is on Earth today.” For his backdrop, he used coal miners in work clothes. “They love to dig coal,” Trump said, claiming they prefer that to making “gidgets and widgets and wadgets.”

Trump’s health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is busily returning public health to 19th-century quackery and patent medicine. As a measles outbreak spreads, Kennedy is only grudgingly endorsing vaccination while promoting treatments including Vitamin A (on which some children are now overdosing) and “aerosolized budesonide and clarithromycin” (an unproven treatment). He is acting to remove fluoride from drinking water despite a consensus that its benefits outweigh its harms, he has impeded promising cancer therapies and other cutting-edge research, and he has dismissed the government’s experts on lead poisoning.

We’re seeing, likewise, a return to U.S. imperialism with Trump’s designs on Greenland, Canada and Panama. Attorney General Pam Bondi, with her attempts to eliminate gun-safety policies, appears intent on reviving shootouts at the O.K. Corral. And modern-day robber barons such as Musk once again have sway over an increasingly corrupt federal government. Trump’s nativist attacks on immigrants and attempts to deport them without due process have antecedents in the late 19th century, the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

“I am seeing things I never expected to see in American history again recur,” says Richard White, noted Stanford University historian of the Gilded Age. The rise of oligarchs squeezing subsidies out of government, the attempts to use government power to disable political opponents and the highly partisan Supreme Court are all “really reminiscent of the 1880s and 1890s,” adds White, whose book “The Republic for Which it Stands” chronicles the era.

It’s not clear why Americans would want to return to that time — when life expectancy was in the 40s; more than a quarter of children died before age 5; cholera outbreaks were common and doctors thought illness was caused by “miasma”; paupers were buried in potter’s fields and foundlings were abandoned on the streets; industrial accidents killed people by the thousands; women and most Black people couldn’t vote; the country had no military to speak of; and the government was staffed by partisans who owed their jobs to patronage rather than competence. But we’re apparently going to give it a try.

Each week, Trump manages to come up with a whole new wave of ideas to bring us back to those halcyon days before public health and retirement security. The Social Security website keeps crashing — a direct consequence of efforts by Musk & Co. to slash the agency’s staff and cut back its services, justified by wildly exaggerated claims of fraud.

The acting head of the IRS quit, the third person to abandon the post since Trump took office. The administration is using IRS records to deport undocumented immigrants, which is forecast to set off a noncompliance crisis that will cost the treasury half a trillion dollars. The administration is slashing FEMA as a new storm season begins. The entire staff of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program has been dismissed, leaving no one to administer the program that helps low-income households pay for heat.

Trump sacked the head of the National Security Agency and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, and ousted the senior Navy admiral assigned to NATO. Musk’s DOGE squad is now taking its chain saw to the Peace Corps. The U.N. World Food Program warned that the administration’s destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development “could amount to a death sentence for millions of people.” The National Park Service rewrote the history of the Underground Railroad to play down Harriet Tubman and slavery. The Naval Academy removed Maya Angelou from its library.

Trump’s abuses of power find new expressions, too. This week, he ordered an investigation into the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, for having the temerity to call the 2020 election the “most secure in American history.” He ordered a second investigation into a former Homeland Security official and accused the official of “treason” because he wrote an op-ed and book critical of Trump. He directed Congress to take control of elections, a power given to the states under the Constitution, and declared that “the states are just an agent of the federal government.” The Justice Department said that the Jan. 6 defendants Trump pardoned should be refunded for payments they made to cover damage done to the Capitol. Trump’s acting U.S. attorney in Washington drew a parallel between the prosecution of the Jan. 6 rioters and Japanese internment during World War II.

The courts keep trying to restrain Trump’s lawlessness. The Supreme Court directed the administration to facilitate the return of a Maryland man it mistakenly deported. The high court also lifted a lower court’s block on deportations under the Alien Enemies Act — but shortly after the decision, a Trump-appointed judge in Texas, Fernando Rodriguez Jr., promptly slapped a similar restraining order on the administration. Another Trump appointee, Trevor McFadden, ordered a halt to Trump’s exclusion of the Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One, calling the move “contrary to the First Amendment” and “unlawful.”

And yet the abuses keep coming. The administration’s roundup of migrants has so far led to the alleged wrongful detention or deportation of at least seven U.S. citizens, The Post’s María Luisa Paúl reported. The administration has also revoked hundreds of visas for foreign students and is scouring social media posts to find more targets — at the same time it continues its assault on higher education, freezing $1 billion in funding for Cornell University and $790 million for Northwestern University.

For more desirable migrants, Trump is promoting a “gold card” with his face on it that allows foreigners to buy their way to U.S. citizenship. “For $5 million, this could be yours,” he told reporters.

This type of vanity governance has also taken hold at the Interior Department, where the secretary, Doug Burgum, requires staff to bake him chocolate chip cookies, and, at least once, to redo them when a batch was “subpar,” the Atlantic reported. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, in her latest glamour shot, posed while holding an apparently loaded rifle in the direction of a border agent’s head. “Noem is pointing the M4 muzzle at an agent with an open dust cover, indicating a chambered round. It’s the worst possible place to point it,” The Post’s Alex Horton pointed out.

Still, Trump will not be outdone in the vainglory department. He hosted another Cabinet meeting on Thursday at which his appointees competed in praising him. “What you have assembled in your vision is a turning point, and an inflection point in American history, and so just being part of that is the greatest honor,” was Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’s winning entry. Discussions are underway for a military parade in Washington of the sort Trump had to abandon during his first term after the military put the cost at $92 million. He signed an executive order this week aimed at increasing the flow rate of showerheads, asserting that “I like to take a nice shower, to take care of my beautiful hair.” And, as the world reeled from his tariffs, Trump managed to also spend part of four straight days at his Florida golf courses. After one of his rounds, the White House issued a statement: “The President won his second round matchup of the Senior Club Championship today in Jupiter, FL, and advances to the Championship Round."

Later, as he flew back on Air Force One to face a country and world in crisis, he went to the press cabin to update reporters on the most important issue of the day: “You heard I won, right?”