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?”
