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.
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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
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