Trump’s nausea-inducing, herky-jerky, thrill-a-minute second term has induced enormous disquiet among everyone from business owners to immigrants to laid-off federal workers to foreign students here on shaky student visas and wishing to complete their educations before the rug gets pulled out from under them.
Ominously, Trump chose the last few weeks as the perfect time to unleash economic warfare on nations deemed cheaters. He announced he was single-handedly going to undo decades of unfair trade practices by China and other scalper nations. He hit Beijing, our greatest economic rival, with a whopping 145% tariff on many Chinese products. However, I would not count on those proposed penalties surviving this process.
Other nations, including Mexico and Canada, were first threatened with annexation, then ruinous tariffs, then a wait-and-see, let’s make a deal, it’s not going to be so bad after all, and an embarrassment of inconsistency. No one knows the fate of North American trade, or, for that matter, whether Mexico and Canada are friends or foes.
Unlike Old Joe Biden, President Trump gives the press lavish access. He is a great ad-libber, charming and charismatic, the world’s biggest movie star. But he constantly spoils his vamps with overstatements and exaggerations. Every press availability should be combined with sound effects or a truth or fiction scorecard.
So far, his new hires have not helped him.
Pete Hegseth, his defense secretary, cannot stop using his private phones for top secret musings on critical maneuvers. The fate of entire departments hangs in the balance.
At this point, I wonder if anyone in the Trump II world has a clear notion of the direction Trump wants the nation to follow. Certainly not foreign students here on legitimate visas who have no idea what is happening to their academic lives here or whether the Department of Homeland Security will show up at their study halls with a one-way ticket out of here and no time to pack a bag.
And don’t expect the economy to forgive its recent muggings.
I haven’t felt this much financial anxiety since bad subprime loans tanked the national economy in 2008. Even though the resulting Great Recession severely diminished many 401 (k) plans, there was seldom the feeling that the whole financial banking system would fly off its wheels. In other words, it is worse than it has ever been, with trillions in wealth up in smoke.
Trump’s main structural problem is that he can’t seem to focus on any one issue long enough to resolve it. Take the one area where Trump’s decisiveness has made a positive difference: immigration.
He appropriately targets violent gangbangers belonging to vicious trans-national criminal enterprises, MS-13 and Tren del Aragua, and then Trump gets busted for sneaking undocumented migrants out of the United States behind the back of a federal judge who had just ordered them entitled to due process hearings.
At 100 days, inconsistency threatens the nation with a constitutional crisis, fracturing our tripartite system of governance. So far, he and his acolytes have stopped short of defying the U.S. Supreme Court, but he’s been so erratic and impulsive that I would not count on that lasting.
Trump must slow down and smell the roses. He inherited a relatively robust economy and stable inflation. Many of the problem areas he has focused on need overhaul and reform, but not all at once.
Focus on the issues in an orderly fashion. Stop the spontaneous combustion. No more improv. That works for comedy, not governance. Run the nation as if by a master plan.
Right now, the Trump Administration’s Grand 100-Day Plan seems like a stoner college student sketched it out on the back of a cocktail napkin.
