There was a Trump loyalist on the radio on Thursday morning trying to explain the whiplash-inducing U-turn on tariffs the night before. He said that what the US president wanted was for the world to sit up and take notice of him. Well, if that’s the benchmark of success, then give the man at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue a straight A+. Yes, everyone is sitting up.
The other way of interpreting those remarks is to say that President Trump is an endless attention-seeker. And though this is far from the most important thing to note from the past dizzying 10 days since “Liberation Day”, it has played a part – and invariably made things worse.
Donald Trump loves the TV cameras. He can’t help but provide the world with a running commentary on what he’s doing. The Rose Garden theatricality, complete with a bingo board of tariffs, felt as though he was auditioning to be a game-show host – but in fact, it was just another episode of The Trump Show.
Just imagine how much more might have been achieved if he had sought to conduct his tariff negotiations in private, with – yes – threats of what might be in store for those who didn’t play ball. Instead, he went for fanfare... and spooked the hell out of markets across the planet.
We were told he would brook no opposition; the “medicine” – the surgery, even – had to be administered, after America had been “raped and pillaged” by the rest of the world.
That’s why Madagascar would have to pay tariffs. Sorry. What? Why? Well, because Madagascar sold chocolate to America, and the Madagascans didn’t buy much in return. Maybe because they’re too poor? And then there were the tariffs imposed on Guadeloupe and Martinique, which were different from the ones applied to the EU – even though these two Caribbean islands are part of France.
It was all so sloppy and rushed, almost as though it mattered more to announce it within the first 100 days than to get it right.
And what are the tariffs for? The narrative is all over the place. Are they a revenue-raising measure to fund tax cuts? Well, if they were, then no matter how much Madagascar purchased from the US, it would make no difference. Or are they about eliminating trade deficits?
To the extent that they’re about “reshoring” – bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US – if you were on the board of an international company that was thinking of making a huge investment in the US and building a factory there, you’d want some macroeconomic certainty, some consistency in decision-making, some predictability. Not even the most addicted guzzler of the Kool-Aid could say that Trump has offered much of that.
So it seems to me there are two principal questions: what caused Trump to bottle it, to fold, to buckle, to capitulate (all words he will hate), and what does this mean for his leadership now?
Listen to his disingenuous outriders and you’ll hear that the “policy readjustment” was planned and plotted cunningly to isolate China. But from Trump’s own mouth came a different story – and, I suspect, the truth. He was spooked.
The stock markets were in freefall, but more terrifying was the way that the bond markets were moving. American government debt has always been the safest haven for troubled investors, but people were selling off US Treasuries; they had no confidence in the man at the top.
In previous columns, I’ve quoted the brilliant Democratic strategist James Carville – he of “It’s the economy, stupid” fame. But something he said a couple of years ago really struck me this week. It was this: “I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president, or the Pope, or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”
And that market certainly put the fear of God into Donald Trump. He might have been able to ignore his advisers, scoff at the bankers, dismiss the plaintive calls from his billionaire buddies who were facing the prospect of having to get slightly smaller private jets – but you can’t screw with the bond markets.
When Trump announced the 90-day pause, a giddy Wall Street went more berserk than students who’ve just finished their finals. But a day later, the markets were flashing red again; the sell-off was continuing. They had got from Trump a partial surrender – now they wanted more. They wanted the hokey-cokey of on-off tariff chaos to end.
Trump’s second term was meant to be different from his first. When Trump was first in the White House, he was surrounded by Maga ideologues who didn’t know what they were doing, or the so-called grown-ups who tried to thwart him. This time, he would have his own people in place who knew what they were doing. And they would deliver his agenda.
For the first few, astonishing weeks of this administration, I fully bought into that analysis. This was full Maga at warp speed. But on Wednesday, that policy hit a bond-market brick wall. And who are the people who’ve emerged as the winners? The grown-ups.
A brutal battle has been fought in the West Wing between the tariffista ultras and the free-marketeers. To personalise it, Peter Navarro versus Elon Musk, with Musk dismissing Navarro as a moron, “dumb as a sack of bricks”. The ultras are licking their wounds.
That has given the markets cause for hope. The tariffs have not gone away, but there’s a belief that they may have reached their high-water mark. In the coming 90-day pause, expect administration officials to claim a series of spurious trade victories as they wind back the most punitive measures.
Trump has already seen a slide in his approval ratings, an index he watches as closely as the stock market. Magaland is having its faith tested – say it quietly, but maybe St Donald is fallible after all. And what drove Americans to vote for him in November was the belief that the businessman would make them all richer.
The Republican Party is already looking at the midterms in November 2026 nervously. Its hold on the House of Representatives is already fragile. Lose the House, and governing for Trump will become even harder.
The Democrats may not be having that much impact right now – and have no general to lead the charge – but, in a sense, that doesn’t matter. The Trump Show is sucking in all the oxygen; how much attention would anyone else get right now?
But just because you’re attracting endless media attention doesn’t mean you’re winning. There is such a thing as bad publicity. And ever since Liberation Day, Americans have been reminded of all that is most chaotic and dysfunctional about Donald Trump and his haphazard way of governing.
The view is that Trump has been chastened by the past 10 days and wouldn’t dare go full tariffista ultra again in three months’ time. But that assumes the president will behave rationally, logically, and predictably – and who would bet on that?
Jon Sopel is the former BBC North America editor and now presents Global’s ‘The News Agents’ podcast. His latest book, ‘Strangeland: How Britain Stopped Making Sense’, is out now
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