It’s become a cliche to point out that Donald Trump’s second term is more chaotic and volatile than his chaotic and volatile first term because there are no “guardrails” to stop him from making destructive decisions. By guardrails, most people generally mean serious, experienced, hands who can advise him of the more sensible and judicious course when making decisions and are perceptive enough about his psychology to understand how to handle him with misdirection and diversions to focus his attention on a safer path than he would choose on his own. It’s not the optimal way to run a presidential administration but when dealing with Donald Trump, a person of very limited understanding of the way the world actually works and very little desire or capability to learn about it, it’s probably the only way to ensure that the country doesn’t completely go off the rails.
This concern has now been borne out in living color in these first few months of Trump’s second term and it’s far worse than we ever imagined it would be. In every important issue area Trump’s impulsive, labile, character has been exposed in one way or another and it’s become clear that as much as people learned to manage him to keep him from doing his worst in his first term, everyone now knows that they can manipulate him for their own ends in the second. And that includes foreign adversaries and certain allies with their own axes to grind.
Consider one of Trump’s most egregious decisions at the very start of this term. On the campaign trail he had promised to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists but it was widely assumed that it would be a careful process that would exclude those who had committed the worst violence against the Capitol police or had perpetrated serious damage to property. The pardons would not go through the normal vetting by the Justice Department because none of the usual criteria had been met so the president himself was either going to have to decide individual cases or take the suggestions of his aides who had prepared a set of recommendations. But according to Axios, Trump couldn’t decide what to do so on day one he just said “F -k it: Release ’em all.” He might as well have just flipped a coin.
In the first term he had a White House Counsel who would have steered him away from making such a capricious decision but no one is there to do that. Perhaps more importantly, there were people around him heavily invested in the January 6th mythology of patriotic heroism who no doubt applauded what he did.
Or take for Trump’s big “liberation Day” tariff announcement which was received with a mix of shock and bemusement by the entire world resulting in an epic stock market crash. It was obvious from the moment he showed his amateurish chart showing tariffs for individual countries that there was no discernible formula (which should have been predicted by the fact that Trump has always erroneously based his obsession with tariffs on the idea that a trade deficit means that America is “losing.”)
In fact, he has no understanding of how tariffs work which is made crystal clear by his changing and contradicting explanation of his goals. On the one hand, he says that the high tariffs will make it possible to end the income tax. On the other hand he says they are designed to force foreign companies move their factories to the United States which would logically mean that imports would fail to bring in the expected revenue. And while he says they are a negotiating tool, he also says that he will unilaterally decide what is fair and will send countries a letter telling them what they will pay. And he continues to insist that foreign countries pay the tariffs and not American companies and consumers.
He believes all of these things separately and together. But mostly he believes that what he believes is automatically right, simply because he believes it. Having been unleashed in this second term and surrounded by sycophants and opportunists, Trump is acting on his uninformed assumptions to blow up the world economic system. And instead of talking him out of it, he has a group of economic courtiers who are so obsequious it makes your teeth hurt egging him on.
The Wall St. Traders who coined the TACO meme (Trump Always Chickens Out) have figured out how to take advantage of Trump’s inexplicable stop and start process by simply observing that his bullying tactics are bluffs and they have learned to anticipate his moves, making a lot of money in the process. It’s a sure bet that quite a few people around Trump have made a bundle doing exactly the same thing. He calls this “negotiating” — people with portfolios call it a tell. But when the economy really starts to falter over these tariffs nobody involved is going to be laughing. And Trump will have no idea how to fix it because he doesn’t understand it and won’t listen to anyone who puts the country’s well being ahead of their own interests.
Likewise, his immigration policies have been all over the place. One week his enforcer Stephen Miller is yelling at ICE supervisors that they have to start rounding up undocumented workers at Home Depot, sparking a massive protest and giving him the excuse he’s been looking for to bring troops into America’s big blue cities. The next week he’s announcing that the farmers and the hotel owners don’t like to see their long term undocumented employees being deported and instructs ICE to stop their efforts in those sectors. A few days later the administration quietly rescinds that order and Trump announces that he is sending tactical units to Chicago and New York to bring the hammer down on the immigrants and the officials in these “Democrat Power Centers” who are “sick” and “hate America.”
The point is that Trump doesn’t really know how to finesse this situation in a way that can satisfy all the stakeholders. So he lurches from one decision to another, dancing as fast as he can hoping that somehow it will all work out in the end. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller relentless pursues his crusade to purge America of as many immigrants as he can.
Perhaps the most glaring example of this phenomenon is in the realm of foreign policy. His bully boy posture against American allies is largely a performance which he thinks makes him look like a strongman. But the real strongmen see right through him. The man who claimed that he would end the Ukraine war with one phone call on the day after he was elected has been shown to be totally impotent when it comes to dealing with his alleged good buddy Vladimir Putin. After wailing for the past three years that all he wants is for “everyone to stop dying” in Ukraine , Trump has been reduced to weakly mewling that they may just have to “fight it out” pretty much washing his hands of the situation. Putin knows that Trump is a paper tiger so he’s doing exactly what he wants.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has clearly taken the same lesson. He tried to persuade Trump to help them strike Iran but Trump dithered and stalled because he thought he could make one of his vaunted “deals,” so Netanyahu finally just went ahead and did it anyway. According to the NY Times, Trump was just left standing limply on the sidelines, not knowing how to respond until he watched Fox News celebrating the brilliance of the Israeli operation and decided to jump on the bandwagon. At this point we don’t know if he will agree to join the offensive operation as the Israelis want his to do but he’s enjoying the rush of taking credit for what they’ve done so far.
There are literally dozens of examples of how this is playing out in these first five months. From Miller to Putin to Netanyahu to every functionary in the White House, they have all figured out that Trump is even more clueless and mystified by the job of president than he was in his first term.His hand-picked “loyalists” and our adversaries alike have their own agendas and are becoming adept at using his ignorance and confusion for their own ends.
One thing we do know: none of this would be happening if Trump were president.
Salon