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TRUMP UNDONE (WELL, PARTIALLY PUT ON HOLD)  
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Harold Meyerson
April 9, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ The president is compelled to delay his tariffs. The Republican
Congress failed to do it, so the markets did. _

President Trump walks to board Marine One after speaking with
reporters on the South Lawn of the White House, April 3, 2025, in
Washington., Evan Vucci/AP Photo

 

Donald Trump discovered today that while he can order the tides to
stop rolling in, he can’t get the tides to comply. The tides, in
this case, came in two distinct but related waves. The first was the
markets—not just on Wall Street, not just the S&P 500, but the
underlying American, and even global, economies. The second was public
opinion, the American people, who feared that that first wave would
hit them with tsunami force.

Trump thought he could surf them both. Instead, he got wiped out. He
is, however, a buoyant SOB, who got wiped out in 2020 but was able to
resurface. That said, even in his increasingly authoritarian
mode—let’s hope, especially in his increasingly authoritarian
mode—he can be stopped.

Consider, then, who and what stopped him, as well as who and what
didn’t. If congressional Republicans had roused themselves to exert
some oversight of Trump’s tariff coup—after all, the Constitution
assigns the tariff power to Congress—then the markets might not have
had to go crazy. It’s not as if there were no precedent for the
consequences of this kind of nonperformance. If Congress had not
failed to do some market regulation in the 1920s, the markets would
not have been obliged to fail so spectacularly (aka the Great
Depression) that regulation belatedly became mandatory.

The whole idea of creating a government defined by the separation of
powers was that the nation could thereby avoid the kind of
unchallenged despotism that Montesquieu had warned against, and whose
warnings were echoed by the Constitution’s chief author, James
Madison. I can’t recall Madison ever warning against unchallenged
stupidity, but even the so-called originalists among us must concede
that the Founders couldn’t imagine a president so demented and
deranged as Trump, or one so set upon a course of action that made
sense only in the confines of his brain, and nowhere else.

In a sense, then, democracy checked Trump, as fears of a 2026
Republican wipeout in reaction to rising prices and rising
presidential autocracy did manage to induce some trembling in high
party circles, from which the White House could not remain totally
immune. But much of what’s wrong with America is the grim fact that
the forces of capital are frequently more powerful than the forces of
democracy, at least since the 1970s, when the checks on capital that
the New Deal had erected began to weaken. It was capital, it was Wall
Street, that created the global economy of the past half-century,
which it structured in a way that saw profits rise and wages stagnate,
even though polls never showed majority public support for our
signature trade deals. Now, it is capital that is defending that
order—not against the forces of democracy, which Trump disdains even
more than capital does, but against the nihilistic destruction that
Trump spews forth every day.

Trump’s model of government and society is both pre- and
anti-democratic and pre- and sort of anti-capital. What’s most
important to him is having the power to humiliate everybody else, all
those other heads of government who quietly snicker at his ignorance
and bombast at G7 meetings, at all those other heads of government who
don’t snicker at him, too. The guy wants to be Louis XIV, surrounded
by deferential courtiers, by constant bowings and scrapings at
Mar-a-Lago, his neo-Versailles. That’s not only not a democratic
model; it’s not a market model, either, as markets create multiple
centers of power, rigged though they may be. And if there’s one
thing Trump has made clear in the first hundred days of his second
term, it’s that he wants to wipe out, or at least intimidate into
inaction, any other centers of power. Pushed to Trumpian extremes by
his tariff policies, his quest for absolute authority not only
threatened small-d democrats but also big-C Capitalists, who only now
have understood that Trump’s war on any global order in which he
doesn’t reign supreme threatens even them (their fortunes, their
fortune-derived clout) as well. The notion that Trump might come after
everyone else didn’t distress them, but the damage he now threatened
to do to their wealth and power distressed them plenty.

Though he doesn’t yet own the courts, Trump does own (with the help
of Elon Musk) the Republican-controlled Congress. Try though he may,
however, he doesn’t own the markets and he doesn’t own the
American people. In a dark winter turned to a grim spring, that should
provide some hope.

_Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect._

_Used with the permission © The American Prospect, Prospect.org
[[link removed]], 2025. All rights reserved. _

_Read the original article at Prospect.org.:
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* Tariffs
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* Trump
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* political class
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* collateral damage
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