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The way the Trump administration reacts to events and promulgates policy would seem to make some kind of disaster inevitable.
Trump, by dint of his personality, makes disaster much likelier; but in theory the danger can be contained. We almost made it through his first term without suffering that kind of disaster, until pandemic struck and Trump consigned hundreds of thousands of Americans to preventable death.
Now, though—without any meaningful constraints—it wouldn’t take an act of god for Trump’s know-nothing, predatory decision making to land the country and world in crisis. By some measures, he’s already done that—many economic analysts suspect we’re already in a recession of Trump’s making. Potential disasters lurk basically everywhere, and it’s just a question of when one will strike.
The Wall Street Journal published a story last week [ [link removed] ], equal parts hilarious and harrowing, about how things work (or, rather, don’t) in Trump’s White House.
“On April 9, financial markets were going haywire,” the Journal noted, setting the scene. “Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wanted President Trump [ [link removed] ] to put a pause on his aggressive global tariff plan [ [link removed] ]. But there was a big obstacle: Peter Navarro, Trump’s tariff-loving trade adviser, who was constantly hovering around the Oval Office.”
Navarro isn’t one to back down during policy debates and had stridently urged Trump to keep tariffs in place [ [link removed] ], even as corporate chieftains and other advisers urged him to relent. And Navarro had been regularly around the Oval Office since Trump’s “Liberation Day” event.
So that morning, when Navarro was scheduled to meet with economic adviser Kevin Hassett in a different part of the White House, Bessent and Lutnick made their move, according to multiple people familiar with the intervention.
They rushed to the Oval Office to see Trump and propose a pause on some of the tariffs [ [link removed] ]—without Navarro there to argue or push back. They knew they had a tight window. The meeting with Bessent and Lutnick wasn’t on Trump’s schedule.
The two men convinced Trump of the strategy to pause some of the tariffs and to announce it immediately to calm the markets [ [link removed] ]. They stayed until Trump tapped out a Truth Social post, which surprised Navarro, according to one of the people familiar with the episode. Bessent and press secretary Karoline Leavitt almost immediately went to the cameras outside the White House to make a public announcement.
This is quality reporting. It gives structure to what was evident from outside: Trump announced his tariffs. Experts instantly recognized that his plan was a reckless and idiotic—the product of lazy thinking and bad math. It nearly crashed the global economy. So Trump retreated. But he couldn’t retreat without doing something to save face. So he imposed embargo-sized tariffs on Chinese imports. But then those promised to bite hard, so he agreed to some exemptions. And now instead of backing down and moving on, the administration plans to create a working group [ [link removed] ] to ameliorate the supply-chain disruptions Trump’s trade war will cause.
It is important to recognize that this is how they do basically everything. They fire people, then rehire them under duress, without reassessing the overriding inclination to fire people willy nilly. They break the law, lose in court, then lie to Trump manipulatively [ [link removed] ] about the nature of the rulings.
But judges can snap back. So can markets. The problem is other scenarios: emergencies that unfold too quickly to head off by reversing policy; slow-burning crises that only become apparent when resolving them is no longer a matter of flipping a switch or changing one person’s employment status. One torture of living as an informed citizen under an administration this reckless is bracing for a calamity of some sort every day, not knowing when it will arrive, or in what clothing.
IMPERFECT TO DEFAULT
I write a lot about the importance of fighting Trump, and the many ways Democrats and liberal leaders could better resist his authoritarianism. Watching over the past several days as office holders and civil society institutions have stepped up their efforts has been a huge relief.
But it’s the other stuff that causes me to lose the most sleep—the stuff that is completely out of our control.
To take one example: I think Democrats should not help Trump and the GOP increase the debt limit [ [link removed] ]—make them do it on their own, or else impose strict conditions on Democratic votes. No debt limit increase to finance tax cuts for Trump, Elon Musk, and their buddies. No implicit assent to a lawless tariff regime. Fight. This would invite a tense legislative standoff, but we know how those go. Republicans routinized them for us over many years.
By contrast there’s nothing Democrats could do to prevent Trump from defaulting on the national debt by accident, or in a fit of pique.
Let me explain.
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