President Trump told Americans Monday to be “Strong,
Courageous, and Patient” with his sweeping tariff regime — as markets continued
their freefall.
It took fewer than forty-eight hours for a near-reversal to occur, when as noted by Politico
After a week of market turmoil that spread from stocks to,
crucially, government bonds, Trump finally flinched after days of insisting
that there would be no delays and that the world should hunker down for a long,
nasty global trade war.
“I know what the hell I’m doing,” Trump told a gathering of House Republicans Tuesday night, bragging that countries have been “kissing my ass” to try to make trade deals.
After the fact, Trump’s courtiers called it all part of a well-articulated plan. “This was his strategy all along,” as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it, citing outreach from some 75 countries begging Trump to negotiate for some sort of tariff reprieve.
Yet this is a case to take Trump both seriously and literally: By Trump’s own admission, he was spooked about the sharp selloff of Treasuries — admitting, as is well known but rarely acknowledged by him personally, that he very much cares about what other people think.
“The bond market is tricky,” Trump told reporters Wednesday. “I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy … jumping a little bit.”
This guy seems to agree:
It turns out that "people" always has meant "people I control" As Ezra Klein put it last autumn, "one of Trump's verbal tics is to say 'Many people are saying.' But it's the opposite. He's saying what many people want somebody to be saying. He's saying what people are saying in private but often are not saying in public." Trump reversed or sharply reduced most of his tariffs because he himself was getting a little queasy:
And, no, it wasn’t just other people who were queasy. A person I spoke to close to the White House confirmed: Internal worry about panic spreading to government bonds, usually a safe haven during economic volatility, are precisely what made Trump do a 180.
The President didn't rescind or cut the most important tariffs, those against mainland China, which exports far more goods to the USA than dies any other country. However, pulling back on the other tariffs must have been difficult to do for a zero-sum guy, who believes he is benefited only by imposing pain upon others. And we don't know what the 90-days of the pause will bring.
Yet, on one day, for whatever reason(s), President Trump did the right thing. And he became the nation's leading Panican.
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