He caved, but there's worse to come - and a way to cut it short

Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic:

He blinked. But we don’t really know why....

This was his personal decision. His “instinct,” as he put it. His whim. And his decision, instinct, or whim could bring the tariffs back again.

The Republicans who lead Congress have refused to use the power of the legislative branch to stop him or moderate him, in this or almost any other matter. The Cabinet is composed of sycophants and loyalists who are willing to defend contradictory policies, even if doing so makes them look like fools. The courts haven’t decisively intervened yet either. No one, apparently, is willing to prevent a single man from destroying the world economy, wrecking financial markets, forcing this country and other countries into recession if that’s what he feels like doing when he gets up tomorrow morning.

This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like.

That's as concise a statement as could be had. Applebaum goes on to reinforce her arument: the Constitutional system the founders created more than 200 years ago, she writes, "has failed." We're left with a "de facto tyrant" free to make decisions stripped of world realities, shorn of thoughtful counsel.

As Applebaum notes, Trump says he works on "instinct." That might work out from time to time if he weren't the Dark Prince and earthly king of ignorant fools. It follows that the instincts of imbeciles will always result in imbecilic actions. Leaders who convince themselves that they alone hold the key to success and triumphs and the most artful of deals succeed only in ignorant foolishness. It's a law of humankind that has played out from the Thirty Tyrants of Athens to Adolf Hitler.

Trump's humiliating reversal on the issue of his bizarre tariff policies arrived with comical speed. (One correction: His "reversal," as ubiquitously reported by the media, requires a hefty qualification, in that his "scaled back" tariffs will continue causing substantial damage to world trade.) For at least a week he assured everyone he knew what he was doing and so everyone should just chill. He wasn't budging, he'd never budge. Even as the markets began mushrooming into thermonuclear clouds he told congressional Republicans, "I know what the hell I’m doing." That was Tuesday. He wrote "BE COOL!" in a public post on Wednesday morning, "Everything is going to work out well." Again on Wednesday morning, "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!" he wrote on Truth Social.

By Wednesday afternoon — never mind. He paused his exorbitant, inexplicable tariffs for 90 days, save for a still-exorbitant triple-digit tax on Chinese imports and, as parenthetically noted above, his inexplicable 10% tariff on most of the world's goods. The markets rebounded. Then, boom.

The S&P 500 tumbled 3.5 percent on Thursday, signaling renewed investor concern about the worsening trade war with China and the destabilizing effects of President Trump’s tariff policies.

One day after the stock market had its best day since 2008 ... [it] saw a significant portion of those gains wiped away. (NYT)

Chaos and especially uncertainty over the 90-day possibility of another swan dive by Trump into the roiling waters of bottomlessly stupid tariffs will persist in destruction. As the possibility hovers, market bumps will occur — Thursday's tumble was brief — yet slumps will dominate. Because leading it all is a fool who rejects reality unless Armageddon teeters. Until then, anyone offering the rational advice to at least pause his calamitous swashbuckling is cold-shouldered, for the adviser suffers from the dire flaw of lacking his reality-slashing instincts.

As insightfully spot-on as Applebaum's column is, its concluding sentence give me pause.

If the Republican Party does not return Congress to the role it is meant to play and the courts don’t constrain the president, this cycle of destruction will continue and everyone on the planet will pay the price.

The courts may constrain him; they're already doing so. But Trump is likely to brush aside any disagreeable conclusive court orders right up to the Supreme Court's. And the Republican Party? The controlling party in Congress? It's overpopulated with ignoramuses as foolish as Trump. So we ask, what can offer realistic salvation from the catastrophic effects of Trumpism Unlimited?

There's 2026 — assuming — but that's only the House. And a Republican Senate, which for now looks assured in midterms, would kill any majority Democratic House legislation meant to reign in Trump's capricious madness. Again, assuming, that leaves 2028 — a political parsec away and abundant time for the self-declared, congressionally approved dictator to slosh concrete on his most egregious "accomplishments."

One option is for Democrats to select one powerful voice to promulgate the party's "message," if (and when?) the collective can just arrive at a coherent one. That may be an unclimbable mountain; on the other hand, it's been done before in America's most challenging, threatening times, e.g., 1932 and 2008. Internal pushback against the strategy, however, would come in the formidable shape of a couple dozen wanna-be Democratic presidential nominees construing one selected voice as an elevation to a presumptive presidential candidacy.

Still, what recommends the approach beyond what has already been mentioned — one voice, one message — is that a singular face of the Democratic Party (true enough, the presumed nominee) speaking about the election year of 2028 would besiege the very real danger of Trump's quite conceivable attempt to cancel the quadrennial event — an American tradition as well as Constitutional edict. And Trump loves nothing more than butchering traditions.

One voice addressing the nation with clockwork regularity about the enormous and possibly irreversible harm of post-2028 Trumpism would dramatically reduce if not eliminate the potential of a dictatorially proclaimed "national emergency" as the rationale behind foreclosing on 2028. The relentless presence of a one-message+ challenger would preemptively frame the election in the electorate's mind as an inevitability.

That would seem to be sorely needed, since I'm far alone from the only person hearing Trump's talk of a third term as but a forerunner of Trump's talk of national necessity-cum- automatic coronation.