Keep ’Em Guessing

Eighty percent of the challenge in producing a daily newsletter is finding a topic.

Identify a subject that moves you and the words will flow naturally. Fail to do so and you’re left squeezing blood from a stone. Writing is easy, inspiration is hard.

Political columnists take inspiration from the daily news cycle, which one might assume has made the job less burdensome lately. This is, after all, a moment in which big things are happening domestically and abroad. The morning hunt for a topic should be a turkey shoot.

It isn’t. It’s gotten more difficult since January 20. Let me explain.

This morning, I pinged my editor with a suggestion. How about something on the White House’s new tariffs on Canada and Mexico, I asked? The president slapping a gigantic, regressive, wholly unnecessary tax on Americans seems worth a few paragraphs.

You’d better not, he told me. Yesterday, Trump’s commerce secretary hinted that the tariffs, which took effect early Tuesday morning, might be rolled back by Wednesday afternoon. Trump is “thinking about a plan,” Howard Lutnick reiterated on Wednesday morning, and would reach a decision in hours. There’s no sense in me toiling all day over a newsletter about tariffs that might be outdated by my 5 p.m. deadline.

How about something on Ukraine instead, he suggested? There’s always more to say about Trump selling out liberal Europe to fascist Russia.

I’d better not, I told him, as that’s likely to be overtaken by events too. Yesterday, it looked like the minerals agreement between the U.S. and Ukraine was back on track, but news swirled last night that Trump now wants a “bigger, better deal” than the current terms allow. Then, on Wednesday morning, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz tossed another condition into the mix when he announced that the United States will suspend weapons shipments and intelligence-sharing with the Ukrainians until they agree to peace talks with Russia. 

Possible outcomes today range from the original minerals deal being signed to a revised deal being signed to nothing being signed and a new rift opening between Washington and Kyiv. It’s not even clear if Waltz’s threat about withholding intelligence from Ukraine is true or merely half-true. Anything I write is likely to be obsolete by 5.

And that’s how the topic for this newsletter revealed itself. 

After four years and six weeks of being boiled, we’re all resigned to the fact that uncertainty under Trump will be higher than it is under other presidents. But let’s pause today to appreciate the insanity of a moment in which the fate of the world’s biggest economy and the fate of liberalism’s proxy war with authoritarianism in Ukraine have both somehow been left to the devices of a histrionic narcissist whose moods seem to swing dramatically hour to hour. 

This is no way to run a railroad, never mind a planet.

Guesswork.

Trump’s politics of uncertainty isn’t just a matter of “vibes.” There are numbers that document it.

The will-we-or-won’t-we tariff kabuki involving two of our three biggest trading partners has sent the U.S. Trade Policy Uncertainty Index soaring. The average daily degree of uncertainty around trade during Trump’s first term was the highest of any president since 1960, per Dispatch columnist Scott Lincicome, and the index for February 2025 already dwarfs any number recorded during those four years.

A study flagged by Lincicome found that uncertainty in Trump’s first term reduced aggregate investment by U.S. businesses by somewhere between $23 billion and $47 billion in 2018 alone. The pool is open on how much more this year’s vacillations will end up costing.

But trade uncertainty isn’t the only driver of wider economic uncertainty. No one knows which federal agency is next to be targeted for cuts by DOGE or how aggressive those cuts will be. Congressional Republicans are considering a tax bill in which steep cuts to Medicaid may or may not be on the table. Kooky gimmicks like creating a U.S. sovereign wealth fund and a federal cryptocurrency reserve are regularly announced with no sense of what they’ll look like in practice or how serious Trump is about them.

According to one index, less than two months into Trump 2.0., uncertainty about U.S. economic policy already exceeds post-9/11 levels and is on its way up toward the worst of the pandemic recession.

Some uncertainty in policymaking is unavoidable, of course. There was plenty, for instance, around what Joe Biden would do in Afghanistan. Would he follow through on the withdrawal framework Trump left for him, ending a 20-year war that most Americans wanted out of but placing the stability of the Afghan government at risk? Or would he recommit to a U.S. occupation, demonstrating American resolve to see the Taliban defeated but igniting a new round of fighting?

The more difficult a strategic question is, the greater the uncertainty around the answer will be. What’s distinctive about Trump is the degree to which policy uncertainty is being driven by non-strategic factors—to the point that his motives are inscrutable even to experts.

Why are we waging a trade war on Canada and Mexico? Why has that war turned out to be more aggressive than the one we’re waging on China? Why is the U.S. allying itself with Russia against Ukraine and Europe, going so far as to resist admitting that Moscow started the war? Do we want Ukraine to win and supply us with minerals—or do we want it to lose and prove that Russian imperialism is superior to Euro-liberalism?

Who are our allies? Who are our enemies? What is America getting from these policy shifts? What’s the strategic endgame?

Why is there so little clarity about all of this?

These are tectonic, epoch-defining realignments, the stuff of which new world orders are made, yet they’re being driven by the president instead of by Congress and for reasons whose logic often seems to evade Trump’s own supporters. Look no further than how their attitude toward protectionism changes as their hero’s political needs require: If tariffs benefit America economically, how can they find it praiseworthy when Trump imposes tariffs and when he lifts them?

Uncertainty in policymaking is inevitable. Uncertainty in policymaking based on whether an ally is wearing a suit to a meeting is not. That’s the Trump difference, and that’s an entirely new universe of risk. In a government of rule by presidential whim, one can’t even make educated guesses about where policy might go. Today it’s “pointless trade war on Canada,” tomorrow it’s “we should own Gaza.”

And that’s why, apart from a few straightforward issues like immigration, appraisals of his agenda are so often drawn into psychoanalysis and palace intrigue. You can’t make sense of “we should own Gaza” using logic. To explain it, you need to look elsewhere.

Volatility.

I suspect Trump relishes the uncertainty he causes for the same reason any narcissist would. From powerful nations to major corporations to the humble American homeowner, no one can make plans with any confidence until hearing from him. The further the United States veers into autocracy, the more his personal hourly whims dictate how the world behaves. The rich and powerful have gone out of their way to show him that they know it, too.

Last week, he had a brief argument with a visiting dignitary on television; days later, plans for a continent-wide European nuclear deterrent were already afoot. It used to be said that “when America sneezes, the world catches a cold,” but now it’s Trump’s personal sniffles that determine that. To an ego like his, the thought of it must be intoxicating.

Not surprisingly, his sense of “greatness” also skews away from serious long-term strategic planning that won’t bear fruit until after he’s gone and toward audacious stunts for which he can claim immediate credit. His trade war on Canada is inexplicable as economic policy, for instance, but it communicates his supreme faith in tariffs in a sensational way. And his insulting fantasy that it might lead Canada to acquiesce in becoming the 51^st state is terrible for diplomatic relations but unbeatable as a vacant gesture of nationalist grandiosity.

“Look at this deal. Look at this press release. Look at this building,” is how a Dispatch colleague summarized Trump’s approach to politics, remembering how the president gloated over bringing a new Foxconn plant to Wisconsin in 2017 and how that turned out. The important thing is to win the daily news cycle by dazzling Americans with some astonishing new promise and not to worry too much about following through, knowing that they’re unlikely to hold him to it.

It’s all part of the show.

That’s probably where his designs on turning Gaza into a resort came from. His proposal might earn the United States new enemies and provide political cover for Russian and Chinese expansionism, but one must admit that it’s a hell of a press release. It’s bold! It dares to offer a solution to the endless Israeli-Palestinian conflict that no one else has been dumb enough—er, brave enough, I mean—to offer. He’s thinking big thoughts no one else would have the nerve to think, whatever that might mean for our long-term national credibility. 

There’s something distinctly adolescent to Trump’s form of politics, as others have noted. Volatile, self-absorbed, melodramatic, consumed with status: Like an attention-seeking teenager, he’s the main character in whatever conflict he’s embroiled in. Go figure then that he’s behaving more unpredictably in his second term, when there are far fewer adults around to restrain him, than he did in his first. As a wise man once said, Trump 2.0 is what you get when you take Trump 1.0 and subtract nearly every element of accountability.

There are still a few adults around him, though. And that, ironically, might be contributing to the freakish degree of uncertainty in his policies.

His daily “mood swings” over Ukraine might be less a matter of his moods shifting than the ebb and flow of his more hawkish advisers prevailing upon him. It’s easy to imagine Trump telling Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz that he wants to cut off Ukraine entirely, only to have them cook up the minerals deal to reassure him that he’d be gaining some sort of material benefit by continuing to support Kyiv. There isn’t much strategic logic in that, but there doesn’t need to be; all there needs to be is some sense for Trump that he’s “winning.” Maybe the volatility over Ukraine policy this past month is a simple matter of him continuously reassessing whether backstabbing the Ukrainians or taking the deal is a bigger “win.”

His vacillations on tariffs for Canada and Mexico are also being opposed by adults—specifically investors. Stocks tanked when he first announced the policy last month, causing him to backpedal and postpone the tariffs. They tanked again this week when he declared that the policy would finally take effect on Tuesday. His fragile political ego is bound up in pride over the strength of the economy during his first term; if the selloff this week causes him enough embarrassment, he might relent yet again to protect that ego. In fact, to some degree, he already has.

A teenager prone to misbehaving might, or might not, behave better after adults step in to punish him. That’s a form of uncertainty in itself.

Rule by whim.

Conservatives dislike volatility in policymaking as a matter of temperament, but also as a matter of economic sense.

The state can’t allocate resources as efficiently as private enterprise, but what it can do is strive to maintain a stable regulatory framework. A business that’s confident that the rules won’t suddenly change is a business that’s willing to make expensive plans and to hire accordingly. The more information markets have, the more efficient they’ll be.

If you believe that, one of the worst things one could do for growth would be to hand over that regulatory framework to a teenager with a personality disorder, a thin grasp of economics, and something to prove. No one knows what he’ll do. His moods are the opposite of reliable information. He might change the rules repeatedly, sometimes multiple times a day, and for no better reason other than some dim sense that trade imbalances are morally wrong.

As an approach to policy, “keep ‘em guessing” is lunacy.

And as you move beyond economic markets, it becomes dangerous lunacy. The allocation of geopolitical power across the planet has also functioned relatively efficiently since 1945: Under the “rules-based” international order, nations that proposed to threaten American allies in Europe or the Far East could predict with a strong degree of certainty that immense costs would be imposed on them if they did so. Unsurprisingly, there haven’t been many serious threats.

That certainty is now gone. We might defend a NATO ally if it’s attacked by Russia, or we might not. We might support South Korea against a North Korean invasion, or we might not. Trump apologists like to imagine that his unpredictability deters foreign aggression, but the more he undermines the transatlantic alliance, the less sense that makes. For the first time in 80 years, there now exists a chance—and a pretty good one—that menacing an American ally will draw no reprisal. If you’re one of the world’s bad guys, the current uncertainty from the U.S. is a rare opportunity to strike that might evaporate in 2029.

They now have to guess what Trump will do. Maybe they’ll guess right. Maybe they won’t. Another term for guesswork in this context is “catastrophic miscalculation.”

All of the above explains why major policy changes should flow from Congress, of course. The legislature moves slowly by design; it’s functionally incapable of acting on a whim. If it undertakes to change the rules, it will do so with more consideration for all affected stakeholders than a surly adolescent on a power trip will. And when it does change them, its changes will take the form of enduring statutory law, not ephemeral executive orders that tend to evaporate the moment the other party regains the presidency.

There’s another reason conservatives should blanch at Trump’s rule by whim, though. It’s plainly conditioning Americans to expect the president, not Congress, to set major policy.

More than they already expect it, I mean. The legislature ceding power to the executive didn’t start with Trump, lord knows. But he’s taking that phenomenon to new places: Because he’s the least ideological president of my lifetime, because he enjoys a cult of personality unlike any of his predecessors, and because he plainly regards the constitutional order as an imposition rather than a point of civic pride, whims and expectations of obedience are really all he has.

So when he announces new tariffs and heralds the golden age of prosperity they’re about to usher in, and then announces that the country targeted by those tariffs has made some token concession that’s convinced him to postpone them, his fans can cheer the first announcement as economic genius and the second as negotiating genius without seeing a contradiction. The president had an idea and then he had another idea, and that’s just how American government is supposed to work.

It is now, anyway. It wasn’t always. But I see from the clock that it’s almost 5 p.m., and I’ve been waiting all day to check the news and find out which side we’re on in Ukraine now and whether there’s a trade war still happening in North America, and to what extent. Great dramas are always suspenseful. I’m on the edge of my seat.