There Was Never a Master Plan

[Celerity]

Trump backed down on tariffs. His supporters think that was the idea all along.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/04/trump-tariff-reality-test/682373/

https://archive.ph/DCEk5



To plainly state what is going on right now would make you sound delusional. The president of the United States has essentially been holding the global financial system hostage. He’s done so by threatening massive tariffs on nearly 100 countries and territories, including one that is unpopulated. These tariffs, which were set to go into effect today but have now been put on a 90-day pause for every country except for China, which will see a 125 percent tax on exports, seem to have been calculated using a blanket formula that some economists and trade experts find almost nonsensical. (Many have speculated that the math was done by a chatbot.) The administration’s supporters do not have a coherent message about why any of this is happening; before President Donald Trump announced the pause, they’d argued simultaneously that the tariffs were a temporary negotiating tactic but also that they might be durable enough to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States.

As the world braced for Trump’s tariffs to go into effect, stocks plummeted, wiping out trillions of dollars in value. The price of government bonds also dropped precipitously, triggering genuine fear of a dangerous debt crisis. Wall Street analysts likened the tariffs to a U.S. tax increase of roughly $660 billion; one economist

Markets are crashing because President Trump has issued punishing sanctions against the American people.

— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers.bsky.social) 2025-04-04T22:58:38.938Z" target="_blank">called it a set of “punishing sanctions against the American people.” The situation is volatile: 10 percent universal tariffs are still in place, inflation remains a concern, America is

Unless I'm misunderstanding Trump's post, we still have 10 percent across the board tariffs and are in the midst of a trade war with China.

That's not a good scenario for the US economy. Why is everyone acting like Trump just turned into Adam Smith?

— Zack Beauchamp (@zackbeauchamp.bsky.social) 2025-04-09T17:49:55.705Z" target="_blank">still in a trade war with China, and it’s not at all clear that Trump will not just repeat this act as we approach the 90-day deadline.

For many, the second Trump administration has felt like a constant tearing of the fabric of our reality. The country is facing a deadly measles outbreak after Congress confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man with a profound skepticism of modern medicine, to run the Department of Health and Human Services. For a time, the businessman Elon Musk seemed to be acting as a shadow president, and he’s participated in the gutting of the federal government (when he’s not streaming himself playing video games on social media). ICE has apprehended visa-holding students off the street—sometimes for no clear reason at all.

While many of these acts have been ignored or rationalized by the president’s supporters, the tariffs may be different. Can the culture war—largely powered by memes, ideologies, vibes, and extremely online radicalization—survive the harsh reality of a trade war? The pause is only temporary; if Trump does not relent, he might still cause a financial meltdown. Trump has also destroyed a lot of trust—just the possibility of future tariffs may cause enough uncertainty to hurt businesses and investors. This would be the ultimate stress test of people’s otherwise unshakable devotion to the president—a final gantlet for this MAGA delusion.

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