If there’s one truth Donald Trump seems to have absorbed in his seventy-eight years, it is that there are advantages to lying all the time—foremost among them that no one knows when you’re bluffing and when you actually mean what you say. Imposing crippling tariffs on allies? Selling out Ukraine? Using the government to enact retribution on political enemies? The President may have threatened all these things, may have said—over and over again—that he is, in fact, intent on carrying them out. But even now, after he has opened his second term with a spate of remarkably destabilizing actions to accompany his inflammatory rhetoric, there persists a degree of uncertainty, in part because no one can ever really offer a definitive answer to the question: How far, after all, is he prepared to go?
Trump loves uncertainty so much that you could call it the first principle of his Presidency—a side benefit, as far as he’s concerned, of the mayhem he generates wherever he goes. The President’s supporters often brag about the supposed openness of his Administration. Trump himself is “the most transparent and accessible President in history,” his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, recently said. But of course “volubility” is not a synonym for “transparency.” The confusion that Trump engenders every time he speaks is not a quirk but a defining feature: it serves to aggrandize his power, leaving men and markets hanging on his every twisting word. This is nothing new. Trump has been trolling the world with this approach since he first entered politics. In his début foreign-policy speech, which I attended nine years ago this spring, at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, Trump said, “We have to be unpredictable.”
The difference this time is that Trump is moving much, much faster. When C.E.O.s have complained, understandably, about their inability to run businesses in an atmosphere where the President’s line varies from day to day on whether he will impose market-distorting tariffs, how much the tariffs will be, and when they will come into effect, Trump’s response has been telling. Over the weekend, when Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo asked him to clarify his position, he answered, “You’ll have a lot. But we may go up with some tariffs. It depends. We may go up. I don’t think we’ll go down, but we may go up.” When Bartiromo specifically asked about business leaders’ concerns, he added, “They have plenty of clarity. They just use that. It’s almost like a sound bite. They always say that—‘We want clarity.’ ” It was hardly a surprise, then, that the front page of the Wall Street Journal carried a story on Thursday with the headline “CEO Frustrations with Trump Over Trade Mount—in Private.” “Swinging from one extreme to another is not the right policy approach,” Chevron’s chief executive, Mike Wirth, was quoted as saying. “We really need consistent and durable policy.”
Already, Trump’s endemic lack of clarity has produced a significant amount of real-world backlash. During the past month, amid the near-daily barrage of contradictory information about the President’s trade war, the S. & P. 500 index has fallen more than ten per cent from its February record high, putting it in official market-correction territory. A new Reuters/Ipsos survey, published this week, found that fifty-seven per cent of Americans believed Trump’s economic policies are too “erratic.” The federal government itself has descended into a Trump-induced state of confusion that has no precedent. On Thursday, a federal judge ordered the government to rehire thousands, if not tens of thousands, of workers across six federal agencies who have been caught up in the purges ordered by Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. The fact that it was not immediately clear how many fired employees would be affected underscored the point.
In foreign affairs, meanwhile, the confusion that Trump has created in a few short weeks boggles the geopolitical mind. Consider this exchange on Thursday after Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, arrived for a summit of world leaders in Canada, awkwardly timed amid Trump’s trade war with Ottawa and threats to annex America’s northern neighbor. Rubio posted on X what might have been, in another Administration, considered diplomatic boilerplate: “I’m in Quebec for my first G7 meeting as Secretary of State. Under @POTUS’s leadership, we are going to use forums like the G7 to counter our adversaries and stand by our allies.” The Times’ diplomatic correspondent, Edward Wong, quickly responded with one of those questions, the mere asking of which suggests a state of extreme discombobulation. “Who are the allies and who are the adversaries?” he asked.
No response was forthcoming, though I guess it was an answer of sorts to hear Trump repeat his demand, less than an hour later, that Canada become America’s fifty-first state. (Generously, he said that the Canadians could keep their national anthem.) As for the G-7, Trump has said repeatedly that in his first few weeks back in office that the group should readmit Russia—the adversary whose invasion of Ukraine the other members of the group and the United States, until recently, have been spending hundreds of billions of dollars to counter. No wonder I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a remark I heard from a former senior Pentagon official this week, apropos of Trump’s pivot toward Vladimir Putin. Quoting the late whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg about the Vietnam War, he observed “It wasn’t that we were on the wrong side. We were the wrong side.”
A few weeks ago, I attended a lunch at a Washington think tank, where supporters of Ukraine wondered whether Trump would actually abandon the country for Russia. The session took place a few days after Trump publicly blamed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Ukraine itself—and a few days before Trump’s now-infamous Oval Office confrontation with Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, which resulted in Zelensky getting kicked out of the White House and an abrupt, albeit temporary, cutoff of U.S. military and intelligence assistance to his country.
Even so, it was clear to me that many participants were shocked and dismayed that, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, Trump appeared to be proceeding with what he had long threatened to do. My host noticed this, too—afterward, he quoted a favorite line of his, from the poet William Carlos Williams, about “the rare occurrence of the expected.” How perfect. More elegant than “he told you so,” the line might as well be an epigraph for these Trumpy times.
The will to believe otherwise is a sad truth about human nature that a cynic such as Trump has learned to exploit. Hope may not be a strategy, but it remains a default setting. The President’s doublespeak, his purposeful confusion and endless equivocations about how seriously to take his pronouncements, don’t only serve to keep doors open and to maintain plausible deniability; they provide cover to those looking for a way to support his unsupportable actions. I think part of what seems so drastic and different about Trump 2.0 is not the radicalism of his agenda but that he is moving so quickly to act on it. It has become harder and harder to rationalize his words away as merely the empty posturings of an accidental President. For the first time in the more than eight years that he has dominated our politics, America—and the rest of the world—is coming to terms with the idea that Donald Trump might really mean it. ♦
