This week’s cover

What a week. Again. Donald Trump’s announcement on April 2nd of “reciprocal” tariffs on American imports (they are actually no such thing), was an act of economic vandalism that caused markets to plummet around the world, as we explained in our previous issue. With the tariffs due to take effect on April 9th, we could be pretty sure what was going to be on our cover this week. But we also knew there was a risk that, as he has done before, Mr Trump would change his mind. Had he called things off over the weekend, we had other options lined up as potential cover stories.

But he didn’t, and markets continued their slide on Monday and Tuesday. So we looked for ways to depict this Trump-induced meltdown. One dramatic image was a giant red arrow pointing downwards; having Mr Trump nonchalantly sitting on it conveyed his apparent insouciance about the impact of his policy.

But we preferred another idea: a red tie tumbling floorwards in jagged steps. Mr Trump’s tie, like his hairstyle, is immediately recognisable. The meaning was clear—so clear that it worked even without a subtitle to spell things out. The tie had to be wide as well as red. In the Trump Cinematic Universe, thin ties are associated with another MAGA superhero, Stephen Miller, one of Mr Trump’s closest advisers. (Steve Bannon’s distinctive costume, meanwhile, involves wearing two collared shirts on top of each other.) It seemed that we had our cover.

But then, on the afternoon of April 9th, just hours after his tariffs had kicked in, Mr Trump announced an abrupt U-turn. Most of the tariffs would be paused for 90 days. Markets instantly shot up.

Could we use a modified version of the red-tie design? Pointing up at the end, it would now have a different meaning: that the markets are at the mercy of one man’s whims. Showing a spinning “Bull of Wall Street” (which is actually round the corner, in Bowling Green park) was another way to depict this.

But neither quite captured what is going on—because ultimately this is, and always has been, about Mr Trump, who relishes being the focus of planetary attention. With his “Liberation Day” tariff announcement, he used the single most powerful machine in human history—America’s economy—to put himself in the global spotlight. He fiddled with its controls; the world held its breath; and then he changed his mind.

We knew we needed to put Mr Trump himself on the cover. A blurry, spinning Trump was not quite right, though: his actions put the world in a spin, while he calmly went golfing (and we have already portrayed him smashing the global economy with his club). We preferred the collage of Trumpy expressions, for several reasons. It is a graphical depiction of Trumpian chaos. And it captures both Mr Trump’s mercurial character and the incoherence of his multiple policy positions—are his tariffs a way to raise revenue, an effort to persuade companies to relocate to America or a temporary negotiating tactic to win concessions in other areas? All three, says Mr Trump, even though these objectives are mutually contradictory.

The darkest scenarios for the world economy that had spooked investors are now unlikely. But the scale of the shock to global trade set off by Mr Trump is still, even now, unlike anything before it. He has undermined America’s stable trading relations, built up over decades, through whimsical and arbitrary policymaking, and replaced the old certainties that underpinned the world economy with chaos and confusion. It will take a very long time to rebuild what has been lost.