The art of the delay
Who knows what “Liberation Day” may eventually signify in the history books: the end of the post-war trading regime, the acceleration of automated manufacturing in America, the most costly bargaining ploy in history, all of the preceding or maybe something else entirely. To Donald Trump himself, the term used to have a more frivolous meaning, if not a more innocent one. One spring morning in the mid-1990s, Mr Trump telephoned a consultant to his company with a gleeful announcement: “Today is Liberation Day.” Later, as the two walked to lunch at the Plaza Hotel, Mr Trump was “gawking at the many jacketless women along the way”, Maggie Haberman reports in her biography of Mr Trump, “Confidence Man”. “To him,” she writes, “the term had a very specific meaning: it was the first warm spring day, when women stopped wearing coats and ‘liberated’ their upper bodies.”
What a confounding fellow this Donald Trump is. He can seem the most ridiculous person in the world at the same moment he seems the most important one in generations. Thin-skinned though Mr Trump is, obsessed with his perceived victimhood, his seemingly granite disregard for accusations of incompetence, dishonesty, corruption, cruelty and hypocrisy has managed up until now to blunt them regardless of their truth, to somehow deny them much political force or even common-sense significance.
Did it outrage you, please you or just make you sort of tired, after all these years of Mr Trump’s immunity to shame, to learn that on April 3rd as markets crashed, the day after he made his tariff threats, the president was at the Trump National Doral Golf Club, promoting a Saudi-backed golf league that benefits him financially? (“I don’t think I’d ever see Doral again,” Mr Trump said back when he was running for president in 2016, as he excoriated President Barack Obama for playing golf in office.) Then he spent the next day, a Friday, golfing at another Trump course in Florida, rather than attending a ceremony at Dover Air Force Base to receive the remains of soldiers killed in an accident in Lithuania.
Democrats ridiculed him, as did some in the press. Then with kingly disregard the White House courted more outrage by issuing a statement on Saturday saying Mr Trump had won his golf match and would move on to the championship round. Maybe he really did not care about the trillions in market value he had vaporised. More likely, he wanted to golf, and he also believed that advertising nonchalance about the turmoil would fortify his hand in trade negotiations to come. The indifference, for Mr Trump, is the point. It is a way he projects strength, the quality he prizes most.
Mr Trump notoriously once claimed, while speaking at a Christian college in Iowa, that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters. In taking the global economy hostage and threatening to throttle it, he has come closer than ever to testing that proposition. His own top aides appeared not to know what his demands were. Some said the president wanted to negotiate, and others that he would not. Characteristically, the president himself said on April 7th that the answer to whether tariffs were permanent or subject to negotiation was: both.
The conflicting messages brought the Trump administration another hail of criticism, to which the response was another public shrug. For Mr Trump, chaos is a source of leverage, a way to keep his options open and his adversaries guessing. So is the question of what he truly believes—whether the issue is abortion, entitlements or even, when it comes trade, to what extent tariffs are his means or his end. While he may be committed to the new 10% baseline tariff, having promised a universal tariff of up to 20% during his campaign, the shambolic “reciprocal” tariffs clearly came into existence, intensifying instability worldwide, in order to be bargained away. “This is not a negotiation,” Peter Navarro, Mr Trump’s senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing, wrote in an article published earlier on April 7th in the Financial Times. “It is a national emergency.” By then Mr Navarro was a step behind; an anonymous White House aide told Politico the piece had been written some time before, “when that was the message”. Two days later, on April 9th, Mr Trump stood down from his bluff entirely by ordering his “PAUSE”.
As he golfed, Mr Trump was doubtless relishing being the focus of a planetary guessing game. He may also have been betting that a stockmarket rebound would greet his eventual pause—and that his opposition would then be undermined by being retroactively judged as overreacting in the days before. This is an old game for him. Besides past tariff threats, the clearest precedent might be his threats during his first term to “totally destroy” North Korea with “fire and fury”, a gambit that led to futile negotiations. Mr Trump is running the same playbook now with Iran.
A deal to end all deals
There is a quality of courage in Mr Trump’s leadership that Democrats have ignored, or mocked, at their peril. But he has probably overplayed his hand. Governments are pounding on the White House door to offer concessions Mr Trump can trumpet as victories. But some will have noticed, as Mexico and Canada have learned (but some American universities and law firms have not), that to make concessions to Mr Trump today is to invite more demands in the future. To threaten countermeasures of their own, as Mexico and Canada have also learned, is to inhibit if not deter him. China, which has studied Mr Trump closely, has said it will “fight to the end” in this trade war. America can cause any other nation more economic pain than it can be caused in return. But Mr Trump’s own threshold for pain is not as high as he pretends. His pose of indifference has empowered him but never made him popular, and self-assurance will look more and more like arrogance in a time of slowing growth and rising inflation. ■