Donald Trump’s tariffs were at once predictable and shocking.
Predictable, in the sense that Trump had been crystal-clear about wanting across-the-board tariffs during the campaign. Shocking, because they have been implemented in a manner that appears extreme and incompetent even by previous Trump standards. As a result, the world is historically unsettled: One metric of global economic uncertainty shows higher levels of concern than at any point in the 21st century, worse than the 2008 financial crisis and even the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
It turns out that this combination, both predictable and shocking, has become a bit of a theme for the Trump team lately. Consider two other news stories, both of which would be headline-grabbing scandals if it weren’t for the tariffs.
First, Trump has empowered Laura Loomer, a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and self-described “proud Islamophobe,” to purge top government officials. The head of the National Security Agency, his top deputy, and six staffers on the National Security Council have all been fired this week — seemingly at Loomer’s behest.
Second, the Department of Health and Human Services started layoffs on Tuesday that are expected to hit about 10,000 workers. By the end of it, about a quarter of the department’s staff will have been cut amid a worrying measles outbreak and the real risk of a bird flu pandemic.
Trump telegraphed these moves during the campaign — promising to root out the “the deep state” and vowing to let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild” at HHS. But they are shocking, nonetheless. Putting Laura Loomer, of all people, in charge of sensitive national security decisions is nothing short of astonishing. And the sheer scope of the HHS cuts, given the current public health challenges, led my colleague Dylan Scott to describe the situation as an “unfolding catastrophe.”
This, it seems, is the week where we saw the Trump administration’s true and unvarnished face. It’s not that what happened this week was necessarily worse than what came before it, though the tariffs might well prove to be. Rather, it’s that the week revealed the true scope and nature of our Trump problem — with even some of his supporters starting to openly worry that things have gone badly wrong.
Put differently, the last week has shown, in no uncertain terms, that Trump is acting like a mad king.
Trump had done shocking and surprising things pretty much since he entered office on January 20. His blatantly political assault on universities, his decision to send innocent Venezuelans to a Salvadoran gulag, his bizarre crusade to make Canada “the 51st state,” his unlawful efforts to shut down entire federal agencies like USAID — all of this made clear that we were in for an unhinged approach to governance.
But even after all that, some people thought there still might be constraints.
Previous rounds of tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada did not lead Wall Street to panic — partly because they were moderated or walked back after implementation. Many conservatives alarmed by Trump’s policies reassured themselves that his national security team, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz, hailed from the GOP’s more traditional internationalist wing.
Now, there is panic even in these quarters.
Wall Street is horrified; the S&P 500 lost more value this week in absolute terms than it did during the entire 2008 financial crisis. Republican stalwarts like Ben Shapiro and Erick Erickson are warning of dire economic and political consequences if Trump stays the course on tariffs. And the notion that the GOP national security “professionals” might check any of this is no longer credible: This week, Waltz was made to sit in an Oval Office meeting during which Loomer listed off staff members of his to be fired. Even Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said that the tariffs could well be “terrible for America.”
The point is not merely to mock these people or say, “I told you so.” Rather, it’s to illustrate that even those who wore blinders about Trump are starting to see what’s happening.
And what’s happening is this: government by mad king.
The phrase “mad king” has been tossed around a lot in the past few weeks, but I think it’s worth offering a more precise definition. A mad king, in my sense, is not merely a leader who makes bad decisions. Nor is it a literal king who assumed office through heredity rather than, say, free and fair elections.
Instead, it’s one who makes them based on reasons that are out of touch with reality, making sense only in their own mind. And it’s one who is able to do so with little-to-no constraint — thanks, in our case, to the dangerous concentration of power in the executive branch.
The events of this week show conclusively that the president fits the definition.
Trump decided to detonate the global economy because of his decades-old belief, in defiance of a consensus of economists, that tariffs are the key to American prosperity. No one, not even his previously demonstrated concern for the stock market, could stop him from acting on it. A mad king economic policy.
Trump has given partial control over the national security bureaucracy of the world’s greatest military power to a demonstrably unstable conspiracy theorist who once chained herself outside of Twitter’s headquarters. The people who were supposed to keep Trump in bounds were proven powerless, and (in Waltz’s case) outright humiliated. A mad king national security policy.
Trump has outsourced public health decisions to an unqualified nepo baby who has embraced nearly every unfounded health theory out there. He then allowed that man to decimate the ranks of our public health bureaucracy in the midst of at least two serious public health crises. The traditionally credentialed individuals in Trump’s health team, like NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, have proven no constraint at all. A mad king public health policy.
When I say this is “the week that Trump became unglued,” I thus do not mean that this is the first week where we could see that things are bad — or even that we had a mad king problem.
Rather, I mean that this is the week where the full scope of the mad king problem so undeniable that even some of Trump’s allies on the right began to see it. The only question now is how the country — and particularly key members of the Trump coalition — will react.
