Friday File: What’s the Plan for “Oh, Sh*t” Tariff Chaos?

I’m hoping that you missed my presence in your inbox this week, though with all the distractions of the world you can be forgiven for not noticing. I’ve been laid low by another illness, but I’m coming out of it now… and I gotta say, the first half of this week might have been the best time ever to lay on the couch moaning through fever dreams. Really, the whole global economy seems a bit like a fever dream these days.

It seemed to me like Wall Street spent the week going from “we’re sure that President Trump is just negotiating, this will be as bad as it gets with this whole tariff obsession of his, that unpredictable scamp,” to, “holy shit, he means it! He’s going to burn it all down and send us back to the 1930s!”

Is that really what’s going to happen? I have no idea. But we are reminded that this President appears to be much less concerned with what Wall Street thinks than he was eight years ago, when he considered the S&P 500 to be the “report card” of his Presidency. And Wall Street might be picking up on that now, realizing that the focus on the stock market and on what his coverage in the media was like during his first term is no longer any clear check on the President’s decisionmaking.  Congress is not participating in governing in any real way yet, and they’ve generally avoided constructive participation in governing for 20-30 years now, but perhaps that will change if this latest tariff announcement leads to the kind of dramatic economic impact that seems likely. And there are inklings of change on that front, with some Senate Republicans willing to speak out against the tariff plans… but really, we’re still mostly in the “rubber stamp” period for whatever the new President wants to do, particularly since the President has shaped the majority party in his image.  If he really does want to implement this massive tax increase to try to punish countries with which the US has a trade imbalance (including a bunch for whom the trade imbalance actually favors the US), then he might actually do it.

The start to the year was obviously more placid. We spent a few months with pundits essentially just pulling out their rerun material — “It was great to have tax cuts and deregulation …