The New Yorker:

“Tariff Man” is gonna tariff—and other lessons from the predictably unpredictable President’s return to power.

By Susan B. Glasser

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.”

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