Trump’s No Good, Very Bad Week

This week hasn’t been one for the history books. A hotly anticipated call between President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, failed to usher in any kind of concrete plan for peace in Ukraine; a limited ceasefire on infrastructure was immediately undermined by, well, attacks on infrastructure. The Israel–Gaza ceasefire collapsed, apparently with the consent of the U.S.; Benjamin Netanyahu declared that any further ceasefire negotiations would occur “under fire,” not an encouraging prospect. The U.S. lobbed a bunch of ordnance at the Houthis in Yemen, at great cost, and made nasty sounds in the direction of Iran. At home, the Fed cut its forecast for economic growth in the next quarter. (Some cold comfort: anemic growth would offset the possible inflationary effects of the Trump tariffs.) Meanwhile, a host of court injunctions threaten executive actions taken in Trump’s energetic first 60 days; even if not upheld, they blunt the administration’s momentum. 

It’s one week; it could just be a blip. A worried mind, though, might see the variety of ills that could befall the administration’s program. If the American people had wanted more reckless, expensive, and warlike foreign policy, they could have voted for the Democrats; fighting Iran on behalf of the Israelis or single-handedly clearing the Red Sea on behalf of the Europeans, Saudis, and Chinese seem to be orthogonal to this administration’s stated purposes. Nor has the rollout of tariffs been entirely happy. While the country has seen a bipartisan movement toward greater trade protectionism and industrial policy, the real and perceived caprices of the tariff implementation—and, more importantly, the failure of the administration to articulate a single, coherent message about what the tariffs are actually supposed to do—have burned much of this natural goodwill. Would the markets still be spiraling if punitive tariffs and protective tariffs had been clearly delineated, and the latter introduced on a longer, more predictable timescale? I somehow doubt it. While DOGE’s much-trumpeted reorganization of the executive has a broad appeal for now, is mere war on the administrative state without substantive policy goals in mind a political winner outside the rarefied parlors of the Federalist Society? Unclear; I would bet that people don’t care that much about government efficiency unless the government is visibly pursuing things they want done. Nor is wading into campus culture war an obvious winner.

The unhappy state of Capitol Hill is unlikely to bring any succor. The tenuous Republican majorities in each chamber are split between the unprincipled, business-as-usual types who will happily pass continuing resolutions until the country is bankrupted and the wild-eyed fantasists who think cutting Medicaid is politically viable. (It’s not.) It is doubtful that Trump’s better instincts are going to be fed by this brigade of cretins and time-servers. For better or worse, the White House will be generating the political program for the foreseeable future, particularly if the midterms go sideways in that old, familiar way.

While there are factions in the Republican coalition who would be happy to see the administration get bogged down in its more novel aspects and slip into the dogmata of yesteryear—neoconservatism, reform conservatism, neo-Reaganism, whatever—nobody actually voted for that. And such a trajectory would have unhappy parallels. As this columnist wrote on November 6, “The annals of Trump’s first term suggest that the incoming administration will show an ample talent for damaging itself; further, the conventional wisdom holds that the economy is due for a correction sometime in the next four years. I do not think it is too soon to say that, come 2028, the de-Harrised Democrats will be in the catbird seat.” (Of course, as of press time, it is far from clear that the Democrats have learned their lessons, but one of the morals of the post-Bush GOP is that, eventually, the major political parties will do what it takes to win elections.) 

Of course, we are still in the early days of the administration. There are reasons to be hopeful on some fronts—in particular, I still believe the conditions of the Ukraine war favor a ceasefire sooner rather than later—but if things begin to hiccup and cough, it is likely to be in a way that looks very familiar to the news-watchers of the week of March 16.