Sometimes, people are just morons.
Look at how Bessent had to sneak in and try and get the tariffs paused: https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-tariff-pause-navar...
There's no coordinated strategy there.
The people with real power voted him in to lower taxes, and in return he is nuking the economy, neutering the Pentagon, trashing public health, isolating the US from tourists and skilled immigrants, walking public education back at least a century, killing the next generation of R&D, murdering rational climate policy with a coal-powered chainsaw, and handing government software and data to enemy powers.
The entire machinery of governance - official and public, as well as off-the-record "do as I say and I'll fund your campaign" private - has folded like tissue paper.
The only pushback is from the judiciary, and their orders are as likely to be ignored as implemented. And parts of academia.
It's astonishing.
How is that any different from what has been going on in the past 40 years... Biden kept almost all of Trump's tariffs and other policies. And Trump kept a lot of Biden's policies and added on to them.
Previous presidents did things because they genuinely believed that what they were doing was the right thing for America based on their deeply-held beliefs.
Trump has no beliefs. He does not act from rational thought. He does whatever makes him feel good in the immediate moment, without regard to the consequences or even his own prior words and deeds.
Bush, Obama, and Biden expressed coherent, reasoned ideologies and plans of action, and as presidents, acted consistently with their own words and deeds. I may have disagreed with Bush's policies, but I know that he actually believed that what he was doing was what he thought was best for America based on his ideological beliefs, because he was able to articulate why. (And those ideological beliefs didn't change on a whim and weren't centered around what was best for him personally.)
Trump doesn't issue coherent thoughts. He doesn't use reason. He can't explain why he does why he does because he doesn't act based on reason; he just goes base of whatever feels good in the second it's flashing through his brain. At the start of the month, he changed his mind on tariffs literally dozens of times in a few hours; so quickly and so frequently that even his own White House didn't know what the tariff policy was for several days. The Secretary of Treasury even said that the best place to find out what our tariff policy was is the President's twitter account (never mind that Congress determines tariffs, not the president).
Everybody is great until they're the worst ever. If someone disagrees with him for whatever reason, they're losers and traitors and maybe should go to jail. Every member of his first administration refused to come back the second time around, so he calls them all losers and traitors. He appointed Powell to the Federal Reserve chair, and now he's calling him Biden's puppet for not doing the stupid thing Trump is demanding that he do to bail him out of the other stupid thing Trump is doing. He appointed two of the justices to the SCOTUS and hundreds of federal judges and now he's calling them "out of control" because they won't just roll over and okay the unlawful things he's doing.
We’re already way, way beyond levels that effectively freeze all trade between the two countries.
Which, if we’re to believe the sycophants, is just the price to pay to onshore manufacturing.