Your smartphone’s battery is holding less of a charge these days and you’re thinking about buying a new iPhone. How much will it cost if you buy one next week? How about if you wait until next month? President Donald Trump’s tariff roller coaster has made this once simple question exponentially harder to answer. Over the last two weeks, he has ratcheted up massive tariffs on Chinese exports, suddenly declared electronics like laptops and smartphones exempt, then just as swiftly hinted that the reprieve may or may not be short-lived.
The whipsawing on how much anything made outside the U.S. costs is leaving businesses and consumers alike confused. And unlike many of his second-term policies, it’s much harder to spin this confusion as intentional on Trump’s part.
Unlike many of his second-term policies, it’s much harder to spin this confusion as intentional on Trump’s part.
Trump has given no clear explanation for precisely what he hopes his tariffs will achieve beyond other countries’ treating the U.S. with more respect. The possibility that this supposed lack of respect might have more to do with him than with America seems not to have crossed his mind.In part, the lack of clarity reflects competing voices within the administration, who are pursuing their own sub-goals under Trump’s broader demand for tariffs. But the lack of an overall strategy means that neither Trump nor his team have specified any revenue targets or even coherent arguments for what a win looks like. Countries have begun sending negotiators to work out new trade deals after Trump’s 90-day pause on the most punishing of the tariffs, but there’s no certainty that those deals will be upheld in the long run — or whether they’ll even matter when the country’s import duties are based solely on the president’s whims.
It’s not as though tariffs are the only policy of Trump’s for which there’s little clarity for those most heavily affected. But one could argue that with some of those policies, the cloud of uncertainty is part of the point. The various shifts and escalations in Trump’s immigration crackdown have frustrated federal judges and left Justice Department lawyers struggling to answer basic questions in court. But the White House likely sees this unpredictability as both spreading fear among undocumented immigrants, encouraging their so-called self-deportation, and deterring for migrants who might otherwise cross the border.
With the repeated tariff rollouts (and rollbacks), there’s no way to find any sort of method to the madness. The same could be said for the broader conservative attacks on DEI initiatives and LGBTQ rights in schools. Leaving wiggle room for interpretation in these cases can often give a cover of plausible deniability against claims of outright discrimination. States like Florida have enacted vaguely worded laws and initiatives on that front teachers and administrators have defaulted towards overcompliance and self-censorship.The through line between Trump’s tariff obsession and his more culture war-focused policies is that they’re often based more on emotional impulses than reasoned policymaking. For decades, even before running for president, he has demanded wide-ranging tariffs over a slew of grievances he has long held about supposed unfairness in global trade. He has railed against the unfairness of other countries’ economic policies as taking advantage of America, even as the U.S. has dominated global trade. There’s been little success in trying to explain to him that the simple look at trade imbalances on goods that he prefers misses America’s enormous advantage in services and intellectual properties. Trump simply has decided that tariffs are a necessity, and it’s up to everyone around him to figure out what that means. It can be tempting to dismiss the stumbles and imprecision on display from the White House as a kind of controlled chaos. The biggest stretch one could make in most instances is that there’s a version of “madman theory” at work, in which the goal is to deliberately keep opponents guessing about what you might do next. With the repeated tariff rollouts (and rollbacks), there’s no way to find any sort of method to the madness. We must conclude, then, that the indecision about what will be tariffed and at what rate and for what reason is a bug, not a feature. And despite the faith other parts of the Trump administration place in coding, there’s nothing to indicate that anyone tried debugging his tariff plan in beta before launching it to catastrophic effect.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
