Donald Trump loves mess

The strategy behind Liberation Day

Greetings from Read Max HQ! Today’s newsletter is about the Liberation Day tariffs and Donald Trump’s approach to the world.

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It’s been a rollercoaster week since Liberation Day, as the markets (stock, bond, punditry) digest President Trump’s new trade policy of “Trade War on Everyone, Probably.” What was initially presented by the administration and its supporters as a firm, non-negotiable commitment to across-the-board tariffs despite the likely recessionary consequences--a tough-love, take-your-medicine approach that was supposed to favor “Main Street” over “Wall Street” and reverse the email-driven feminization of American men--has become, several twists and turns and sell-offs and market rallies later, a highly negotiable commitment to tariffs, a new position brought about by bond-market scaries and a Maria Bartiromo interview with JPMorgan Chase C.E.O. Jamie Dimon and quickly reframed by the administration as a masterclass in the Art of the Deal.

But what “deal,” exactly? What goals is the Trump administration really trying to accomplish? As Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal wrote in the Odd Lots newsletter last week, the point of these tariffs--the aims, the strategy, the core idea--was continuously lost in a strange chorus of contradictory explanations and rationalizations. Here’s Tracy:

As Paul Donovan over at UBS notes, all of this intense volatility underscores a serious problem: “Erratic policymaking means stories of dramatic shifts in policy are credible. The move toward Schlesinger’s ‘imperial presidency’ model means policy shifts depend on the whims of one person. These make fake news plausible, creating market volatility.”

And here is the most important difference with 2008. Back then, we knew policymakers were working together to make stocks go up. They wanted to stop the bleed. In 2025, this is far from clear. The Trump administration has spoken multiple times about the need for “pain” or “medicine” to achieve a reordering of global trade and remake America. There’s talk of crashing stocks to reduce bond yields and the cost of refinancing the US deficit. There’s insinuation that the crash could redistribute wealth by making stocks more affordable for those who have been locked out of expensive markets. And when there are reports of a potential retreat from tariffs — or at least a delay — the Trump administration has moved very fast to squash them.

And Joe:

One day it’s about tariffs raising revenue to reduce the deficit. Another day it’s about tariffs raising revenue to counteract the tax cuts. If you take last week’s Rose Garden presentation literally, then the tariffs are about how every basically every country in the world has been engaged in unfair trade practices, and we need to counteract them. At other times, the story is that the centrality and strength of the dollar has made US industry uncompetitive. And yet another thing you hear is that it’s an existential danger for the US to be so reliant on China for manufactured goods, especially in the realms of advanced technology (like electronics, batteries, semiconductors and so forth).

These are all things you hear. Sometimes you hear them all in the span of a day! And so, in addition to the direct costs imposed by such a radical change in policy, it’s hard to imagine where things will end up, simply because nobody knows what the goal is.

Just take yesterday for example. In the afternoon Peter Navarro published an op-ed in the Financial Times that specifically said the words “This is not a negotiation.” And then, a few hours later there was talk of deals and negotiation, which helps explain why the markets have turned around so sharply today.

This is not, of course, a new experience--it’s been extremely common throughout both Trump presidencies for the actions of the executive branch to lack clear ideological or practical explanation (or, alternately, to suffer under the weight of too many non-compatible explanations, offered freely arbitrarily). And it’s also extremely common, even this late in the game, for people to play a kind of “parlor game” of proposing or divining a Sophisticated Secret Strategy that the administration is pursuing. The “Art of the Deal” idea deployed this week by Trump spokespeople and boosters is the version of the Secret Strategy theory most common among Trump supporters and ideologues: The irrational, self-sabotaging chaos with which Trump approaches his job is part of a “madman act” meant to set an aggressive tone in negotiations. “This was brilliantly executed,” Bill Ackman tweeted. “Textbook, Art of the Deal.”

The detractors’ version of the Secret Strategy idea is that the administration was engaged in deliberate market manipulation from which Trump and cronies handsomely profited--an idea that’s been floated by both anonymous finance accounts and elected Democrats like Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren, among others:

But as attractive as parlor games are, it’s hard for me to put much stock in the idea of Trump having a grand Secret Strategy. From the outside, it’s hard to find any evidence that Trump or anyone in his administration is a long-term thinker or master strategist. The idea that the irrationality of the tariffs was intended as a rational stage one of negotiations is obviously spin. And the idea that the tariffs were from the start a stock-market con so someone could clean up on options trading beggars belief. Surely there are less messy ways to make a quick buck when you’re in the White House?

But I do think that if you take the two ideas together they point toward a truth about Trump’s approach. I just wouldn’t call it a Secret Strategy, precisely. My sense is that Trump’s bullheaded lunacy, the confusion and disorder he seems to intentionally cultivate, emerge not from some coherent theory of negotiation or in service of some Ocean’s Eleven-style long con, but from an approach to the world rooted in well-developed instinct, in which chaos and disorder are seen not as strictly negative outcomes but as opportunities for gain. Trumpian confusion is a a strategy whose only purpose is to create havoc and disorder from which Trump might personally (politically, financially) benefit. Declare tariffs, wait for an opportunity to open up, and take your chance. Sow chaos; reap profit.

Trump is, of course, not the only person for whom this move has been highly effective. Back in 2022 I reviewed for BookForum an interesting book called Speculative Communities, by the sociologist Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, which argues that the Trumpian approach--chaotic, short-termist, risk-on--reflects the dominant logic of the era. Komporozos-Athanasiou describes this as the logic of the speculator, and differentiates it from the logic of the rational investor or manager.¹ The example I used in my review was Elon Musk, at the time in the midst of the bizarre, drawn-out saga through which he purchased Twitter²:

Perhaps Musk had no scheme in mind for his initial purchase, no specific plan for owning Twitter, and no ultimate goal he was striving to achieve. Over the last decade, as the Tesla cofounder has become the most prominent and widely worshipped CEO in the country, he has consistently defied stereotypes of businessmen and [managers] as rational, prudent, and deliberate; instead he’s become a specialist in broken promises, half-baked plans, and bizarre public performances. And yet his net worth has soared to $255 billion. If “winging it” has worked for him so far, why start making plans now? Maybe he is simply making a mess, to see what might come out of it—what kinds of pressure he could bring to bear on Twitter, and what kinds of business, cultural, and political opportunities might follow.

Musk, according to this line of thinking, is engaging in what the University College London sociologist Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou calls, in his intriguing new book Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World, “speculative politics”: “sowing chaos to reap power.” He hasn’t been pursuing a clear program, laid out from the beginning in the manner of a mergers-and-acquisitions banker, but embracing confusion and volatility and changing circumstances in the manner of a financial speculator. For Komporozos-Athanasiou, this logic--of financial speculation, of engaging, embracing, and even encouraging volatility in the hopes of gain--is the defining logic of our time, a consequence of increasing unpredictability and precarity. “If the only certainty in our present is that the future is uncertain, then shorting and hedging the unknowable becomes the zeitgeist of contemporary financialized societies,” he writes.

I’ve written a lot in the past about how “speculative politics” and the Muskian mode are enabled and reinforced by social media, with its volatile swings in sentiment and its market-like structures. But it’s also easy to overstate the transformative importance of social media, and the case of Trump is particularly interesting to me for the way it demonstrates continuities between the present regime and what preceded it: Trump didn’t learn to embrace chaos from Twitter; he learned it from his time on reality television, and even before that from his time as a character in the tabloid press. (As any self-respecting reality TV star will tell you, the best way to establish your singular importance is to constantly cultivate “drama,” or social volatility.) As much as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok may have exacerbated the tendency toward self-interested irrationality, the basic Trumpian “move” pre-exists those platforms, and wouldn’t be neutralized just by removing them.

But what would neutralize the “madman act”? Over the last ten years or so, “acting like a crazy person for fun, profit, and political power” has been a remarkably consistent play. The only downside risk, as far as anyone can tell, is short-term embarrassment--a temporary setback that can be easily overcome by continuing to act crazy until it works again. Trump’s Liberation Day walk-back may appear humiliating, and his popularity may be plummeting, but it’s hard to imagine it’ll change his approach.

1. You don’t necessarily have to buy into Komporozos-Athanasiou’s framework to see or understand the dynamic. In some ways Nate Silver’s most recent book On the Edge, in which he traces the outlines of a “community” of people with an appetite for risk and volatility he calls “The River,” is dancing around a similar idea.

2. The saga of Musk’s purchase of Twitter, like the saga of Liberation Day thus far, seemed agonizingly stupid and irrational, and contained over its course any number of walk-backs, reversals, and mutually incompatible explanations or justifications. And, needless to say, it’s been extremely beneficial to Elon Musk personally, and in general made the rest of the world much worse off.