Very important, and in normal times, anything that looks like chaos is poison.
No doubt you have noticed that the Establishment–including those not inclined to absolutely despise Trump and wish that he would keel over with a heart attack every moment of the day–have been screaming like their hair is on fire.
Most of those people would be upset or even furious no matter what Trump did, but there is a subset of people–CEOs, stock market types, and even Realpolitik foreign policy types who might be inclined to give Trump a lot of runway to make decisions–who have been made very nervous by what appears to be chaos and inconsistency in Trump policies.
Tariffs are on! Tariffs are off! Nobody is quite clear about what Trump’s economic policies will be once the dust settles, and it makes them nervous. This is one of the main reasons that markets have been looking disappointing in recent weeks.
You see a lot of upset among our allies as well, and while much of that is due to Trump’s aim to remake the balance of power in Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific–not to mention all that talk about Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal–some of it is a nagging sense that they don’t quite understand what Trump is doing.
In more normal times I would be inclined to agree with many of these folks that Trump should slow it down, telegraph his intentions more, and make changes more slowly so everybody could digest them.
Trump officials back president’s economic policies amid tariff uncertainty https://t.co/floZZi74zu
— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) March 18, 2025
These are not normal or stable times, and Trump is right to rush ahead, even though I, too, occasionally get nervous about the pace of change.
What most people don’t grasp, but what Trump and those in his cabinet do, is that this is a moment of great peril in the world, and the United States has been sleepwalking toward disaster–perhaps a disaster so great that it presents an existential threat to the country.
If that sounds alarmist, consider these facts:
- Within weeks, the national debt will reach $37 trillion, and within months after that $38 trillion, and within months after that, $39 trillion. And so on, and so on, and so on. This is not just “unsustainable” in an abstract, “some day there will be a collapse,” but in a very concrete “disaster is on the horizon, and we are speeding toward it fast enough that we can see it get closer by the day.”
- Interest on the debt has crossed the trillion-dollar-a-year line–larger than our defense budget.
- Biden left a total mess in the Middle East, and the collapse of Syria made it worse. Hamas still exists and is still strong enough to run Gaza if Israel lets it, and nobody has a clear solution to the degradation of the security situation there.
- Biden also let the Houthis take over the Red Sea, hampering world trade and leaving Trump with a thorny issue which had been largely contained before Biden screwed it up.
- Europe is falling to a bizarre combination of transnational extremism by the elites and medieval Islamists. The elite are behaving like toddlers with access to powerful economic and military weapons, and they appear to be itching for a long and dangerous war with Russia.
- All this, while our real adversary is China, which appears to be inching toward a serious war that would be a worldwide economic and military disaster at a time when Biden weakened our military dramatically.
- Last, but not least, the Democrats are upping the violence and murmuring about a civil war. A big one won’t break out, but domestic terrorism will only get worse in the coming months.
In short, these are not normal times, and Trump isn’t really CREATING massive uncertainty–he is facing it head-on, acknowledging that it exists, and working furiously to avert disaster.
Most people have never experienced or even thought much about a real crisis of epic proportions hitting America, but what we are facing makes the 2008 financial crisis look like a firecracker compared to a potential nuclear explosion in the relatively near future. And not just a metaphorical nuke hitting America, but if things keep cruising along the path Biden set, the danger of a real nuclear war is non-zero.
I would prefer it to be zero. For that matter, I would prefer that we not head into a Great Depression caused by a massive collapse of the dollar brought on by our debt.
I understand why a lot of people, including those who are open to Trump’s leadership, are increasingly nervous about Trump moving so fast and seemingly erratically at times, but Trump isn’t doing so because he is erratic. There is a method to the madness, and I am inclined to think that he has a decent chance of reversing the course and putting us back on the right track.
Will Trump’s strategy work? There are far too many variables to guess, at least for me. But by now, we should have learned that Trump’s instincts are uncommonly good, and this time around, Trump is surrounded by some of the smartest people in the world who will not use their efforts to thwart Trump, unlike the first term.
For the first time in years, I feel cautiously optimistic that somebody is addressing the biggest and most dangerous issues we face. We can’t expect more than that.
So ignore the nervous Nellies. They are not wrong to be nervous, of course–the problems we face are enormous–but they are wrong to be worried that Trump is doing too much too fast. They had better hope he is working fast enough to address the myriad looming disasters.
