Few would argue with the claim that President Trump’s tariff policy is chaotic.
In early April 2025, Trump announced sweeping tariffs on all U.S. trading partners, including a 10% blanket tariff and higher rates for specific countries like China (145%) and Canada (25%). Just a few days later, however, he rolled back many of these tariffs, citing the need for "flexibility".
Again this past weekend, Trump announced major changes—this time targeting the tech industry. Products like smartphones, laptops, hard drives, and semiconductors were suddenly exempted from the 125% tariffs he had imposed on Chinese imports just a week earlier. But these exemptions are temporary, the administration noted, hinting at future tariffs that target semiconductors and other electronics.
The uncertainty has rattled business leaders. Last week, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon warned that the lack of clarity could push the U.S. into a recession if trade deals aren't finalized swiftly. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon also highlighted the challenges of navigating the instability caused by these policies.
“ There’s no strategy here... zero, ” said Michael Cohen, a longtime Trump confidante-turned-critic who testified against him in his Manhattan hush money trial. “This isn’t about strategy, this is about brute force... and dictating demands.”
Cohen is not alone. Michael Strain, an economist with the American Enterprise Institute, believes that Trump has no coherent policy, saying, “People are trying to figure out what game of five-dimensional chess the president is playing and I don’t think there is one. I don’t think he knows what he’s doing and he’s making mistakes and making this up as he goes along.”
But while many worry about the chaos and suggest Trump has no idea what he is doing, could this actually be part of Trump’s “Art of the Deal”?
For years, many have described Trump’s negotiating style as chaotic and unpredictable and have suggested this is an intentional strategy to gain leverage in the tariff negotiations. This approach aligns with a negotiating approach known as "chaos negotiating," where unpredictability is used as a tool to unsettle adversaries as a way to push for favorable outcomes.
Proponents of this method believe it can be a calculated way to shift power dynamics. Critics argue it creates confusion and can backfire. In truth, it may be a bit of both. Many academics believe that negotiators are better off setting specific and clear goals when negotiating, although others believe that improvisation and even chaos are powerful methods as well. Thomas Green, a managing director at Citigroup Global Markets, believes that embracing chaos can be advantageous at the bargaining table. Admittedly, Green's approach challenges conventional wisdom; “I’ve learned to make chaos my friend in negotiations,” says Green. He played a pivotal role in negotiating the $350 billion settlement of lawsuits against major U.S. tobacco companies and used this approach as the team leveraged the unpredictability of the situation to outmaneuver the opposition. The negotiation demonstrated how chaos, when managed effectively, can be a powerful tool in negotiations.
Of course, no one can really know what Trump is thinking and perhaps that is his goal. David Bahnsen, the founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group suggested this, saying: “There is a certain chaotic dimension to this that lends itself to uncertainty.” Part of it is that President Trump likes that style. I do not think he has liked the last 4 or 5 days, and I think that's where this announcement is coming from. But investors that are trying to trade around this should be extremely careful unless they think they're inside the President's mind. I'd be very careful thinking you know what President Trump's going to do next, when I can assure you that he doesn't know what he's going to do next.”
So, what will become of this latest round of tariffs—and the complex web of negotiations they’re fueling? Will Trump’s unpredictability give him leverage or will it weaken the United States' credibility and negotiating power? The truth is, no one knows. The long-term implications for trust in U.S. trade policy and the stability of strategic partnerships remain uncertain.
However, Yogi Berra, a famous baseball player known for his witty and paradoxical sayings, might have summed it all up best for what the future holds for the U.S. tariff policy:
“It is very difficult to make predictions—especially about the future.”
When it comes to Trump’s tariff policy that certainly rings true.
David Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.