In just 10 weeks since his presidency, President Trump's desire for risk appears to be very little.
He imposed an attractive global tariff on male dogs, fear of inflation and, worse yet, he levied. But the man who pushed himself to the president last weekend as a sniffed contract maker sounded to a cavalier when asked if the car price would skyrocket.
“I couldn't really care about it,” Trump replied.
It is the latest example of his willingness to take his greatest position, essentially making his enemies bold to take him. Before the announcement of the tariffs, he moved to blow up the global alliance system. The US built an embassy, ​​silenced the US voice and removed the government from businesses that mostly provide food and medical aid.
Trump is willing to retaliate against perceived enemies or include part of the federal government, even if it means testing the boundaries of democracy 250 years ago, putting public health systems at risk or ignoring the legitimate process of immigrants who live in the country legally.
And in the face of daily competition with China for artificial intelligence, space and biological sciences, he is pleased to risk cutting funding for America's largest research university.
For outsiders, including more than 200,000 Chinese students studying in the United States, those public and private institutions are sparkling diamonds at the heart of American innovation. For Trump, they represent what he called the “radical left” ideology, and he is determined to bring it to his heels.
The president's aides hone the idea that they are either dumping their expertise or putting basic research incubators at risk, arguing that taxpayers don't need to spend billions of dollars on such pursuits. They say the best talent will find a way into the SpaceX style private sector.
This was not the first term Donald Trump, when he meditated on the decline in the federal deficit, but actually let it go up, and when he had plans to eradicate the “deep state” but didn't know how to destroy it. A lot has changed since then, and many voters and chief executives seemed happy to see him take risks in his second term, which appears never to be happy in his first term.
When asked why the second term is unfolding so differently, people around Trump argue that almost everyone has to speak anonymously — saying that the legal, electoral and psychological restraints that have tied him down to the past are gone.
After he escaped death with an assassin bullet, he took it as a sign that he had escaped to complete his vision of what America should look like. “God was looking at me,” he said in February. When the Supreme Court ruled that he was immune from a widely defined official act that seized moments that extended or exceeded the president's authority.
Trump doesn't have to face voters again unless he turns his meditation on running an unconstitutional third term into reality. He is no longer surrounded by voices of attention when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin warned in 2017 that it would create uncertainty that could force the market to fight, or when Defense Secretary Jim Mattis claimed he held America's central role in NATO.
These advisors have been replaced by enablers and amplifiers that contain an uneven number of former Fox News commentators. Even current advisers, drawn from Wall Street facilities, such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bescent, who would have reacted to the idea of ​​causing a trade war in past lives, have built up economic and social grounds for the president's instincts.
“Access to cheap products is not the essence of the American dream,” Bescent argued last month at a New York Economic Club.
Now, Trump is betting that he can speed up the end of his age of globalization.
That was the first part of Trump's gambling filmed Wednesday. If Becent's argument is correct, Trump believes that American shoppers are willing to pay a higher price, at least for a while, if it's the cost of forcing makers to get their jobs back to America. It is essentially that the only way protectionism works and solves the problem is to draw from the lessons of William McKinley, which President Trump praised in his inauguration speech.
But there are other bets he's taking. He believes that other countries around the world will not face pain, but will reduce tariffs and other barriers to American goods. He argues that tariffs provide the United States with a new source of revenue and prevent the United States from relying on income taxes.
At various points in the last 10 weeks, Trump has promised that all of this will come to fruition, ignoring evidence that their goals are tense with each other.
“He is clearly very confident in how these policies will be unfolded,” said Matthew P. Goodman, director of the Greenberg Center for Geographical Economic Research, the Foreign Relations Council.
“The thing that stands out in Rose Garden with all these workers and flags is that if that doesn't work, it's all up to him,” Goodman added, referring to Trump's tariff announcement on Wednesday. “And to think that this will not affect markets, prices, or economic growth is really evolving.”
Of course, for Trump, even those with a policy announcement and slogan “Day of Liberation” are often the beginning of the process.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared to invite a special plea for tariff relief when he told reporters on Tuesday that the president was “always standing up for good negotiations.” And that's exactly what most officials expect as world leaders practice golf swings and head to Mar Lago to make their point.
When that happens, Trump faces a choice. If the market responds poorly to tariffs, he retains the ability to dial up and down, like a thermostat.
And he will have the room for that. This is because the “mutual” tariff rates he announced in each country were calculated by valuing not only the tariffs that those countries place on American goods, but also the valuations. This is an inaccurate calculation, the perfect playing card tool – a customizable negotiation.
As Trump revealed in The Art of Contracts, the book he wrote in 1987 is important to shape his own reputation as a savvy negotiator. But now, as president, he has the power he had dreamed of while insisting on the price to pay for the resort.
His style in the second term is marked by using all forms of American power to win his path. He shows he is willing to close an entire institution, such as the US International Development Agency, showing that he will achieve his goals and attack fear on federal workers that their department can go next.
He is willing to put a fracture of NATO and the collapse of Ukraine. And if the prices that end the sustained trade deficit are causing deep harm to the country's oldest and strongest alliance, he will not hesitate to threaten his friends. China could suffer the most from Trump's mutual tariff matrix, but its next targets include American allies or much-needed partners: Japan, the European Union, India, South Korea, and even Switzerland.
In both cases, Trump declares that economic relations will come first. A security or diplomatic partnership is a distant second or third partnership when counting something. He bets at the end of the day that Xi Jinping and the European Union leaders are stakes to choose not to escalate.
