Michael Huber 
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New York
CNN
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The CEO commander-in-chief is no economist, nor is he a particularly good manager. If there’s one aspect of running a business he seems to understand, it’s branding — much of his real estate empire is built on licensing the Trump name, allowing him to slap tacky gold signs on hotels and casinos around the world while offloading the actual costs onto developers.
It’s disappointing, then (if not terribly surprising) that he fails to recognize the power of America, the Brand — the green light at the end of the dock, the beacon signaling this is the place to park your money when the seas get choppy.
Just two weeks into his second administration, the chaos Trump campaigned on is taking root, leaving just about everyone — from CEOs to trade officials to school teachers — on unsure footing.
At the risk of sounding like a crank, here are just some of the highlights of the Trump 2.0 White House so far:
In sum: No one knows what the heck is going on. That’s as bad for business as it is bad for America’s democratic institutions.
“It is a cliche, but of course cliches have a foundation in reality: Business enterprises abhor uncertainty,” Lawrence White, an economics professor at NYU’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, told me. “I’m less certain about what outcomes are going to be, less certain what return I will get on my investment, where I ought to place my investment, when I ought to replace to place my investment — all of those things are impediments rather than encouragement.”
Take tariffs, the cornerstone of Trump’s economic plans.
Even before the president on Monday hit the brakes on the levies against Mexico and Canada that he’d announced just 48 hours earlier, Wall Street had called his bluff.
US stocks followed European and Asian equities lower in pre-market trading Monday but reversed course by late morning when the US and Mexico reached a deal that delays the tariffs for one month. Canada secured a similar delay Monday afternoon following a phone call between Trump and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“Call us deluded, but we still think that permanent tariffs on the US’s allies (Canada, Mexico) will not be a thing,” strategists at Macquarie, Australia’s biggest investment bank and asset manager, wrote in a research note. Even though stocks fell across the globe Monday in response to Trump’s Saturday announcement, those movements seemed “muted relative to the scale and scope of what could befall the global economy if the new tariffs ‘stick.’”
In other words, traders are doing game theory analysis to try to interpret what the leader of the world’s biggest economy really means when he wields tariffs as a cudgel against America’s closest allies. Is he serious? Yes, very. Also, no. Also, he may be serious now until someone else airs an idea he likes that suddenly becomes American trade policy.
One former trade official, Dmitry Grozoubinski, reflecting a widely held sense of exasperation among experts, wrote on Bluesky that “asking me to forecast Trump’s use of tariffs is a bit like asking an aviation expert to predict the behaviour of a knife-wielding pantsless man on the bus just because he happens to be raving about chem trails.”
Executives, trade groups and economists across the political spectrum have been pleading with Trump to back off the tariff talk, fearing a global trade war will engulf the world’s leading economies. Late last week, economists Phil Gramm and Larry Summers wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing that “tariffs and the retaliation they bring … poison our economic and security alliances.”
Trump has been unmoved by those arguments, claiming in at least one interview last year that the conventional wisdom is simply wrong. He appears willing to bet the $30 trillion US economy on that belief.
Tariffs (or the threat of them) alone may not wreck the global economy. But the piling on of uncertainties — including the whack-a-mole of executive actions and the conflagrations of democratic norms — raise long-term doubts about the United States as the global standard bearer for economic stability.
“There are just all kinds of uncertainties that, even if they are low probabilities, they’re not zero,” said economics professor Lawrence White. “I think there are fears that the ‘Trump 2’ trade position is going to lead to this spiraling sequence of trade barriers that can put a serious dent into world economic growth. And will we have the 1930s again? No, but will we put a dent in current circumstances? Quite possibly.”
