Uncertainty is Ready for its Closeup

Every day, we learn a little more about the way the Trump junta operates. We might sum it up with the phrase “Shoot first, ask questions later,” but this is not entirely accurate.

They do indeed shoot first, mostly with executive orders that are breathtaking in their over-reach, malicious intent, and criminal shortsightedness. But they don’t so much ask questions later, as they send stupid lawyers into court to defend stupefyingly illegal behavior. They tend to fail, but even in failure, the confusion they create works wonders for them.

On what must be several dozen fronts since January, MAGA operatives looking to subvert the government have done so, first by launching whatever harebrained scheme they’ve come up with, then by watching for the fallout. The fallout could be in the form of a court ruling, or howls of protest from the victims, or even from Democrats calling them out.

But the point is that they depend on that first launch to shake things up, to float the lies that establish the narrative. If there’s too much pushback, they back off and launch some other harebrained scheme. But that original narrative sticks, at least with the meatheads in the MAGA base.

This is not a new tactic, though it’s certainly been ramped up of late. Trump always shoots from the hip, unencumbered by any rational thought process. He never hits what he’s aiming at. And he inevitably walks it back, even as he loudly claims victory. He sets up the narrative so that he wins no matter what, even if it’s only on Fox News.

But what he’s really good at is uncertainty, a word that’s getting a lot of play right now. He invents it, promotes it, wallows in it. The perfect chaos agent, he has, in a mere five months, infused a jittery uncertainty into just about every walk of life.

Every time he places an absurdly wrong tariff on an absurdly wrong country for absurdly wrong reasons, he inflicts uncertainty on all parties, especially his own supporters.

Then, when he flip-flops on those same tariffs a few days or weeks later, he couldn’t care less about the damage being inflicted on crucial relationships with longstanding trading partners.

But the real damage comes from the uncertainty, especially in the supply chain, and this ripples through the economy. Manufacturers are uncertain what to make, how to make it, or where to sell it once it’s made. This means they have to scale back production, which means layoffs or hiring freezes. Which means employees are uncertain about their jobs and are cutting back on restaurants, new cars, gym memberships, and the family Xmas budget. Speaking of which, most toys come from China, as do most power tools, and neither are likely to be under the tree this year.

While the tariff nightmare is a perfect storm of toxic uncertainty, one could argue that Trump’s mass deportation obsession is even worse. After the ICE raids in LA, his secretary of agriculture summoned the courage to suggest that fear of deportation might be hurting the farm sector, not to mention a few other industries that might cost his billionaire buddies bigly. At which point, Trump actually exempted several industries from the ICE raids.

The legacy media swooned over this, even if several million immigrants didn’t quite believe it. And sure enough, Trump reversed those very exemptions two days later. The reversal was surely the result of a primal scream from Stephen Miller, who hates having his atrocities interrupted.

Miller is emerging as the Rasputin of the junta, reputed to be pulling many strings behind the scenes, one of those strings being Trump himself. It’s not clear if Miller actually speaks for Trump or just says he does, but the result is the same. The growing evidence of Trump’s cognitive decline — and the ongoing cowardice of the media in not covering it — only gives more power to evil regents like Miller, one of few in the inner circle who actually knows what he’s doing. Among the buffoons in that cabinet, Miller surely stands out for competence and strategic acumen, though this is in no way a good thing. Mass deportation is Miller’s baby, and he’s riveted on it, consequences be damned.

Miller’s Gestapo-like tactics are putting immigrants in a world of uncertainty. The spectre of masked ICE thugs descending on their workplace and whisking them off to South Sudan or some Salvadoran hellhole, is making every immigrant, regardless of legal status, think twice about coming to work.

Already, the day laborers who line up every morning at Home Depot aren’t lining up, forcing builders to scramble to stay afloat. Already, hotels can’t find enough seasonal workers to make the beds and buss the tables. Already, hospitals are short of nurses, orderlies, and janitors. And nursing homes will soon need to hire all the white Christians willing to change grandma’s bedpan for minimum wage.

Then there are the farmers, the salt of the earth, who voted for Trump out of profound ignorance, and who will soon bear the brunt of this new age of uncertainty.

Because it’s not at all certain that this year’s crops can be harvested without migrant labor to do it. Those crops might just rot in the fields, driving farmers either into debt or out of business. Even if they do get harvested it’s not certain those crops can be sold, since two of U.S. agriculture’s biggest customers — China and USAID — won’t be buying.

All this uncertainty raises the price of everything, at every step in the supply chain. The press disingenuously acts surprised that Trump didn’t end inflation on day one, a promise they inexplicably took seriously. But that will be nothing compared to the inflation that is likely descending on us.

Trump has personally detonated a major shock to the global economy. Just because we haven’t yet felt that shock doesn’t mean it isn’t rumbling in the distance.

We’re about to find out how much of our everyday life has been made in China, and may no longer be available. We’re about to find out how little we actually manufacture in this country, thanks to four decades of Republican-enabled offshoring. We’re about to find out how dependent we are on other countries.

When the CEO of Walmart told Trump his shelves would be empty by summer, it’s worth noting that summer is here. Apparently all the big retailers tried to get ahead of the tariffs by over-buying in anticipation, but that inventory will be running out soon.

But Trump sees global trade the way he sees everything, as zero-sum. It’s not enough for him to win, everyone else has to lose.

And with that happy thought in mind, I finish this piece in the knowledge that Trump, who never seems to hit bottom, has just launched an exploding cigar of a war.

This is guaranteed to have no good outcome, and he has clearly done it for no good reason beyond his own crashing poll numbers. Yes, we’ve seen this movie before — Wag the Dog, remember?

It’s way too soon for me to write about this. I get a headache thinking about the consequences, most of which will be unintended. I have no idea how the next few days — to say nothing of the future of humanity — will play out.

But for now, the only thing that’s certain is uncertainty.