Updated at 8:44 p.m. ET on April 9, 2025
Over the course of one afternoon and evening last month, the Department of Homeland Security loaded three planes with migrants, most of them Venezuelan men whom the Trump administration had determined, on the basis of little to no evidence, to be members of the gang Tren de Aragua. The planes departed Texas and flew across the Gulf of Mexico toward Central America, even as a judge in Washington, D.C., was holding a hearing on whether the U.S.

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Step one: Start a pointless, globe-encompassing trade war, rationalized solely by your own boneheaded innumeracy. Step two: Tank the markets. Step three: Pare the war back to a hot conflict with one of the United States’ most important trading partners and a warm conflict with every other country on Earth. Step four: Watch the market rebound and declare victory.

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For the past few days, investors, foreign leaders, and members of Congress have gradually gotten more and more frantic about the Trump administration’s huge tariffs. The White House, meanwhile, projected equanimity. “They feel like everything is going according to plan,” an adviser told Politico.

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Only yesterday, President Donald Trump was mocking Republicans nervous about his global trade war as “Panicans.” In a defiant speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee, he insisted, “This time I’m doing what I want to do with respect to the tariffs,” and that only he had the courage to defy “the globalists.

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Inscribed above the front entrance of the U.S. Supreme Court is a simple, four-word inscription: Equal justice under law. The phrase doesn’t require a great deal of explanation, but it does require fortification.

Last November, Republican Representative Troy Nehls of Texas told reporters that “if Donald Trump says tariffs work, tariffs work. Period. Because Donald Trump is really never wrong.” This expression of faith in the great leader is a precept of MAGA-ism. The pigs in Animal Farm had a similar way of thinking: “Comrade Napoleon is always right.

After the Trump administration inadvertently texted its war plans to this magazine’s editor in chief last month, people all over the world—including spies, fighter pilots, and foreign leaders—had to wonder if their secrets were safe with the United States government.
But the humiliating gaffes of Signalgate are only one measure of the Donald Trump team’s recklessness.