A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh talk tariffs and the Supreme Court’s latest on the Alien Enemies Act deportations.

I’ve now seen a couple articles claiming that Democrats are missing an opportunity with Trump’s tariff catastrophe or generally trying to thread some moron needle over whether they’re good or bad. Jon Chait did it here. Now Lauren Egan has written a similar piece in The Bulwark. Both these pieces seem vastly overstated to me. I’m pretty immersed in Democratic voices and almost everything I hear is that Trump tariffs are a catastrophe. But to the extent there is some hedging from a few Democrats, I don’t think there’s even any real issue here to hedge, not over anything actually recognizable as trade policy. Joe Biden embraced what used to be the anathema of industrial policy. He also employed targeted tariffs. In fact he had a pretty all-policy, holistic focus on re-shoring specific industries that are either particularly high-value in economic terms or are tied to critical technologies with national security dependencies. Those policies were very broadly embraced by Democrats.

Most of what happened today is obvious. And I’m no expert on macro- or international economics. But allow me a few observations. Start with the obvious: Trump rolled out an absurd policy which on its own terms would need to be held to for years to have any hope of success. After repeated pledges never to relent, he caved after one week. He now looks like an even bigger fool and menace on the international stage than he already did which is a feat of some magnitude. I also doubt he undid the damage he’s done to himself domestically as a custodian of the nation’s prosperity. Perhaps most of all he looks weak, reckless and stupid.

I did a post a few days ago about how there really is no plan to any of this. The people around Trump are people who fall into two categories. One group is people who do have plans, sorta. They’re often pretty dumb plans, but they’re plans. And they’ve congregated around Trump because he is someone who looks like a useful instrument of their plans or someone who wants sorta kinda what they want or wants to get there in the same way. Maybe kinda. Trump’s Treasury Secretary (Bessent) and Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors (Miran) seem to fall into this category. The second group is made up of sycophants, cultists, shysters and hustlers who are just along for the ride and generally working to retcon different explanations or theories of why Trump and the administration are doing what they’re doing. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick epitomizes this category.