• The president has grown more impulsive, more vindictive, and more anarchic.

Last Monday, Donald Trump, seeking to fortify public support for his massive, across-the-board tariffs, posted: “The United States has a chance to do something that should have been done DECADES AGO. Don’t be Weak! Don’t be Stupid! Don’t be a PANICAN (A new party based on Weak and Stupid people!).”

By Wednesday, Trump had caved. His witless, incoherent, and incompetently executed policies — his administration had imposed tariffs on an Australian territory that is home to no people but to many penguins — created a financial panic that risked devastating the American economy and triggering a global recession. Trillions of dollars of stock-market value evaporated in a matter of days.

A man who has spent most of his life, and much of his presidency, gaslighting the public ran into the brick wall of reality. Misinformation, disinformation, bullying, and nasty social-media posts proved ineffective. Stock and bond markets weren’t intimidated by the threats of the aging president.

Trump fought reality, and reality won.

WE’RE FEWER THAN 90 DAYS into Trump’s second term; many more collisions between the president and the real world will come. So what can we expect, based on what we’ve witnessed?

We won’t see qualities from Trump that we haven’t seen before, but we will see them in a more extreme version. He is more impulsive, more vindictive, and more anarchic than in his first term. “He’s at the peak of just not giving a f— anymore,” a White House official familiar with Trump’s thinking told The Washington Post. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f—. He’s going to do what he’s going to do.”

Source: Peter Wehner, theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/donald-trump-authoritarian-actions/682486/