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It was lunchtime at the New York Stock Exchange, and Peter Tuchman was standing on a balcony surveying the scene, one side of his unruly white hair flaring up jaggedly like a market chart. It was Wednesday, April 9, a week after President Donald Trump announced a series of astronomical tariffs on nearly every country in the world, including tiny Antarctic islands inhabited only by penguins, seals, and other wildlife. The S&P 500 was eerily flat for the day, but the so-called Fear Index — or VIX, a measure of the market’s volatility — was disturbingly high, as if what Tuchman was observing were an ocean whose glassy surface belied the currents swirling dangerously below. Tuchman has worked on the floor of the NYSE for 40 years — through 1987’s Black Monday, the dot-com bust, the Great Recession, the pandemic — and had never seen anything play out quite like the crash of the past week. “People are, you know, freaking a bit,” he said. “I mean, everyone in here has probably got a 401(k), and suddenly their 401(k) is a 101(k).”

The NYSE has always been a place friendly to the conservative, pro-business side of the political ledger, but lately it has become a lot Trumpier. In one firm’s booth, MAGA hats hung on neat white hooks above each Bloomberg terminal and TRUMP was emblazoned on the mouse pads — what Tuchman called the MAGA Pavilion. Recent events, however, had required some extreme mental gymnastics to justify the sledgehammer effect Trump’s tariffs have had on everything from the traders’ retirement savings to the global economic order, which just a week before rested on that rock-solid pillar known as the United States of America. “Most of the floor are Trumpers, and they still think this makes sense, and I still don’t get it,” Tuchman said.

Even those financiers sympathetic to Trump were having doubts, though. The president had declared the tariffs a “Liberation Day,” but Wall Street acted as if it were Armageddon, sending stocks plunging and erasing more than $10 trillion from global markets at historic speed. “More like ‘Obliteration Day,’” groused Anthony Scaramucci, the hedge-fund manager who was fired after serving only 11 days in the first Trump administration. “It appears to be the largest set of negative fiscal policies that have been pursued in 100 years,” said Bob Elliott, who runs an investment firm called Unlimited and previously oversaw portfolio strategies for Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund. Elliott, a familiar face on FinTok, where he makes daily finance videos often while walking his dog and wearing a Black Dog sweatshirt, had been predicting a 20 percent market decline, only to see his thesis play out more quickly and violently than he’d envisioned. “I was expecting disappointment, and we got disaster,” he said.

The daily whipsaw induced by the tariffs feels fundamentally different from crashes past, as if the deep-seated rules underlying the usual chaos of buying and selling no longer apply now that a single man has managed to instigate a financial crisis on an inane whim. “It’s like, if we’re going out and I cheat on you, we may get back together, but are you ever gonna really trust me again? Fuck no,” Tuchman said. “Absolutely not, because it’ll always be that voice in the back of your head, what they’re capable of. Now we know what he’s capable of.”

As Tuchman and his fellow traders were waiting with a mix of dread and anticipation for the next headline or Truth Social post to drop, some had already declared the end of an era. Tom Lee, an investor who runs a firm called Fundstrat that distributes market analyses to more than 10,000 clients and manages $900 million, is known on Wall Street for his evangelical enthusiasm that stocks would rise ever upward in the long term. But in a note to his clients, he admitted his zeal might have been misplaced. Trump, he said, had committed “a fundamental breach of capitalism’s regulatory covenant.” It’s one that could reverberate with unpredictable consequences for a long time to come, even if the tariffs are eventually repealed and their champion replaced. Or as Spencer Hakimian, who manages a $78 million hedge fund called Tolou Capital, told me, “I did not think for one second he was going to go this crazy.”

Earlier that morning on April 9, as the market opened, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “BE COOL!” And soon after: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” Almost no one was listening, a testament to Wall Street’s disillusionment with a president who only a week earlier had seemed, for all his foibles, to be their guy.

On April 2, shortly after the market closed, Trump appeared in the Rose Garden declaring that this would be remembered as “the day that we began to make America wealthy again. We’re going to make it wealthy. Good and wealthy.” Trump had already walloped markets with earlier tariffs against Mexico, Canada, and China, together the largest trading partners of the U.S. But at first glance, the 10 percent universal tariffs the president announced, plus reciprocal tariffs supposedly set at half of what other countries charge the U.S., seemed much better than investors had been expecting. James van Geelen, the founder of Citrini Research in Greenwich, Connecticut, watched the futures market initially jump on the news as his Bloomberg terminal’s instant messenger erupted. “You start getting inbounds, like, ‘We’re so back,’” he said.

While the rest of the country — or liberal America, anyway — had spent the first months of the Trump administration up in arms about its assaults on the courts and the universities and the federal government, Wall Street had remained relatively quiet. Even as the market began selling off in late February while Trump’s tariff threats intensified, the billionaire class that had endorsed him largely took it in stride. At this moment in early April, it was reasonable to suspect that maybe Wall Street knew something the rest of America didn’t, namely that Trump could run the economy well enough to satisfy both middle-class workers and private-equity executives alike. Maybe even those who didn’t vote for him would at least get a little bit richer as a consolation prize.

Then Trump brought out what is now known simply, devastatingly, as the Chart. Trump held the blue, white, and yellow poster board in his hands and went down the list of “Reciprocal Tariffs”: China was on top, with a levy of 34 percent added to his previous tariffs on the country, for a total of 54 percent; Vietnam, a major producer of textiles, was a couple of rungs down, slapped with a rate of 46 percent; Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a tiny archipelago off the coast of Canada, was hit with a 50 percent tariff; and on it went, with seemingly no country spared except a few outliers like Russia.

The math made no sense. Never mind that the White House thinks a trade deficit with another country means the U.S. is somehow being ripped off (that’s not how it works). The botched formula it applied resulted in tariffs that were as much as four times larger than they should have been, according to the economist whose work the White House claimed to be using. “There’s a good chance that the formula for calculating these percentages actually came from ChatGPT,” said Carson Block, the CEO of Muddy Waters Capital who is famous for his short reports on companies he believes are engaging in fraud. Tuchman compared the equation to “three apples, four oranges, plus two cashews, multiplied by seven, divided by two.”

Van Geelen, who started his career as a paramedic in Los Angeles, likened the situation........

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