The Great Trump Toddler Tariff Tantrum that we have all been living through is so very Trump – blunt like a baseball bat, burn-it-down-first-figure-out-the-consequences-later reckless, and attention-grabbing like Kim Kardashian – that it is easy to forget that Donald Trump is merely human, too.

The now 47th US president has an extraordinary gift for occupying center stage. Yet, as Karl Marx wrote almost two hundred years ago with reference to France’s Napoleon III, another bigger-than-life “global disrupter” leading his country into a fiasco, “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please […] but under circumstances existing already.”

And if the co-founder of “scientific Communism” isn’t your thing, take it from the other side: Arch billionaire capitalist and creator of the world’s largest hedge fund Ray Dalio is warning us that the current tariff brouhaha, fundamentally driven by Trump’s crude ideas about how to re-industrialize the US, is obscuring what is really at stake: namely, a “once-in-a-lifetime event”: a “classic breakdown of the major monetary, political, and geopolitical orders.”

Yet collapse is only half the picture. We are also witnessing historic transformation on a global scale: yes, the old world order of so-called “liberal hegemony” – that is, really, US “primacy” – is tottering and crumbling. But it is also already being replaced by emerging multipolarity. With American politics simultaneously, according to Dalio again, “fraying” at home, conditions are “ripe for radical policy changes and unpredictable disruption.”

And hasn’t Trump made good on that? Before his subsequent U-turn and suspension (not yet canceling) of his “Liberation Day” tariff blitz, accumulated 2025 US import tariffs were scheduled to grow higher than ever since 1909. Rapid subsequent US stock market cratering alone wiped out well over $5 trillion – as if, to quote the Communist Manifesto, melting into the air. A post-U-turn rally then recovered some of the losses. Yet, whichever way you look at it: “Radical policy changes” and “unpredictable disruption” indeed.

Now – after what the Trump team tries to sell as the president’s brilliant pressure tactics and an analyst has called Trump’s “capitulation to the markets” (except regarding China) – even if Trump may end up negotiating away some or many of his tariff hikes, great damage has been done to Washington’s already shoddy standing and credibility: Because it has once more displayed the staggering irresponsibility, stunning shortsightedness, and sheer incompetence that make living on the same planet with the self-appointed “indispensable nation” so painful for the rest of us, and this lesson will not be forgotten.

Yet the bigger point is that – with his giant ego, lovingly cultivated idiosyncrasies, and Freudian-sized Sharpie signatures – Trump remains locked into........

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