Reality has a vote. That is one lesson administered to the body of politics in the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second administration.

After the president gleefully announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, stock market prices fell sharply, and the bond market became, as Trump put it, “yippy.” So after just one week, on April 9, he put the Liberation Day tariffs on a 90-day pause. 

Perhaps contributing to this choice was automaker Stellantis’s April 3 decision to lay off workers in five U.S. factories.  

That can’t have been what he expected to happen and what he expected to do. Reality and widespread reactions to a policy I and many others regarded as “lunatic” caused him to change course. Reality has a vote.

Something like that scenario has been playing out, in slower motion, on Trump’s attempts to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. Trump ultimately got Ukraine to agree to a ceasefire after his contentious White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Feb. 28. 

But his confidence that he could similarly muscle Russian President Vladimir Putin has, so far, proved unfounded. Putin evidently calculates that prosecuting the war is a political necessity that outweighs any damage Trump could inflict. The issue simmers,........

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