After a lot of stress, far too much time staring at screens for my physical and mental health, and attempts to understand our stupid financial system, my conclusion is that he's caught in the middle of a tug of war between the technofeudalists and the war hawks. The technofeudalists are okay with international train so long as the line continues to go up and they consume a larger piece of the pie. There was an initial strain of thought among this group that the tariffs could be used as a bargaining chip to weaken regulations (especially around social media) abroad as part of negotiations. They originally signed on to the tariffs, realized very quickly that that wasn't going to work, so now they're demanding that the tariffs get rolled back to bring the line back up.
The war hawks are okay with crashing the economy so long as enough industry is reshored to keep the war machine going against Iran and/or China. This is why Trump is ranting about semiconductors and rare earths, because someone told him we need that stuff to keep the bombs growing. They want this to happen on probably an impossibly compressed timeline because they have yet to wake up to the fact that China outplayed them the US would likely lose any war that it attempts to start.
Caught in the middle are the run-of-the-mill finance ghouls who just want to make money uninterrupted and have taken to trying to persuade him through the press by issuing increasingly bleak predictions of economic disaster, even though Goldman Sachs just posted a record profit off the volatile market.
Trump's policies and what pass for official announcements about them flip depending on which camp talked to him last. The consensus emerging right now is that he'll eventually be pressured to drop the tariffs and things will go back to normal, except the decoupling of the global economy from the United States will accelerate as a result of the uncertainty and obvious incompetence. What time scale that starts playing out on and what the consequences will be, I have no idea.
