Trump's Week Shows the Risks of His Full-Speed-Ahead Approach

Yomiuri Shimbun

a day ago

Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post
President Donald Trump speaks during a swearing-in ceremony for the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, at the White House on Wednesday.
His sweeping tariffs that have upended the global economy? Two federal courts struck them down this week, though by Thursday afternoon an appeals court had at least temporarily put them back in place.
His boasts that he could rapidly end wars? Russia continues to escalate attacks on Ukraine. But White House officials suggested Thursday that he was on the cusp of announcing a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
His Big Beautiful Bill? His former wingman, Elon Musk, sharply criticized it as he departed from his official post. But by Friday the two men were in the Oval Office together, lavishing praise and marveling at their friendship.
President Donald Trump's second term has been marked by volatility, brought about in part by his insistence on bulling forward in search of maximum gain, even if that heightens the risk of ultimate failure. This week crystalized just how rapidly his fortunes can rise and fall.
The confluence of the court ruling against his tariffs and Musk's criticism of his sweeping domestic policy bill highlighted the possibility that some of Trump's signature plans could collapse all at once.
In the midst of that, a president who hates to be perceived as weak and relishes his command of social media was publicly confronted with ridicule on Wall Street, where financial traders mocked his repeated pullbacks on tariffs with a trending meme: TACO, which stands for 'Trump Always Chickens Out.'
Still, Trump remains resilient, and in a week that in some ways appeared to be a low point of his presidency, somehow the TACO keeps morphing back into Teflon Don.
'He has hit a couple big bumps in the road,' said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and a Trump ally. 'From Trump's standpoint, he just has to fight through all this. He's being very bold and pushing the margins. And when you're pushing the margins, you occasionally run into trouble.'
To those working in this White House – one accustomed to unfriendly court rulings, sneering from Wall Street, and an off-the-cuff Musk – it all had the feel of just another week.
With Republicans holding power of both the House and the Senate – and with Trump holding power over almost his entire party – he has faced few outside challenges since taking office. In the opening days of his tenure, he fired inspectors general across the government, limiting the watchdogs who might launch investigations. He threatened the political careers of Republicans who criticized him or wouldn't vote for the loyalists he nominated to Cabinet posts.
Democrats have been criticizing each other for being rudderless and leaderless, consumed more with infighting over their views of Joe Biden's cognitive health than on whether or how to counter Trump.
That has left the courts and the financial markets as the two major checks on Trump's power. Administration officials have tried to placate investors, but in the aftermath of unfavorable rulings, they repeatedly have lashed out at 'unelected judges,' whom they accuse of thwarting the president.
Much of the rhetoric Thursday was aimed at the U.S. Court of International Trade, which on Wednesday struck down most of Trump's tariffs on imported goods. The president, in attempting to implement his flurry of import taxes, had invoked a 1977 law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, which grants presidents wide powers to deal with economic emergencies. The court ruled that his actions had far exceeded his lawful powers under that statute.
'We are living under a judicial tyranny,' Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and architect of some of Trump's ambitious proposals, wrote Thursday morning on X.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the decision 'another example of judicial overreach' and said the three judges who struck down the tariffs, one of whom was appointed by Trump, 'brazenly abused their judicial power to usurp the authority of President Trump, to stop him from carrying out the mandate that the American people gave him.'
'The courts should have no role here,' she said. 'There is a troubling and dangerous trend of unelected judges inserting themselves into the presidential decision-making process. America cannot function if President Trump, or any other president for that matter, has their sensitive diplomatic or trade negotiations railroaded by activist judges.'
A few hours later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said that it would grant the Trump administration's request to pause the lower court's ruling and allow his tariffs to continue for now.
And on Thursday night, Trump lashed out at Leonard Leo, who played a prominent role in helping select judicial nominees, including three Supreme Court picks, during Trump's first term. He called him a 'sleazebag' and suggested that he gave bad advice on some of the judicial nominees who are now ruling against him.
Trump's tariff proposals have caused a whipsaw of policies, with 145 percent tariffs initially imposed on China quickly lowered to 30 percent with a 90-day pause after a steep decline in financial markets. Trump threatened the European Union with 50 percent tariffs starting in June, then backed off over the weekend and delayed them until July 9 to provide more time for negotiations.
His willingness to back away from his initial proposals spawned a meme earlier this month when a columnist in the Financial Times wrote about Wall Street's emerging TACO trade theory, which highlights how the president backs away from his threats when markets go down.
Trump reacted angrily when asked about the term during an event on Wednesday in the Oval Office.
'Don't ever say what you said,' he told the reporter. 'To me, that's the nastiest question.'
He defended his approach on tariffs, saying that he deliberately starts with a 'ridiculous high number and I go down a little bit, you know, a little bit.'
'You call that chickening out?' Trump said. 'It's called negotiation.'
A few minutes later, he returned again to the topic.
'They wouldn't be over here today negotiating if I didn't put a 50 percent tariff on,' he said. 'The sad thing is now when I make a deal with them, it's something much more reasonable. They'll say, 'Oh, he was chicken, he was chicken.' That's so unbelievable. I usually have the opposite problem. They say you're too tough.'
Trump this week also lost one of his chief allies when Musk formally left his position. On his way out, he broke in a significant way with Trump and most Republicans by criticizing the president's spending bill, which includes large tax cuts and would add trillions of dollars over the next decade to the towering national debt.
'I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,' Musk said in an interview with CBS News.
'I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful,' Musk added, 'but I don't know if it can be both. My personal opinion.'
In an interview with The Washington Post this week, Musk also said that his efforts to cut the size of the federal government proved far tougher than he had expected.
'The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,' he said. 'I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.'
Trump – who in February sat alongside Musk for a Fox News interview, with each man lavishing praise upon the other – hosted Musk in the Oval Office for a news conference on Friday afternoon.
And while he marked Musk's last day as a special government employee, he clearly did not want his billionaire buddy to depart.
'Elon is really not leaving,' Trump said, before presenting Musk with a golden key inside a wooden box. 'He's going to be back and forth.'
Musk's criticisms this week stood out because from the first few months of the president's tenure, the two were inseparable. Trump bought a Tesla after staging a car show on the South Lawn of the White House. Musk recounted to reporters the times that the president invited him to sleep over in the Lincoln bedroom and help himself to a tub full of caramel Häagen-Dazs ice cream in the kitchen.
Leavitt dismissed any criticism of the One Big Beautiful Bill – as it is officially known – and, unlike Musk, said that it could be big as well as beautiful.
'The president is very proud of the One Big Beautiful Bill, and he wants to see it pass,' she said. 'We thank him for his service. We thank him for getting DOGE off of the ground, and the efforts to cut waste, fraud and abuse will continue.'
On the foreign policy front, while Trump's recent trip to the Middle East won a range of new business deals and showed him at his most comfortable, he has continued to be vexed by conflicts that he has little control over.
On Thursday, White House officials fanned reports that a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas was imminent. Leavitt on Thursday confirmed that Israel had signed off on a ceasefire proposal that the Trump administration had presented, and said officials were awaiting approval from Hamas.
'Those discussions are continuing, and we hope that a ceasefire in Gaza will take place so we can return all of the hostages home,' she said.
But Trump has struggled to halt the war between Russia and Ukraine, a conflict he used to say he would solve within the first 24 hours of his presidency. Russian President Vladimir Putin has escalated attacks on Ukraine, openly challenging Trump, who has several times told him he must stop so that negotiations could start.
And Trump, who has often deflected when he wants to buy time, has adopted a familiar refrain.
Asked on April 24 about continuing to help Ukraine, he said, 'You can ask that question in two weeks.'
Asked on April 27 whether he trusted Putin, he said, 'We'll let you know in about two weeks.'
Less than two weeks later, on May 4, he was asked whether he had misread Putin. 'I'll tell you about in a month from now, or two weeks from now.'
Two weeks later, on May 19, he was asked whether Ukraine was doing enough. 'I'd rather tell you in about two weeks,' he said.
Asked again on Wednesday whether Putin was doing enough to end the war, he gave a now-rote answer:
'I'll let you know in about two weeks.'