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Vox
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Vox
Are white South Africans really refugees? A historian who grew up under apartheid explains.
covers politics Vox. She first joined Vox in 2019, and her work has also appeared in Politico, Washington Monthly, and the New Republic. South African internet personality and Afrikaner commentator Willem Petzer addresses a group of white South Africans supporting President Donald Trump gathered in front of the US Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, on February 15, 2025. Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images Under the second Trump administration, there is one group of people getting expedited access to refugee status and resettlement in the US. It's not citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where 6.1 million people have been internally displaced due to decades of fighting among armed groups and widespread gender-based violence. The US is not currently accepting more DRC citizens as refugees under President Donald Trump. It's not Afghan citizens either, despite the continued human rights violations, especially against women and girls, perpetrated by the Taliban after the US withdrawal from the country in 2021. Instead, the Trump administration is now revoking temporary protections for many Afghans already in America, which could result in their deportation back to Afghanistan. And it's not the Sudanese people, of whom nearly 8.6 million have been internally displaced amid a conflict between military and paramilitary forces. A subset of white South Africans, known as Afrikaners, are the only people Trump has newly admitted to the US as refugees. Trump has described them, without evidence, as victims of a 'genocide that's taking place' and anti-white discrimination, echoing rhetoric that has long circulated on the far right. And he's sought to punish South Africa for that by cutting off US aid. (The US government will have to admit some refugees from other countries who were already in the resettlement pipeline before Trump took office, per a court order issued in late March after the president tried to suspend almost all refugee admissions. But that court-ordered acceptance is a sharp contrast from the administration's enthusiastic outreach to Afrikaners.) Trump's effort to label Afrikaners 'refugees' is based on dubious pretenses. The South African government and even some white South Africans argue that, after the end of the apartheid system, which supported white minority rule in South Africa until the early 1990s, white people remain a privileged class. The typical Black household has 5 percent of the wealth of the typical white household. And police data does not show that Afrikaners, many of whom are farmers, suffer from disproportionate levels of violence that would amount to genocide. As a small minority of the population, white people still own a majority of the country's land. That hasn't stopped Elon Musk from criticizing the country's land ownership laws as 'racist' against white people following the signing of a land reform bill earlier this year. The law allows the government to seize property without compensation only in limited circumstances, including when the land is not in use or has been abandoned and if the owner is merely holding it as an investment in the hope that it will appreciate in value. Afrikaner farmers have argued that the law could be used to seize their land against their will, but the government has contested that claim, and there is no evidence that this is occurring. Instead, the evidence suggests Trump is selectively plucking a white minority for resettlement, even as nonwhite people facing war and famine around the world have been shut out from protection in the US. On Monday, the first group of these Afrikaners, 49 people in total, arrived in the US, where they will be offered a 'rapid pathway' to US citizenship and receive assistance from a refugee office within the Department of Health and Human Services. To learn more about the impetus behind Trump's decision, as well as about the situation in South Africa, I spoke with Jacob S. Dlamini, a Princeton University history professor whose research has focused on South African apartheid. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Do white Afrikaners have a legitimate claim to refugee status? I grew up under apartheid, literally under signs that said, 'Whites only.' White boys chased Black folks for sport when I was growing up. This feels like a real kick in the gut. There is no substance to the claim that Afrikaners as a group have been persecuted. These are not refugees by any stretch of the imagination. They are people who simply do not want to live under majority-Black rule. Some of them will talk about crime. I come from a family of small business owners who have suffered because of crime. I've lost friends to crime. I've lost relatives to crime. Independent stats show that whites as a group are not disproportionately targeted. If anything, it's poor people who bear the brunt of South Africa's crime problem — and it is a serious problem. In his executive order granting refugee status to white Afrikaners, Trump referenced the South African government's recent land reform bill, which he claims allows the seizure of 'ethnic minority Afrikaners' agricultural property without compensation' and is 'fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.' Does that square with the reality in South Africa? The very first piece of legislation that Nelson Mandela signed into law when he became president in May of 1994 was a land reform bill whose job was to correct what is essentially South Africa's original political sin, and that was the taking away of land from indigenous peoples and allocating it to white South Africans for exclusive ownership. For the past 30 years, the government has actually failed spectacularly on that front. That failure helps explain why today, in May 2025, whites still own more than 70 percent of farmland in South Africa. [Editor's note: Only 7 percent of the country's population is white.] In fact, as white farmers themselves have been pointing out ever since Trump announced his plans to do this, no single white farmer has had land taken away from him, and there is no suggestion that that's going to change anytime soon. Do you think Trump's policy is evidence of Elon Musk's influence in this administration? Musk is not the only South African who's got Trump's ear. There's a whole cohort of white men who grew up, for some of their lives, under apartheid in South Africa. That is significant. The mistake that the media in the US has been making has been to focus on Musk and to assume that it all radiates from him to Trump. In fact, there's this whole cohort of white men who have yet to come to terms with democracy in South Africa, meaning that a poor Black person who has no prospects in life has as much say politically when it comes to elections as does a very rich white person. That's what it comes down to. They've lost their power, which is not the same thing as privilege. For example, it's still the case that when you look at corporate South Africa, 62.1 percent of corporate leaders are white, and most of those are men. Only 17.2 percent are so-called Black African. And that is 30 years since the advent of democracy. What do Trump's policies mean for the South African government? They're in for four years of hell with Trump. But it is also, I'm hoping, a wake-up call for the current [African National Congress] government to take South Africa's poor much more seriously. The incompetence and the corruption of the past 30 years have, in some ways, pushed the ANC off the higher moral ground that it occupied when Mandela was president. Trump's decision to treat the chief beneficiaries of apartheid as victims of a genocide taking place only in his head gives the ANC a chance to get back on that moral high ground by reminding the world just how criminal apartheid was. The single biggest mistake that the ANC made at the moment of transition in 1994 was to assume that all that you needed to do to correct the injustices of apartheid was to create a Black capitalist class. All that this did was create this massive patronage system that had government contracts at its center. This made the Black bourgeoisie dependent on government business and encouraged corruption. Looking back over the last 30 years, we can see that thinking that you could use government contracts to create a Black business class was just a terrible idea. Ironically, the ANC copied the idea from successive apartheid governments, which used government patronage to build an Afrikaner business class. There is not a single Afrikaner [billionaire in US dollars] in South Africa today who did not get their start on the back of apartheid government contracts. Corruption is endemic, and it's a huge problem. Of course, the thing about corruption in South Africa that we forget is that it's non-racial, it cuts across racial lines. Because you need these cross-cultural and racial networks to move money around, to launder money. It's a national enterprise. Who has suffered because of the incompetence and the corruption? It's all South Africans, especially the poor. White Afrikaners as a group have not suffered exclusively. How should we think about Trump's decision to welcome white Afrikaners as refugees in the context of his gutting of US refugee admissions broadly? It is bitterly ironic that he has stopped the processing of refugee applications for everyone except this group of privileged white South Africans. Marco Rubio kicked out South Africa's ambassador to the US for pointing out the basis of Trump's animus toward South Africa, but there is no mistaking the white supremacist underpinnings of this. There is no mistaking the crude racism at the heart of this. You have here an administration that has and is punishing people who really need all the help they can get, who are coming here or are here for better opportunities for their kids and for themselves, but it will stop at nothing to take this very privileged group of white South Africans and turn them into refugees, when, in fact, they're anything but refugees. I grew up under apartheid. My mother went to her grave without having voted in the country of her birth. I grew up fighting the system. I now find myself in 2025 having to relitigate whether apartheid was wrong. That is what this amounts to: taking people who benefited and continue to benefit from this awful system called apartheid and turning them into victims and refugees. What Trump is communicating is that apartheid was right. That is morally repugnant and just plain obscene.
Vox
06-05-2025
- Politics
- Vox
Trump is attacking sanctuary cities. Will Democrats defend them?
covers politics Vox. She first joined Vox in 2019, and her work has also appeared in Politico, Washington Monthly, and the New Republic. A woman holds a sign reading 'Santuario de Inmigrantes' (immigrant sanctuary) as protesters demonstrate to protect the District of Columbia as a sanctuary city, in Washington, DC, on April 4, 2025. Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images President Donald Trump is again targeting a familiar foe: blue cities and states with 'sanctuary' policies limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities. During his first term, Trump tried to withhold federal public safety grants from states and localities that refused to allow local law enforcement to share information with federal immigration agents or hand over immigrants in their custody. The policy was struck down in federal court and was set to be reviewed by the Supreme Court. But the justices never decided the case before Trump left office, leaving the door open for him to try again in his second term. Now the fight is back: Trump issued an executive order in January to withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities and counties under US immigration law. The Department of Justice issued a subsequent memo implementing that order. But there's a key difference: Last time, Democrats were unified in their defense of sanctuary policies, seeing it as a winning issue. What's different this time is the lack of uniform opposition from Democratic leadership in some of those cities and states as the party struggles to chart a path forward on immigration. So far, the courts are siding with local officials. In April, a federal judge again struck down both the executive order and the DOJ directive as unconstitutional, ruling that they violated protections for the separation of powers, Congress's spending powers, and due process, as well as sought to unlawfully coerce local officials into enforcing federal immigration law. The court battle, however, likely isn't over. That's because Trump issued a new executive order last week directing his government to suspend federal grants to sanctuary cities and states. This time, he used a more extensive legal toolkit. In addition to invoking federal immigration law and his constitutional authority to protect the US from 'invasion,' he accuses sanctuary cities and states of crimes — including conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and harboring illegal aliens — as a basis to take away their funding. A representative from California Attorney General Rob Bonta's office, which has been at the forefront of the lawsuits related to sanctuary policies, told Vox that they were reviewing the legality of the order and did not rule out the possibility of a court challenge. 'The Trump Administration is attempting to create a culture of fear by trumpeting executive orders and inhumane policies that target our immigrant communities,' they said. 'California is not hiding the fact that we have chosen to focus our resources on public safety instead of immigration enforcement.' But it's not clear that everyone in blue states is ready to resist. Defending sanctuary policies presents a messaging challenge for Democrats. Trump's immigration policies helped propel him to victory in 2024 and remain one of the more popular elements of his agenda, even if support for them has slipped a bit recently. And some Democratic leaders aren't defending sanctuary policies as vehemently as they once did. The Logoff The email you need to stay informed about Trump — without letting the news take over your life, from senior editor Patrick Reis. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. The legal fight over sanctuary policies Trump's legal battle over sanctuary cities in his first term ended without a conclusion: The case was still before the Supreme Court when he left office, and then President Joe Biden asked the justices to dismiss it, refusing to defend his predecessor's efforts to slash funding. But now Trump is trying to revive that legal battle. Naureen Shah, director of government affairs for the ACLU's Equality Division, argued that his latest executive order has 'no legal basis,' framing it as 'another example of President Trump's relentless campaign to attack the integrity of our legal system and separation of powers by targeting judges, lawyers, and other officials who refuse to comply with his extreme agenda.' Shah said that cities and states have the right to determine how to employ their own resources. That includes 17,000 local law enforcement agencies across the country that the Trump administration is trying to deputize to carry out the president's deportation agenda. And the Democratic Mayors Association has argued that embracing Trump's latest executive order is not the best use of their resources. 'His latest executive order is a dangerous overreach targeting sanctuary cities and does nothing to address the real challenges of our broken immigration system,' Cleveland Mayor Justin M. Bibb said in a statement on behalf of the association. No lawsuit has been filed against the new executive order yet. But with millions on the line, it's likely to come soon. Trump is expected to appeal any ruling in favor of sanctuary cities, potentially taking it all the way to the Supreme Court yet again. Not all Democrats are vigorously defending sanctuary policies The national debate over sanctuary policies comes at a precarious moment for Democrats on immigration. For a while, immigration was buoying Trump's approval ratings. Surveys have also suggested that sanctuary policies specifically are divisive, with 77 percent of Republicans and 11 percent of Democrats saying in a February NPR-Ipsos poll that they approve of efforts to defund sanctuary cities and states. However, concerns about Trump's deportations of undocumented immigrants to El Salvador — including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who the government admits was deported in error — seem to have recently put a dent in Trump's poll numbers. The Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released on April 25 found that 53 percent of Americans overall now disapprove of Trump's handling of immigration, up from 48 percent in February. That may mean that the public approval of sanctuary policies is also shifting. That has put Democrats in a difficult position, as they face internal disagreements on how to handle the immigration issue. Some have been subdued in their defense of sanctuary policies. How should Democrats talk about immigration in the face of a public that remains skeptical of it, but also increasingly concerned about Trump's approach to enforcement? It started on the 2024 campaign trail, when vulnerable Democrats, including former Sens. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Jon Tester of Montana, came out against sanctuary policies. Both lost their seats. The phenomenon has continued after Trump assumed office. California Gov. Gavin Newsom — who called himself a 'poster child for sanctuary policy' during his 2017 campaign — has refrained from even using the word 'sanctuary' publicly. He has also promised to veto (for a second time) legislation that would provide new 'sanctuary' protections to immigrants in state custody. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore has advocated for due process in Abrego Garcia's case and has said that he would protect Marylanders in the face of Trump's immigration policies. But he hasn't ruled out cooperating with US Immigration Customs and Enforcement, saying in January that local cities and counties need to 'follow the Constitution' while declining to elaborate on what that meant. 'We are going to make sure that our local jurisdictions are going to follow the Constitution,' Moore said. 'We are cooperating to ensure that we are getting violent offenders off of our streets and out of our neighborhoods, frankly, regardless of where they come from.' San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan has objected to the term 'sanctuary,' telling CalMatters that it's been 'politicized by both ends of the ideological spectrum.' San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has also avoided using the term 'sanctuary' and refused to sign a nonbinding resolution reaffirming the city's sanctuary protections, saying it was his policy to 'not to comment or act on urging resolutions.' New York City Mayor Eric Adams has signaled an openness to working with the Trump administration to arrest certain immigrants connected to 'violent migrant gangs.' Though his case is unique given the controversies that have haunted his administration, and he is running for reelection as an independent. The New York City comptroller has also demanded that Adams recuse himself from all matters related to the city's sanctuary policies, including any response to Trump's latest executive order that could see the city stripped of federal grants. Earlier this year, Adams was accused of making a 'quid pro quo' deal with the Trump administration to cooperate on immigration enforcement in exchange for federal prosecutors dropping criminal charges against him; Adams has denied those allegations. The Adams administration has been 'muted, if not muzzled, in its response to the very clear and explicit threats to our City's federal funding and New Yorkers' civil liberties,' Comptroller Brad Lander wrote in a letter to Adams on April 29. A representative for Adams' office contested that the mayor has taken steps to advocate for New Yorkers when the federal government threatened the city's FEMA funding, an offshore wind project, and congestion pricing plan, saying that Lander's demands were 'desperate and detached from reality.' While Adams isn't representative of the typical Democrat, the debate in New York reflects a larger one within the party: How should they talk about immigration in the face of a public that remains skeptical of it, but also increasingly concerned about Trump's approach to enforcement?
Vox
22-04-2025
- Business
- Vox
The domestic fallout from Trump's tariffs, in 3 charts
covers politics Vox. She first joined Vox in 2019, and her work has also appeared in Politico, Washington Monthly, and the New Republic. Economists say the spike in certain spending is neither sustainable nor evidence of a healthy economy. Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images It's not just the stock market. In the few weeks since President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs, a series of indicators from across the economy suggest anxiety — or even outright panic — is in the economic driver's seat. Consumer confidence is at a near-record low. People are panic-buying products that are likely to see major price hikes soon, from cars to consumer electronics. Businesses are also already predicting a slowdown in production, suggesting that Trump's tariffs are actually working against his stated — and likely impossible — goal of reviving American manufacturing. This has a real impact on the health of the US economy. Confident consumers spend and support confident businesses, which fuel economic growth and hire workers. Trump can't achieve his goals of onshoring manufacturing and ushering in a golden era of American prosperity when both consumers and businesses are spooked. It might be too early to tell whether Trump's tariffs will lead to a recession, but it's clear that they are already shifting economic activity in the US. Here's what the data show. Related 3 signs the US might already be in a recession Consumers are shopping scared The leading metric of consumer confidence is the University of Michigan's consumer confidence index, which measures how favorable Americans feel about the economy based on their responses to a series of survey questions. That index plunged immediately after Trump's tariffs, down to 50.9 — lower than during the Great Recession and close to the historic low in the period following the Covid-19 pandemic. This suggests that Trump's tariffs are not just sending shockwaves through the stock market, but also the pocketbooks of everyday Americans, who were already struggling with the aftermath of high inflation. Economists expect that consumers will eventually pull back on spending as a result. But in the short term, they appear to be stocking up. But economists say the spike in certain spending is neither sustainable nor evidence of a healthy economy. 'When you announce you're doing tariffs in two weeks, that's going to lead to a big decline in spending in two weeks, but it may lead to a really big increase in spending in the short term,' said Michael Madowitz, principal economist at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive economic think tank. 'I bought a bunch of parts to fix my really old car.' He's not the only one: In March, motor vehicle and parts dealers saw a 5.3 percent increase in sales from the previous month and an 8.8 percent rise from the same month last year. Trump had, at that point, announced 25 percent tariffs on fully assembled automobiles, scheduled to take effect by May 3. In March, electronics and appliance stores also saw a 0.8 percent increase from February and a 1.8 percent increase from the same month last year. China is one of the world's largest producers of consumer electronics, and Trump had been talking about hitting it with tariffs for months at that point. Trump has since offered a limited exception for consumer electronics from his baseline 145 percent tariff on Chinese imports, but it's not clear how much that will insulate those products from price hikes. Trump has also said that consumer electronics could face additional, yet-to-be-announced tariffs on products that contain semiconductors. American manufacturing is in trouble Trump has promised that 'jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country' as a result of his tariffs. His hope is that, in making it more expensive to import foreign goods, companies will seek to invest in bringing their production to the US, therefore bringing prices down for American consumers in the long run. He also claims that the tariffs will stop other countries from 'cheating' America with trade imbalances. However, economists were skeptical of those claims from the outset. The Economist called the tariffs the 'most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era,' based on an 'utterly deluded' understanding of economics and history. Now, the data shows that Trump's tariffs are having the opposite of their intended effect: US manufacturing has slowed in the weeks since he made the announcement, and economists expect that trend to continue. Surveys of American manufacturers conducted by the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Philadelphia revealed a pessimistic outlook. Both expectations for general business activity and for new product orders declined sharply in April. The New York Fed's future general business conditions index dropped from 12.7 in March to 7.4 this month, its second-lowest reading in more than two decades. The Philadelphia Fed's new order index dropped from 8.7 in March to -34.2 this month, its lowest reading since April 2020, just after the pandemic began. That's bad news for the businesses that Trump said would benefit from his tariff policies, but are now struggling to plan for the months and years ahead in an environment of such uncertainty. In an effort to convince him to abandon the tariffs, some American manufacturers have avoided criticizing them directly and instead sought to promote how much they are already investing heavily in their US factories. But it's not clear that even overtures from American manufacturing leaders and panic among consumers will persuade Trump to give up his decades-long obsession with tariffs as a solution to what he perceives as foreign trade barriers.
Vox
11-04-2025
- Politics
- Vox
He was deported in error. Why won't the government provide any information about him?
covers politics Vox. She first joined Vox in 2019, and her work has also appeared in Politico, Washington Monthly, and the New Republic. Kilmar Abrego Garcia's mother holds a picture of her son and his family during a news conference to discuss his son's arrest and Thursday, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man it had sent to a notorious Salvadoran mega-prison in what the government has conceded was an 'administrative error.' Not one of the justices dissented from that ruling. The justices sent the case back to the federal trial court. The court asked for information by Friday morning on Abrego Garcia's whereabouts and what steps the government has taken and will take going forward to facilitate his return. But the government came up empty-handed. Its lawyers said they couldn't provide that information on time, effectively defying the court's order. The Logoff The email you need to stay informed about Trump — without letting the news take over your life, from senior editor Patrick Reis. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. 'Foreign affairs cannot operate on judicial timelines, in part because it involves sensitive country-specific considerations wholly inappropriate for judicial review,' they wrote in a court filing. Essentially, the administration is saying it can't deliver information on Abrego Garcia on time because he is in the custody of a foreign government, and that facilitating his return may require sensitive foreign policy considerations. The US is paying the Salvadoran government to imprison hundreds of deportees, 90 percent of whom have no criminal record. But immigration law experts said that foreign policy cannot justify the Trump administration's failure to return Abrego Garcia. 'The idea that somehow this is something other than just picking up the phone and saying, 'Get this guy back here,' is absolute poppycock,' said Paul Wickham Schmidt, a retired immigration judge and professor at Georgetown University Law Center. 'The idea that this is some sort of sensitive foreign relations is BS.' This is the second time that the Trump administration has effectively ignored a court order. The first time, it refused to turn around deportation flights headed to El Salvador midair, arguing that US federal courts had no authority outside the US. On Friday afternoon, the judge ordered the administration to provide daily updates on its plan to bring Abrego Garcia back — as the government slow-walks an order to return a man it, by its own admission, put in grave danger via an 'administrative error.' Where is Kilmar Abrego Garcia? The Trump administration's reluctance to provide any information about Abrego Garcia raises serious concerns about his safety. In 2019, an immigration judge granted Abrego Garcia relief from deportation to El Salvador because he faced the risk of being targeted by gangs. Though the government has accused him of being a member of the MS-13 gang, that was never proven in court. 'If the government is now refusing to acknowledge that he is somewhere in that country, that's suspicious,' said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a professor at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and author of several books on US immigration enforcement, including Welcome the Wretched. 'It's alarming to see the Justice Department refuse to even acknowledge that he is there or anywhere else on the face of the earth.' Why the government's stonewalling should worry everyone The government's actions are part of a larger picture of attacks on the rule of law, Schmidt said. 'They're targeting law firms that represent people against the government,' he said. 'They're defunding legal services. They're putting people in obscure locations. They're compromising the immigration courts.' There's no telling how far protections for civil liberties could unravel from here, García Hernández said. A recent Supreme Court ruling doesn't provide much assurance: The justices found that the Trump administration could not deport people like Abrego Garcia to El Salvador under an obscure, 18th-century law without allowing them the opportunity to challenge their deportations in a US court. But that assumes that those targeted have access to legal counsel, and that's hard to come by in some of the remote areas where they have been detained. Related The ugly history behind the obscure law Trump is using for mass deportations While the Trump administration might now be targeting unsympathetic figures — people it accuses of ties to gangs — that might give way to broader assaults on individual rights.
Vox
10-04-2025
- Business
- Vox
What Trump's tariff pause can't solve
covers politics Vox. She first joined Vox in 2019, and her work has also appeared in Politico, Washington Monthly, and the New Republic. President Donald Trump holds a reciprocal tariffs poster during a tariff announcement at the White House on April 2, 2025. Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images Much has apparently changed in the last 24 hours in the US economy. With a single post on Truth Social, however, Trump seemed to begin to turn things around. He announced a 90-day pause on some of the extremely high country-specific tariffs he'd announced last week. And while Trump also announced further escalation in the trade war with China, the 90-day reprieve was enough to boost the nation's economic outlook: The S&P 500 surged in response, Goldman rescinded its recession prediction, and US Treasury yields — a partial metric of economic uncertainty — also decreased somewhat. For the many Americans anxiously watching their stock portfolios amid the tariff chaos, this should be good news. But even with some of the tariffs paused, there's a deeper economic malaise taking hold. The uncertainty created by Trump's whiplash-inducing changes to the US's trade policy is not just going to evaporate. And even at their current level, Trump's tariffs are already upending the global trade order in hard-to-predict ways. That's a problem for business owners, investors, and the everyday Americans impacted by their decisions. Uncertainty is toxic to US businesses Trump's announcement of a 90-day pause has brought some relief to investors and business owners who previously had no time to prepare for one of the most significant changes to US trade policy in the better part of a century. Dominic Pappalardo, Morningstar Wealth's chief multi-asset strategist, said that those affected now have 'at least a small window to prepare, plan, and adjust for the impact.' The pause also allows individual countries time to negotiate the tariffs and for the US to pare them back. 'I believe these windows of optimism are what caused markets to rally so aggressively on today's announcement,' Pappalardo said. But the pullback did nothing to address economic uncertainty. The economy runs on confidence in the future. Businesses make plans months or years in advance in the hope that their investments will eventually pay dividends. Consumers, too, are more likely to spend on goods and services that these businesses sell when they feel good about their prospects. Their spending helps support economic growth and a solid job market. However, despite Wall Street's initial enthusiasm, the US economy is now grappling with increased uncertainty due to Trump's reckless tariff threats and only partial reversal. Today, Explained Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day, compiled by news editor Sean Collins. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Before Trump assumed office, many investors bet on a 'Trump put,' the notion that the president would design his policies to bolster the stock market. A flat 10 percent tariff on all imports was then considered a nightmare scenario. And when considering tariffs on China and other countries together, the effective tariff rate is now 25 percent higher than it was before. Substantively, these tariffs are still steep. They will negatively impact the economy: Producers are still likely to pass on higher costs to American consumers and to lay off their workers, potentially causing unemployment to rise. But even outside of those direct impacts, the way Trump hurriedly rolled out these tariffs — and then quickly changed course — is not a comforting sign for anyone trying to do business in the US. The American economy now appears to be subject to the whims of a man who has what The Economist called an 'utterly deluded' understanding of economics and history. That's left business owners and investors questioning whether it's worth taking the risk of sinking more money into the US market. That uncertainty isn't going away just because Trump hit pause on some of his proposed tariffs. 'Uncertainty is what's crushing the markets right now,' Preston Caldwell, Morningstar's chief US economist, said ahead of the pause.
