When news broke that the White House had appealed the U.S. Court of International Trade’s ruling that most of President Donald Trump’s tariffs are illegal, I thought of the old familiar story of the man who lived by the river.
Upon hearing a weather report that the river will flood, he resolves to stay. “God will save me,” he says. After being swept into the river, he’s carried past a branch he doesn’t reach for. “God will save me,” he says. He doesn’t take the hand of a fisherman in his boat because, again, “God will save me.” When the drowned man gets to heaven, he asks why God let him drown, and God replies, “I sent you a weather report, a branch and a boat. What are you doing here?”
Over the four months that Trump has blundered ahead with sweeping tariffs, he has been offered chance after chance to change course— and rejected them all. But unlike the man in the story, Trump isn’t by himself in the river. We all are.
Voters were the next to warn Trump he was headed the wrong direction.
The earliest warning to the president came from the markets. They tumbled as he imposed and pulled back on tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico — and then things got worse. When Trump revealed his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April, he promised, “The markets are going to boom.” In fact, they plunged in their worst day since the beginning of the Covid pandemic. After a week of promising the tariffs would be imposed as scheduled, Trump announced a 90-day delay for all countries other than China.
At this point, the pattern is so predictable — stocks drop when Trump threatens tariffs and rise when he delays those threats — that traders have a new strategy: “TACO” or “Trump Always Chickens Out.” Informed of the TACO acronym by CNBC’s Megan Casella at a media availability Wednesday, the president lashed out at the “nasty question” and told Casella, “Don’t ever say what you said.”
Voters were the next to warn Trump he was headed the wrong direction. The president’s polling decline accelerated after the “Liberation Day” announcement and stabilized only after he paused those tariffs.
The Court of International Trade’s decision — and a similar ruling from a federal district court judge Thursday — provided Trump with the perfect excuse to make the tariff “pause” permanent. The trade court’s three-judge panel (one Democratic and two Republican appointees) ruled unanimously, and the reasoning was straightforward: A decades-old emergency powers law didn’t “delegate an unbounded tariff authority” to the president, and both the reciprocal tariffs of “Liberation Day” and the levies on Canada and Mexico exceeded the president’s authorities under that law.
A sane administration, facing voters, markets and courts throwing up their hands and shouting “stop!” would heed those calls. But even as Trump delays and delays most of the blanket tariffs, he hasn’t abandoned them (and his 25% tariffs on steel, cars and aluminum remain in place). There is no reason to think court rulings will change his mind.
Investors quickly realized that Trump is still Trump, and chaos still reigns.
The president’s advisers reacted to the trade court’s decision with both rage (“a judicial coup,” said Stephen Miller) and dismissal (“a hiccup,” said National Economic Council Chair Kevin Hassett). The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has already temporarily paused the ruling. And even if the trade court’s decision survives, there are multiple other statutes Trump could use to reimpose tariffs, albeit in a more deliberative and limited fashion.
No wonder, then, that, though stock futures jumped ahead of markets’ opening Thursday, those gains disappeared almost entirely. Investors quickly realized that Trump is still Trump and chaos still reigns. Other than the investors winning TACO trades, the country is hurting from the chaos. The U.S. economy shrank in the first quarter, even without the worst effects of sweeping tariffs. Consumer spending grew 1.2%, less than half the average from 2022 to 2024. A Reuters analysis of disclosures from America, Europe and Japan’s largest companies finds “an overwhelming majority say the erratic nature of Trump’s trade policies has made it impossible to accurately estimate costs” and that Trump’s on-again, off-again trade war has already hit those companies with $34 billion in higher costs. Meanwhile, small businesses, lacking the financial resources and the political influence of the largest companies, face even stronger headwinds. Duties on materials for everything from water bottles to cowboy boots have raised costs — and many, if not all, of those costs will be passed on to us. And those are just the most tangible effects. “What we’re really not seeing is the businesses that aren’t being started,” economics professor Justin Wolfers told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday. “There’s a factory that could be built,” but the cost of imports “either just went up 50% or went up 10%, but no one can be sure.” The markets, the voters and two courts have all offered Trump a hand to rescue him from this river of madness. But he has rejected every entreaty. As is so often the case with Trump, though, it’ll be others who drown.
James Downie is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. 
