The blink that defined Trump’s first 100 days

Donald Trump’s first 100 days back in the Oval Office have upended all universal understanding. The global trade order has been turned on its head. Due process has morphed from a right to a vibe. Capital letters have been torn out of style guides and set loose in the wild west of social media. “We don’t have a Free and Fair “Press” in this Country anymore” the President shared on his Truth Social account, setting the tone for this week of reflection and analysis. Why are so many of those words capitalized? Why bother asking. It’s not supposed to make all that much sense. That is the President’s preferred political climate: a little chaotic, a little confusing, utterly exhausting.

This is, of course, deliberate on the administration’s part. The less we can say for certain, the more Team Trump can claim some kind of 4D chess is taking place. The messiness is a necessary component to landing on a clean, good outcome. That was the lesson from his first term, anyway: flirt with nuclear war on Twitter, get a friendly sit-down with North Korea’s famously antagonistic dictator. Threaten tariffs on friends and foes, get renegotiated trade agreements that seemingly work in America’s favour.

The first 100 days of Trump’s second term was in many ways a rehash of these tactics, on a much more aggressive scale. The President’s supporters say he was simply prepared this time round: rather than learning on the job – and struggling to surround himself with “doers” for years – he came back into the White House with an agenda and people who could implement it in a matter of weeks.

He was indeed prepared, it turned out, to act on what he had promised on the campaign trail. It was the outcomes of those actions that appear to have been less thought through. Opting for the strangest tariff calculations, for example – turning trade deficit figures into import taxes – sent the markets spiralling. For all the claims that Team Trump didn’t care about the panic, the 90-day pause suggested heavily that they did. That the Treasury Secretary had to plead with the President to suspend the tariffs – in an off-the-books, clandestine meeting – still has markets wobbling. Investors know that the chaos Trump so often enjoys – in this case, the uncertainty over how tariff decisions are made and what comes next – still looms large.

No one can be certain how this all pans out. The President appears to be oscillating between exploring full-blown free trade agreements with every country and doubling down on his tariff plans – two very different options that would lead to dramatically different results. Yet for all the executive orders signed, for all the departments slashed or abolished, it was this sequence with the tariffs in his first 100 days that I suspect will define his presidency – not because of the announcements or even the turmoil – but because Trump blinked.

Trump took the tariffs too far, and he knew it. He couldn’t hold out to see if markets would calm or stocks would rally. Within a week he had to U-turn and try to chalk it up as a win. While it was the right decision in the end, it was public, it was obvious, and it rebalanced power overnight.

It was the blink seen round the world. Vladimir Putin saw Trump blink, and continued on with his killing sprees in Ukraine. Europe saw the President blink and banded together in preparation to retaliate. American businesses saw him blink, and are now suspending US investment plans until the trade disagreements are solved on favorable terms. Most worryingly, the Chinese Communist party saw Trump blink – and the weight of the White House’s threats against China, were she to put a foot out of line, became much less heavy.

We won’t know the full implications for some time. But the President’s future plans – to bring an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine, to keep China contained (and away from Taiwan) – have been made much more difficult to achieve, now that the precedent has been set that Trump will back down. Always happy to change his mind – but never at the whim of external circumstances or other’s demands – the world now knows that the Dow is superior to Trump’s mandates.

The President’s desire to avoid a depression (phew) is the right instinct – but putting his red lines on display in his first 100 days – through his own choices, no less – has made his lofty ambitions for this second term much harder to achieve.

Can the President build back his chaotic edge? Only time WiLL TeLL.