THE TRUMP UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE. Back in 2016, when I was covering Donald Trump‘s first presidential campaign, I met a number of Republican voters who were open to Trump — they weren’t thrilled by other candidates, such as Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio — but they were not quite able to commit to supporting the businessman candidate. One big reason was the daily dose of controversy and hubbub that seemed to follow Trump around, courtesy of his own campaign style and a hostile and click-crazy media.
Some GOP voters had no problem with it because they saw Trump as fundamentally on their side and primed to shake up a hidebound Republican Party. But others were uncomfortable with the daily din, which created in them a level of uncertainty and anxiety about what Trump would do next. This is what I wrote about it in February 2016:
Everyone has a certain tolerance level for uncertainty, disorder, and controversy. If a candidate’s campaign stays below that level, all is fine. If it climbs above that level, a voter may begin to think a candidate is more trouble than he’s worth. The voter sees the campaign as a taxing experience — it’s just one thing after another — and looks for an alternative choice. The problem is, Trump has an apparently infinite tolerance for uncertainty, disorder, and controversy. He can be comfortable and prosper in a campaign that just wears some of his voters out.
Here’s the thing. After everything that has happened since then — Trump’s victory, presidency, defeat, and victory again — the Trump uncertainty principle still applies. In his second term, he has had the most energetic start to a presidency perhaps ever; he has broad and deep support among Republicans and independents; he has flummoxed his Democratic opposition; and he has laid the groundwork for what could be an enormously consequential time in office. And yet, he is still capable of creating uncertainty that he finds tolerable but that makes many voters uncomfortable. He is doing it now in two ways — with tariffs and with the Department of Government Efficiency.
On tariffs, the problem is not that Trump believes in tariffs. In case anyone has forgotten, he has been president before, has imposed tariffs before, and there were predictions of doom that did not come true. The problem today is that Trump has spoken for a long time, throughout the campaign and now his presidency, about imposing broad tariffs, but now he seems to be having trouble pulling the trigger.
Look at this, from the Wall Street Journal: “The U.S. partially pulled back tariffs on some goods from Mexico and Canada after markets sank and companies lobbied President Trump, as the administration’s swerving trade policy strained relations with allies and raised recession fears. Trump gave America’s neighbors and biggest trading partners a one-month reprieve from 25% tariffs on a range of goods, setting up another showdown for April 2. It was the second time in a month that Trump had retreated from tariffs on Mexico and Canada, highlighting the uncertainty of his trade policies as he also raises duties on Chinese goods and moves ahead with plans for broader tariffs imposed on a host of countries next month.”
What to make of it? Trump aides have portrayed the Mexico and Canada tariffs not as a “trade war” but as a “drug war.” As far as fentanyl is concerned, Trump has a much better case to make against Mexico than Canada, but the point is the implementation, or non-implementation, of his policy has created uncertainty all around. (Notice that this is not about Trump’s tariffs on China, which he began imposing in his first term and former President Joe Biden kept in place.)
As far as Mexico and Canada are concerned, though, the uncertainty about what Trump will do next is really upsetting a lot of businesses. If Trump imposed the tariffs and stuck with them, the businesses would work on dealing with the new situation. If Trump canceled the tariffs, they would move on. But with the tariffs on and then off, they are in a state of uncertainty and agitation, and reasonably so. Trump needs to show them that he has settled on a policy and will pursue it.
As for DOGE, Elon Musk’s effort to root out government waste, fraud, and inefficiency has targeted a lot of federal spending that is either ridiculous, unnecessary, duplicative, or in other ways a waste of taxpayer money. It claims to have saved $105 billion so far, claims that have been hotly contested by many Democrats. In any event, it has gotten rid of a lot of government spending that should never have happened.
Where DOGE has created a great level of uncertainty is in layoffs. Each day, there are news stories about X number of employees at X agency being laid off. There are a number of reports that 62,000 federal workers were let go in February. Is that accurate? It’s hard to know. There is a report that the Department of Veterans Affairs plans to cut 80,000 jobs. Is that accurate? And those are just a few of the many reports of job cuts all over the government. Are they really taking place? Who is leaving, and how did they come to be fired?
The questions got so intense that the president felt the need to address, if not really answer, them on Thursday. First, he reportedly told Cabinet secretaries at a closed-door meeting that they, and not Musk, are in charge of who works for their departments and who will be fired. In public statements later, Trump emphasized that the firings would be done carefully and would not affect government workers whose jobs are really necessary.
Cabinet heads should be “very precise as to who will remain and who will go,” Trump said. “We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’ … It’s very important that we cut levels down to where they should be, but it’s also important to keep the best and most productive people.”
One point of Trump’s remarks was to address an obvious conflict: Who is in charge of, say, the Department of Agriculture — the secretary of agriculture or the head of DOGE? Well, first of all, the president is in charge of them all. Beyond that, remember that when Musk began DOGE, there were few confirmed Cabinet secretaries. Now, there are more, and they are by rights the officials who make decisions for their departments.
A second point of Trump’s remarks was to address the public’s uncertainty about what is going on. Is DOGE really targeting, to cite some reports, the Federal Aviation Administration and air traffic controllers? That’s an area of pretty strong public interest. What is going on? No administration should ever dive into an area like that without explaining to the public precisely what it is doing and why it will make things better.
These two examples, tariffs and DOGE, show that Trump has not lost his tolerance for high levels of uncertainty. The problem is many voters do not share that tolerance. It also appears Wall Street does not share that tolerance, with markets plunging on several days.
So, the president, the man who can withstand sky-high levels of uncertainty and disorder, is taking steps to reassure voters who can’t. If he is to succeed, Trump will have to keep pushing a sclerotic and change-averse bureaucracy to improve. But he will have to remember that he can’t make voters too nervous while he’s doing it.
