The Hubris Is Off the Charts
We’re in the middle of a self-inflicted financial collapse, but look at the bright side: The president won a golf tournament this weekend.
Hey Siri, is it a good thing to open the week with market experts issuing reminders about where the stock exchange circuit-breaker points are? Happy Monday.
Hubris Flourishes
by Andrew Egger
DOGE burning down the federal government. RFK Jr. destroying our health agencies’ credibility. The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security running roughshod over judicial norms and safeguards.
We’ve been making the same point repeatedly for months now: Once you break it, good luck fixing it.
Now comes the big one: Trump is breaking the entire global economy, which is in cardiac arrest over his outrageously nonsensical tariffs. U.S. markets have hemorrhaged $11 trillion in value since Inauguration Day. More than half of that came in just the last few days, as markets have tried futilely to solve for Trump’s brain-boggling policy goal of zero trade deficits with any other country.
Amid their frenzied selloff, traders cling to a single lifeline: the increasingly desperate hope this is all some sort of feint. Surely this must still be a negotiating tactic. The end of this insanity can’t be far off.
If Trump suddenly yanked his tariffs off tomorrow, the markets would largely rebound. But his team insists he won’t—and the clock is ticking. These tariffs, which go into effect Wednesday, amount to extinction conditions for many U.S. businesses. The longer they last, the more real, irreversible economic damage will start to pile up: businesses closing down, workers being laid off, recession looming larger.
And yet, what stands out most about this moment is how truly unbothered Trump appears. It’s not just confidence that his hairbrained plan will work out eventually; it’s indifference to all the suffering he is causing. It’s easy to insist that a little pain will be good for us when one doesn’t have to experience it for themselves.
Trump spent the weekend telling reporters “markets will BOOM,” posting to Truth Social an all-caps vow that “ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!”, and scooting down to Florida to faff around at a weekend golf tournament. The White House announced on Saturday that “the President won his second round matchup of the Senior Club Championship.” The next day, Trump himself shared the news that he had won the “Championship Round.”
“It’s good to win,” he told reporters on Air Force One on the way back to D.C. “You heard I won, right? Did you hear I won? Just to back it up, you were there, I won. I like to win.”
Later on the flight, he reiterated his lunatic goal for his tariff regime for anyone who’d happened to miss it. World leaders, he said, “are dying to make a deal. And I said, we’re not going to have deficits with your country. We’re not going to do that, because to me a deficit is a loss. We’re going to have surpluses or at worst, going to be breaking even.” Futures markets sagged another four points.
What takes your breath away is the hubris. The window for a quick and relatively painless exit from this trade war is closing very fast. Trump spent a whole weekend ostentatiously not working on it.
But of course hubris has been the organizing principle of Trump’s life. And it has now grown into the organizing principle of a White House made in his image.
The hubris is everywhere you look. Over the weekend, Attorney General Pam Bondi placed a Justice Department prosecutor on administrative leave. His misdeed? Acknowledging to a judge Friday that he didn’t have good answers to explain under what authority immigration officials had seized Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man the administration acknowledged last week it had erroneously deported. Bondi informed Erez Reuveni, acting deputy director for the Office of Immigration Litigation, that he had failed “to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States.”
Meanwhile, the White House was sneering off a judicial order requiring them to seek Abrego Garcia’s return. “Marxist judge now thinks she’s president of El Salvador,” Trump adviser Stephen Miller tweeted. Bukele openly jeered the judge’s order on Friday, to the great amusement of Elon Musk.
That’s raw hubris. So is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the most powerful anti-vaxxer ever to make it into government, attending the weekend funeral of a Texas girl who died last week of measles. Kennedy told reporters Sunday that “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.” Left unaddressed was how he once said there was no such thing as a “safe and effective” vaccine and the anti-vax crank he brought aboard HHS to “study” the debunked link between vaccines and autism.
These people are adrift in self-spun fantasias; they are utterly high on their own supply. They have inflicted tremendous damage to our country in such a short period of time.
But their actions are also losing propositions in the end. They seem not to realize how much their program of populist lawlessness and antiscience zealotry relies on the perception of broad public support—and how difficult public support, once lost, is for a president and his team to regain.
Hubris Fails
by William Kristol
Three brief supplementary reflections on Andrew’s excellent item on Trump’s soaring hubris:
1. There’s no question that Trump’s hubris has gotten more marked since his comeback after January 6th, and then since his election to a second term. Here’s one more small but telling example.
During his first term, in 2018, Trump wanted to stage a big military parade in Washington, D.C. But there was pushback from the military, from Congress, and from the D.C. government. Trump backed down and it didn’t happen.
His second term could be different. As the Washington City Paper reported yesterday:
According to a D.C. source with knowledge of the plan that’s still being developed, Trump has commandeered Saturday, June 14—the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army and, as it happens, Trump’s 79th birthday—for his military parade. It would stretch almost four miles from the Pentagon in Arlington to the White House, according to the source, who stressed that local officials are just learning of it.
Such grandstanding seems like a classic pride-goeth-before-the-fall moment. So I’m marking down June 14, 2025 as the coming high water mark of Trump’s hubris. And it’s an apt date—the eighty-fifth anniversary of the Germans entering Paris on June 14, 1940.
It may seem like wishful thinking to expect this to be Trump’s high water mark. But I think it’s plausible. After all, if Trump’s poll numbers keep dropping by about a point a month, as they have been—and this is pre-tariffs—he’ll be down below 45 percent approval by the time of his hubristic extravaganza.
2. The Founders understood the dangers of hubris. They built a system to provide guardrails against it. The separation of powers is a key part of that, as ambition was to counteract ambition. Other features of the American republic, ranging from the the Electoral College to the very size of the republic, were designed to limit the ability of one hubristic man to take over and exert unchecked power. And political parties, which emerged in the 19th century, were also designed to channel and limit the sway of any one individual.
These guardrails have been weakened. That’s our fault, not Trump’s. Trump’s hubris may be his weakness, but his success has been our failure. But perhaps by June we will awaken and begin to act to rectify our failure.
3. Life and literature suggest that hubris fails. Hubris is punished in the end. It brings nemesis. It results in tragedy.
The trouble is that a considerable cost is paid. Great damage is done. We know this from the Greeks, and from Shakespeare. But we also know this from a source closer to home, from that American tragedy, The Great Gatsby—published 100 years ago this week.
I’m confident Trump’s hubris will do him in. He will be a failed president.
The question is whether he’ll leave us a failed country.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Weekend Editions… of Overtime; Lauren covered the big backlash to the big Democrats sitting in posh positions at big law in The Opposition; and Jonathan Cohn’s The Breakdown identifies Trump’s next target: Poverty-stricken kids.
On the pods…
TOM JOSCELYN joins BILL KRISTOL on The Bulwark on Sunday to discuss how central conspiracy theories are to MAGA.
JVL and TIM MILLER break down Jonathan’s emergency Triad on why ‘The Age of America is Over.’
JONATHAN COHN joins SAM STEIN to talk about his newsletter on the disaster that is RFK Jr.
TIM MILLER riffs on the 60 Minutes expose about the horrors of the El Salvador prison where Trump this weekend floated sending Americans convicted of crimes.
WILL SOMMER joins SARAH LONGWELL on The Focus Group to check in with Biden-Trump voters and see how the Trumpy base is taking all of this economic winning.
Time for Democrats to Pitch Their Own ‘Contract with America’... Resistance is necessary, writes JILL LAWRENCE, not futile. “But we need more than that, starting now.”
Quick Hits
TROUBLE AT COURT: Among the more notable critics of Trump’s trade war with the world: Elon Musk.
With his armada of international businesses, Musk is acutely aware of how disruptive the White House’s new tariff regime is likely to be. He commented Saturday that he would like to see a “zero-tariff situation” between the United States and Europe.
But he also got remarkably personal about the trade war on social media—going after Trump’s top protectionist trade adviser Peter Navarro. On Friday, the noisome X account “Insurrection Barbie” posted a clip of Navarro waving off the market crash: “Here is Peter Navarro explaining the tariffs and contrary to the paid fake expert class that is usually on corporate media, Peter Navarro has a PhD in economics from Harvard. He’s also not going to lie to you about what is happening to a globalist agenda.”
“A PhD in Econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing,” Musk replied. “Results in the ego/brains>>1 problem.”
On Sunday, Navarro clapped back. “It was interesting to hear Elon Musk talk about a zero tariff zone with Europe. He doesn’t understand that,” he told Fox News. “The thing that I think is important about Elon to understand is, he sells cars.”
Three words: Let. Them. Fight.
BUREAUCRACY, WHO NEEDS IT?: Our collective attention may be on the collapsing markets today. But don’t forget, the government is collapsing too. The DOGE team has continued to insert itself into various agencies with designs on reducing operations and staff levels. A new round of deferred resignation offers (the infamous Fork in the Road emails) have gone out to several departments—the most recent being Treasury, according to internal emails seen by The Bulwark. The cuts elsewhere are having real world implications. The Washington Post reports the following from the Social Security Administration, which has faced deep cuts to its IT crew:
Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online.
The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts—or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.
WHO’S NEXT AT NSA?: Last week, President Trump made two significant personnel moves within the intelligence community. First, he removed Ralph Goff, a CIA veteran and vocal Ukraine supporter, from consideration as the CIA’s chief of clandestine operations, three weeks after the Washington Post reported that he had been selected.
Then on Thursday, Trump fired Lt. Gen. Tim Haugh, the commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, after meeting with right-wing provocateur and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. In her telling, Loomer persuaded the president to oust Haugh because former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley had recommended him.
I served under Gen. Haugh multiple times throughout my twenty-year career. He was highly regarded by officers and enlisted alike for his cyber acumen and incredible leadership skills. The Air Force has always been a leader in the cyber domain, and the service had high hopes for a trusted, experienced officer of its own in the important role.
Of course, as disappointing as it is that Haugh is out, the really troubling question is who will replace him. The NSA has unparalleled capabilities that, if directed by someone without integrity and character, could become very scary very quickly.
—Will Selber
Cheap Shots
"Let them play golf!!" Donald J. (Marie Antoinette) Trump
Don’t forget that Lutnick then mentions robots will be affixing the tiny screws, “and humans will repair the robots.” Sure they will. AI robots will be doing the repair. The 1950’s aren’t coming back with the factories employing tens of thousands to put a nut on a bolt. No one wants to return to the textile mills of the South, or the rending plants of old Chicago’s south side.