Maybe the talks with Mexico and Canada amount to nothing. Or maybe the threat moves them onto Trump’s breakneck timetable.

I still disagree with Charles that Donald Trump is acting out of pure caprice, and with Dominic that severe economic harm was done, and with Noah that Trump started a “crisis” with his tariff threats. And I’m pretty sure I disagree that the incident revealed Trump to be a cheap date.

I find all of this premature as analysis and slightly hysterical in tone. I can’t help but think we are making this mistake because the subject is tariffs, which are treated more like a foreign religion’s mysterious statutes than a policy. On other subjects, we tend to understand Trump better.

I’ll focus on Charlie’s reply to me in the Corner, “Trump Is All over The Place on Tariffs,” and hit the other points along the way.

Charles holds that Trump is just flitting from one idea to the other, and anyone who is making sense of it is using a post-hoc rationalization (and he may be right about certain commentators). Charles correctly says that in the last week Trump has talked about the various uses of tariffs (for revenue, for re-industrializing, for use as negotiating tools), as if they all worked that way at once. Charles contrasts my post about the various uses of tariffs (which call for differences in design and implementation) with Trump’s rhetoric. This sets up an amusing contrast between the (deliberately) technical and understated tone of my prose and Charlie’s colorful analogies. My “discrete ends” and “tool of statesmanship” get parodied by Trump whose action is held to be akin to “walking into a bank, pulling out a gun, informing the teller that there is nothing she can do to prevent a hostage situation, and, having created a crisis, only then seeing whether he could use the situation to negotiate a couple of points off his mortgage rate.”

This is Charlie articulating the view put out by Noah that having started a “crisis,” Trump backed away from his intentions, and accepted the saving fig leaves offered to him in the form of cooperative tweets from our two neighbors.

The evidence for this interpretation is just drawing a straight line from Trump’s statement that the tariffs were unavoidable, to the fact that much of what Mexico and Canada were offering had been offered before the tariff threats or were reportedly on the way before the tariff threats.

Well, if we’re going on previous reports, shouldn’t we note that Trump’s economic team had already telegraphed that a tariff threat was coming, that it was related to the fentanyl crisis, and that its purpose was to be a starting point for negotiations? In January incoming Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explained: “You should think of tariffs three ways: one will be for remedying unfair trade practices either in an industry or by a country, like steel and China. Another will be as a revenue source, and third is to use it for negotiations with countries like Mexico for the fentanyl crisis, for example.” Combined with the strong hints in the fact-sheet — language about leverage — there was all the reason in the world to believe that this was, as I said, a species of negotiation.

So, Mexico (at the very least) knew that such an announcement was coming. Perhaps Canada did also. That leaves one of two explanations for the events of the last few days. 1) It’s all theater. Our neighbors knew we were going to do this. They issued press releases about things we knew they were going to do, and nothing substantial will come of this except a fight over the headlines, with Trump declaring victory and some free-traders declaring disaster. 2) There is some substantive agenda on which Trump would like the three countries to act in concert.

My objection to the analysis offered by Charlie and Noah is that it was premature, taking it as a given that Trump wanted to impose the tariff, that this kicked off a crisis, and that it was all over with nothing to discuss. As with Trump’s trade actions in the first administration, I will wait to see if anything substantive comes at the end of the process, rather than declare defeat at the beginning.

And if I may offer my own colorful analogy: Just because you pissed your pants, having confused a predicted meteor shower with an imminent extra-terrestrial invasion, doesn’t mean there is a general crisis and that every one of us also has extra laundry to do today. The “crisis” was entirely the social-media-reinforced disgust of the commentariat. Everyone else played their role. A 0.5 percent daily movement of equity prices is normal, not a sign of economic heart failure. Maybe other people had already priced in Bessent’s promise of a tariff threat to start negotiations. It’s easy to “shrug off” a non-crisis.

I can hear the objection now. But Trump said! But Trump said!

Yeah, Trump said. Most of us have gotten canny on this. Even most of us here at National Review. You can tell that the dander is up because the particular issue is tariffs; we have long since stopped judging Trump and his rhetoric this way on other issues. Consider Panama breaking its deal with China and committing to cooperation with the United States. If we held Trump to the standard Charlie and Noah did on tariffs, then Trump’s inaugural address, promising that we would take back the canal, would have kicked off a “crisis” about the imminent invasion of Panama and repossession of the canal. So too his repeated vows not to rule out military options. When Trump’s emissaries then negotiated a deal that ended with Panama not renewing with China, pledging to new cooperation with the United States, and advertising his country’s sovereignty, Trump would have revealed himself to have “settled” for a cheap substitute of his initial policy goals. One that surely all our allies and enemies would notice, leading to trouble and miscalculation and on and on. We would be writing editorials about Trump’s weakness. Nope. Praise for Trump’s Panama deal was near universal here.

Maybe the talks with Mexico and Canada will amount to nothing. Maybe there is a counter-factual where a deal could have been reached without these telegraphed threats that send econ bloggers into heart-palpitations. Or maybe the threat is a way of moving Canada and Mexico onto Trump’s breakneck timetable. I’ll wait and see the results before I judge.