Kelly McParland: Trump’s litany of failures is adding up

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For all the attention focused on the daily outpouring of news from Washington, it’s noteworthy how little of substance has yet to be accomplished.

President Donald Trump is said to be an agent of chaos and change. Disruption is deliberate, turbulence is a goal. Before you can reform a broken system, first you have to destroy the institutions and practices that enable it.

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Perhaps that is still to come. “There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big. We’re bringing wealth back to America. That’s a big thing,” the president noted in a recent interview. Sure there may be some bumps along the road, but it will all work out in the end.

The issue, of course, is when that end is expected. Two months into his second presidency and already the omens are ominous.  If you eliminate the rich supply of headlines — media obsessives have rarely had it so good — the record is largely one of failure. Noisy, perhaps, but still failure.

Most notably, expectations of boom times on Wall Street have proven misguided. The market is wallowing amid an unpleasant soup of tariffs, uncertainty and confusion.  The major U.S. indexes — the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq exchange —  are all flirting with correction territory, meaning they’ve given up any gains made in the run-up of enthusiasm preceding Trump’s inauguration.

Losses on the S&P add up to US$4 trillion since January. Among the biggest losers are Trump’s richest supporters: Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index calculates 10 of America’s wealthiest people — mostly in tech-related industries — are down US$300 billion so far this year, led by the world’s richest, Elon Musk, who has all but stapled himself and his fortunes to Trump since the start of the president’s second term. The market value of Tesla, Musk’s electric car company, has fallen by half, or about US$800 billion, and could well plummet further according to investment bank J.P.Morgan, which cut its price target for the stock to US$120 a share, compared to US$428 on Jan. 15.

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So dire is Tesla’s outlook that Trump offered a personal endorsement, appearing on the White House drive with the black-clad billionaire to make a public pledge to buy one of his cars.

Though Trump put Musk in charge of downsizing the government, improvement is hard to find. Federal spending hit a new high last month — US$603 billion, up US$36 billion from 2024 — despite Trump’s pledges to slash it. The federal deficit set a new record at US$1.15 trillion over five months. Investment firm Goldman Sachs slashed its forecast of U.S. growth to 1.7% from 2.4%, stating “our trade policy assumptions have become considerably more adverse” while White House policy “is managing expectations towards tariff-induced near-term economic weakness.”

A respected survey of consumer confidence found it falling “across all groups by age, education, income, wealth, political affiliations, and geographic regions.” Bloomberg reported that Americans are missing car payments at the worst rate in decades. Consumer credit card debt is at its highest level in 15 years. Analysts who argued Trump’s opening salvo of tariff threats was just a negotiating ploy have started questioning that assumption and are now whispering about the danger of recession. “The longer the tariffs stay on, the more the risk of recession grows,” economist Luke Tilley told the Associated Press. Former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers says the odds are now 50-50.

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The Wall Street Journal, the bible of U.S. business, says top corporate and financial figures fear Trump is dragging the U.S. into trouble. In a much-discussed editorial it denounced the tariff onslaught as “the dumbest trade war in history.” A recent headline warned, “Wall Street Fears Trump Will Wreck the Soft Landing.” While corporate chieftains hold their tongues in public for fear of upsetting the thin-skinned, volatile president, the Journal reports, in private they’re appalled. One participant in a recent top-level corporate gathering reported “universal revulsion” at Trump policies, adding “They’re also especially horrified about Canada.”

If the economy has failed to respond to White House methods, the administration’s forays into international affairs have yet to bear fruit. Russia continues its murderous assault on Ukraine despite U.S.-brokered peace attempts and Ukraine’s agreement to a ceasefire. Greenland on Thursday overwhelmingly rejected U.S. annexation ambitions in a national vote that ended with all three main parties supporting independence instead. Europe has responded to Trump’s attacks on NATO by uniting behind Ukraine, pledging to match U.S. tariffs dollar-for-dollar and restating its firm support for the NATO alliance.

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Trump’s curious fixation on Canada has mainly succeeded in uniting Canadians against him, ruining decades of friendship between the two countries and setting off a trade war certain to prove harmful to both parties. Chances have increased voters will replace one Liberal regime with another, rather than the Conservative opposition that seemed destined for power before Trump got involved. Middle Eastern countries that tolerated U.S. power, if never loving it much, have been driven into rare unity against Trump’s suggestion Gaza be rebuilt as a sort of gated Florida community next door to Israel, minus the Palestinians. In a move that couldn’t help but enrage Arab sentiment, the U.S. and Israel are reported to be seeking to ship ousted Palestinians to Sudan or Somalia, two of the poorest, most violence-wracked countries in Africa.

On the home front, U.S. courts have impeded Trump’s hopes of remaking a judiciary he feels has treated him ill. Judges have blocked efforts to fire public employees en masse, ordering thousands of them be rehired; rejected an executive order aiming to withhold funding for transgender care; stalled efforts to use wartime measures to deport migrants, and enforced a previous policy enjoining immigration officers from targeting mosques, temples, synagogues and other religious sites.

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A federal judge rejected Trump’s attempt to bar a law firm linked to Hillary Clinton from entering government buildings. Even the Supreme Court, with three Trump-appointed members and a conservative majority, ruled against efforts to withhold US$2 billion in foreign aid payments, and rejected Trump’s request to intervene in his sentencing for a case involving hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Over the weekend, the U.S. deported more than 200 Venezuelans despite a court order blocking the flight, claiming the order “had no lawful basis” because the flight was already in the air.

There’s a camp that argues chaos agents like Trump and Musk are beneficial because they bring about change, by force if necessary. By that token, the carnage in Ukraine represents good tidings, the levelling of Gaza was strategic brilliance and the fires in Los Angeles were a desirable achievement. The truth is, destruction is destruction. Leadership is in minimizing the damage it brings. That’s where we are now, but don’t expect beneficial change to come from Washington.

National Post

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