Late last week, following the worst two-session slide for US equities since the financial crisis (if you exclude the pandemic), I said the market would force Trump to relent on tariffs.

“I don’t care what your favorite right-wing lunatic blogger says, nor what sort of tough talk emanates from the presidential TruthSocial account, this isn’t tenable,” I wrote, on April 4. “Another couple of sessions like these last two and Trump will fold up like wet cardboard, I personally guarantee it.”

It took just two and a half sessions for Trump to do just that. Under pressure from Wall Street, the C-Suite, a growing list of billionaire Republican donors, a handful of nervous GOP lawmakers and, perhaps most importantly, the bond market, which was teetering on the brink of crisis, “Tariff Man” threw in the towel.

“Based on the fact that more than 75 countries have called Representatives of the United States, including the Departments of Commerce, Treasury, and the USTR, to negotiate a solution to the subjects being discussed relative to Trade, Trade Barriers, Tariffs, Currency Manipulation  and Non Monetary Tariffs, and that these Countries have not, at my strong suggestion, retaliated in any way, shape, or form against the United States, I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE,” Trump declared, with two and half hours to go for cash trading on Wall Street Wednesday.

For the next 90 days, Trump’s only applying the 10% baseline levy which, compared to what he was going to charge some of America’s trade partners, may as well be nothing. As you can imagine, stocks staged a cartoonish rally led by the Nasdaq 100, which rose 12%.

As the figure shows, Wednesday counted among the largest single-session gains on record for big-tech, particularly if you strip out crises.

Plainly, this is just farce atop farce. A total circus. The administration’s going to claim this too was 3D chess, and some people will believe them. What can you say? I can say that Trump’s turned US Treasurys into local currency EM bonds and the Nasdaq 100 into the Hang Seng Tech Index.

I’m not one to indulge “I told you so” moments, really I’m not. I’m certainly arrogant and I’m distastefully (childishly, embarrassingly) vain, but regular readers can attest that those personality flaws don’t generally manifest as “I told you so” moments vis-à-vis asset prices, and for one simple reason: I don’t know where asset prices are likely to go over the short- or even the medium-term, so it’d be disingenuous, bordering on a lie, to claim prescience in that regard. When I’m right, it’s by accident.

This is a little different, though. I wasn’t making a call on stocks or even on the economy when I said Trump would fold. I was making a call on one man’s mettle in the face of adversity, and if you read every article posted here (a tall order, I realize), you know I doubled and tripled down on that call in recent days. On Monday, for example, I wrote that “I don’t think Trump has the fortitude for this, and I don’t think his position’s principled enough to be ‘sticky’ in the face of a grinding bear market, let alone a snowballing crash.”

I don’t know when everyone’s going to come around to the reality of Trump, but here it is. He doesn’t care about any of the things he says he cares about. Not really, anyway. This notion that because he’s long championed tariffs, and has a history of railing against “unfair” international trade, he’s thereby a man of principle dedicated to the cause, isn’t necessarily true. I’ve spent decades complaining about and railing against all sorts of things without so much as braving the slightest inconvenience in an effort to address the issues or “right” the “wrongs.”

At heart, Trump’s just a bloviating publicity hound, and on some (credible) accounts, the only reason he got serious about politics is because Barack Obama humiliated him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. According to a lot of smart people who know Trump, and also to people who were in the room that night, that’s the real origin story of Trump’s presidencies, with all other previous pretensions to high office being just that: Pretensions.

By now, a decade into what’s become an experiment in American autocracy, Trump almost surely buys a lot of his own bullsh-t, which is to say various Messiah narratives probably resonate with him in 2025 in a way they didn’t before. And his authoritarian aspirations are real now in a way they weren’t during his first term. Trump as the most dominant figure in the modern history of American politics became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I’m quite sure that on some days, even his megalomania (which otherwise knows no bounds) finds itself astounded by the success and grandiosity of his conquest.

But at the end of the day, Trump’s just an amoral, shameless narcissist, with the discipline of a four-year-old. The idea that he was going to sit around and suffer months (and maybe even years) of bad press tied to the sort of stock market losses and economic underperformance he would’ve characterized as evidence of gross incompetence were they associated with any other president, was wholly laughable.

In a pitiably transparent effort to maintain the tough guy veneer, Trump hiked tariffs on China by another 21% on Wednesday afternoon while announcing the 90-day pause for everyone else. Why 21%? Well, because tariffs on China went up to 104% on Wednesday at midnight, and 125%’s a round number, I guess. That’s the sort of logic we’re working from.

Here’s the thing, though. Trump can reverse stock losses, but he can’t put the genie back in the lamp in terms of the damage he’s done to America’s reputation over three months, nor can he so easily convince the bond market that US Treasurys are the same asset they were when he took office again in January. The stocks may be ok depending on where things go from here. Everything else, not so much.