One day, it’ll be obvious to everyone how crazy US policy was in 2025.

To be sure, that’s obvious to a lot of people right now, in the moment. But with the benefit of hindsight, this period will be universally understood as uniquely — and dangerously — preposterous for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is that the Trump administration’s approach to achieving its strategic goals is self-evidently counterproductive on any number of fronts.

By “self-evidently counterproductive,” I mean the ends and the means are almost definitionally at odds. Donald Trump’s economic pitch revolves almost entirely around the notion that tariffs are going to compel massive investment in the US, and his strategy for the tariffs revolves almost entirely around engineering daily chaos and total uncertainty. That won’t likely work.

If you’re going to invest huge sums of money in physical capacity — which is what Trump generally wants — the first thing you need are basic guarantees about the character of the business environment. In essence, you have two questions: Is the rule of law, as a concept, strong? and Are the rules, regulations and so on, fixed, easy-to-understand and administered in a predictable, even-handed way?

If the answer to those two questions is any sort of “no,” then the rest of it — the modeled economics of the business venture, any incentives, the availability and terms of any financing, etc. — are almost completely irrelevant.

No one would’ve thought to ask those questions about America before Trump. That is: Of course the rule of law’s strong in America. The answer to the first question is an unqualified “yes.” And if the answer to the first question’s “yes,” then the answer to the second question’s “yes” too.

Now, though, it’s obvious to everyone that the rule of law’s at least weaker under Trump, even if it’s still strong by the low standards of nations where it’s not absolute. A group of nations to which the US now unfortunately belongs.

If you run afoul of Trump personally — so, nothing to do with breaking any rules or otherwise behaving in a way that merits punishment under a set of universally applicable laws — you might be subject to unspecified penalties not applicable to other businesses who remain in his good graces. A corollary is that the rules aren’t fixed, and they’re not administered in a predictable way.

So, the answer to the two key questions posed above is “no” in America currently, and that means that no amount of financial incentives short of, maybe, a complete trade embargo and no amount of bullying short of outright physical coercion, will be sufficient to bring about the kind of “golden age” Trump described on January 20.

In three words: Businesses need certainty. Or the closest thing to it in a highly uncertain world. Trump’s offering the opposite: Uncertainty, and on an epic scale.

The figure above plots the monthly version of the famous Baker, Bloom and Davis news-based economic uncertainty index for the US. It’s off the charts.

To be sure, news-based measures aren’t perfect. And given the level of antipathy towards Trump in the media, and the extent to which articles about all the uncertainty he’s creating are good stand-ins when you don’t want to call him a lunatic, it’s conceivable that index overstates the case.

Even so, it’s (more than) fair to suggest there’s never been more uncertainty about US economic policy specifically than there is now. Note the emphasis. There have surely been more uncertain times for humanity, where “uncertain” is broadly construed. Here we’re focused exclusively on how predictable — or not — US economic policymaking is on a daily (or monthly) basis. Right now, it’s totally (completely) unpredictable.

The idea that companies — foreign or domestic — should rush into this melee and start building physical infrastructure without the faintest idea of what course Trump’s going to set tomorrow, let alone next year, all to avoid a tariff rate that moves around every couple of days and may not even stick if it’s implemented at all, is completely crazy.

As one PM at Allianz told Bloomberg over the weekend, “project economics, supply-chain commitments and capital flows may now pivot toward more stable jurisdictions like Canada or the EU, unless clarity is quickly restored.” I’d quip that anyone considering Canada should be careful because Trump might annex it, but guess what? That’s not a joke in 2025!

Coming quickly full circle, I don’t think we actually need hindsight. It’s plain to everyone outside of Trump’s hardest-core MAGA base that this situation – the manic tariff reversals, the aggression against allies, the due process denial, the crusade against Harvard which last week found The White House alleging collusion between the college and Xi Jinping and on and on — is whatever comes after beyond the pale.

I realize people have been saying this for nearly a decade now and it hasn’t happened yet, but you have to think a “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” moment for Trump is nigh. If it’s not, God help us.