Only 10 weeks into his presidency, President Trump’s appetite for risk seems to know few bounds.
He imposed sweeping global tariffs on Wednesday, despite fears of inflation or, worse, stagflation. Yet the man who propelled himself to the presidency as a hard-nosed deal maker sounded cavalier last weekend when asked if he was worried the price of cars could surge.
“I couldn’t care less,” Mr. Trump replied.
It was the latest example of his willingness to take a maximalist position, essentially daring his opponents to take him on. Before the tariffs announcement, he moved to blow up a global alliance system the United States spent 80 years building embassy by embassy, silencing Voice of America and mostly removing the government from the business of providing food and medical aid.
Mr. Trump is more than willing to test the boundaries of a 250-year-old democracy to retaliate against perceived enemies or eviscerate parts of the federal government, even if that means risking the public health system or ignoring due process for immigrants living in the country legally.
And faced with daily competition with China over artificial intelligence, space and biological sciences, he is happy to risk cutting off funding to America’s largest research universities.
To outsiders, including the more than 200,000 Chinese students studying in the United States, those public and private institutions are the sparkling diamond at the heart of American innovation. To Mr. Trump, they represent what he has called “radical leftist” ideology that he is determined to bring to heel.
The president’s aides brush off the idea that they are jettisoning expertise or risking the incubators of basic research, arguing that taxpayers don’t need to spend billions of dollars on such pursuits. The best talent, they say, will find its way to the private sector, SpaceX-style.
This was not the Donald Trump of the first term, when he mused about reducing the federal deficit but actually let it soar, and when he harbored plans to root out the “deep state” but did not know how to extinguish it. Much has changed since then, and many voters and chief executives have appeared happy to see him take risks in his second term that he never seemed willing to in his first.
When asked why the second term is unfolding so differently, the people around Mr. Trump — almost all insisting that they must speak anonymously — say that the legal, electoral and psychological restraints that bound him in the past are gone.
After he escaped death by an assassin’s bullet, he took it as sign that he was spared in order to complete his vision of what America should look like. “God was watching me,” he said in February. When the Supreme Court ruled that he was immune from prosecution over official acts, broadly defined, he seized the moment to stretch — or exceed — the powers of the presidency.
Mr. Trump never has to face the voters again, unless he turns his musings about running for an unconstitutional third term into reality. He is no longer surrounded by voices of caution that held him back in 2017, when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin warned against creating uncertainty that could tank the markets, or when Defense Secretary Jim Mattis insisted that he preserve America’s central role in NATO.
Those advisers have been replaced by enablers and amplifiers, including a disproportionate number of former Fox News commentators. Even current advisers drawn from the Wall Street establishment, such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who in his past life would have recoiled at the thought of triggering a trade war, have constructed an economic and social rationale around the president’s instincts.
“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” Mr. Bessent insisted last month at the Economic Club of New York, a declaration that Walmart and Amazon shoppers might dispute.
Now Mr. Trump has bet that he can speed the end of the age of globalization.
That is the first part of the gamble Mr. Trump took on Wednesday. If Mr. Bessent’s argument is right, Mr. Trump thinks that American shoppers are willing to pay higher prices, at least for a while, if that is the cost of forcing manufacturers to bring jobs back to America. It is a gamble, essentially, that protectionism works, and that the only way to solve the problem is to draw from the lessons of William McKinley, the president Mr. Trump lauded in his inauguration speech.
But there are other bets he is taking. He thinks that other nations around the world will reduce tariffs and other barriers to American goods, rather than face the pain. He has argued that tariffs will provide a new revenue stream for the United States, making America less dependent on income taxes.
At various points in the past 10 weeks, Mr. Trump has promised that all these things will come true, ignoring the evidence that the goals are in tension with one another.
“He is obviously exceedingly confident about how he thinks these policies will play out,” said Matthew P. Goodman, the director of the Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“Standing out in the Rose Garden, with all those workers and flags, is putting it all on him if it goes wrong,” Mr. Goodman added, referring to Mr. Trump’s tariffs announcement on Wednesday. “And to think this is not going to have an impact on the markets, and on prices and on economic growth, is really stretching one’s imagination.”
Of course, for Mr. Trump, a policy announcement, even one with the slogan “Liberation Day,’’ is often the beginning of the process.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, appeared to invite special pleading for tariff relief on Tuesday when she told reporters the president was “always up for a good negotiation.” And that is exactly what most officials expect, as world leaders practice their golf swings and head to Mar-a-Lago to make their case.
When that happens, Mr. Trump will face a choice — or hundreds, maybe thousands of them. If the markets react poorly to the tariffs, he would retain the ability to dial them up or down, like a thermostat.
And he will have that leeway, because the “reciprocal” tariff rates he announced for each country were calculated by assessing not only the tariffs those countries place on American goods. It is an imprecise calculation, and the perfect Trumpian tool — customizable, negotiation by negotiation.
As Mr. Trump made clear in “The Art of the Deal,” the book he wrote in 1987 to shape his own reputation as a savvy negotiator, such leverage is key. But now, as president, he holds powers he could have only dreamed about while he argued over the price he would pay for a resort.
His style in the second term has been marked by using every form of American power to win his way. He has shown he is willing to shutter entire agencies, like the United States Agency for International Development, to both achieve his goals and strike fear into federal workers that their department could be the next to go.
He is willing to risk the fracture of NATO and the collapse of Ukraine. And if the price of ending persistent trade deficits is risking deep harm to country’s oldest and strongest alliances, he will not hesitate to threaten his friends. While China may suffer most in Mr. Trump’s matrix of reciprocal tariffs, the next targets include American allies or much-needed partners: Japan, the European Union, India, South Korea and even Switzerland.
In each case, Mr. Trump is declaring that the economic relationship comes first. Security or diplomatic partnerships are a distant second or third, if they count for anything at all. He is betting that, at the end of the day, Xi Jinping and the leaders of the European Union will choose not to escalate, fearing what a president who revels in unpredictability might do next.
