Vanity, thy name is Trump, Donald John Trump

From Ezra Klein, Trump’s Tariffs Are Part of a ‘Tectonic Plate Shift’ in the Global Economy, NYTimes, April 11, 2025.

Third, the king cannot hear no. One of the most appalling parts of this whole fiasco was watching Trump’s advisers fawn over him after he buckled. Bill Ackman, the hedge funder, wrote on X, “This was brilliantly executed by @realDonaldTrump. Textbook, Art of the Deal.”

You heard this again and again. Here is the White House press secretary:

Archived clip of Karoline Leavitt: Many of you in the media clearly missed “The Art of the Deal.” You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here.

Only there’s no deal. And there was definitely no art. We learned the outer edge of Trump’s pain tolerance, and so did the rest of the world. So there goes some of his leverage. We saw a slapdash policy fall apart within a week or so. But still Trump’s allies are declaring his genius — not because they expect us to believe it, but because they know he needs to hear it — and he needs to see them saying it in public, aloud. It is part of the structure of humiliation that dictators demand of their servants.

Authoritarianism is not just a mode of governance — it’s a habit of communication. The king is always right, even when he is contradicting what he said a day before. Future influence in the court relies on being in his good graces, and praise is the currency of that grace. Dictatorships are disastrous in part because they restrict the flow of information around the decision maker.

The bond market was eventually information Trump could not ignore. But those who seek his favor and his ear are making sure he learns nothing from this. I suspect we are underestimating how thick the information bubble around Trump now is, how little bad news actually reaches him, how rarely he ever hears serious criticism clearly delivered, how much the sycophants around him praise every utterance that comes out of his mouth.

There's more at the link, which is mostly an interview with Peter Orszag, the chief executive officer of Lazard, and formerly the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Barack Obama.