By Maureen Dowd / The New York Times
After 100 days of President Donald Trump back in office, the United States has been permanently changed. This is one of the moments reshaping the country, according to one of 15 Times Opinion columnists:
Donald Trump has had remarkable success creating a shadowy plane of unreality, an inside-out zone where he uses his dark sorcery to convince whole swaths of people to believe his self-serving version of events rather than actual events. And now, far beyond Fox News, there’s a Trumpist media ecosystem built to help him.
But we learned that, thank heavens, this plane is not impermeable.
Reality can pierce Trump’s “reality” show. That moment happened most dramatically when, a week after he levied his irrational tariff plan, he had to put much of it on pause after stocks fell like a pig out of a helicopter, to adapt a Dave Barry phrase. And, most ominously, when many investors raced to sell their ordinarily stable Treasury bonds.
The president tried to blame Americans losing their nerve for the pause, rather than the dubious math and erratic application of tariffs that sent the global economy spiraling.
“Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line,” he told reporters at the White House. “They were getting yippy, you know. They were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid.”
I hadn’t heard the term “yips” since I had to follow George H.W. Bush around on the golf course in Kennebunkport, Maine, and report on his driving and putting. (He was such an avid golfer that when it rained, he played the sand traps as water hazards.) Bush used the term in an orthodox way, as a moment of inexplicable jitters while playing golf. Trump’s use was slightly unorthodox, about recession fears.
No one, except perhaps his most die-hard supporters, buys Trump’s attribution of his U-turn to the irrational nerves of Americans rather than the increasing likelihood of recession or the absurd White House spin that the bizarre tariffs were all part of a canny “Art of the Deal” negotiation.
The truth, even if Trump won’t admit it, is that reality penetrated his fabricated unreality, and the Emperor of Chaos had to course-correct. It was an enormous relief to see that Trump’s alchemy in creating his own set of “facts” with a derecho of disinformation has its limits.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.
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