David Pakman

We have a we're going to clarify something.

Or sometimes it's we're doing the thing we announced, but we're going to delay it.

We're going to wait a little bit.

Sometimes it's we have an even better version of what we were going to do.

But the new version, interestingly and hilariously, doesn't do any of what was actually announced.

Sometimes it's you just say you've done it even though you haven't really done it.

Now, there is a strategic layer to this, which is that by constantly shifting positions, you create confusion about what's real and what's final and what's fake and what's just a mistake.

And so supporters and Trump's been doing this.

I've been talking about this for a decade now.

Supporters can latch on to whatever they like the most.

And the critics end up in the situation where you go, look, this is what you said you're doing.

Yeah, but we're kind of doing it this other way.

We're we're doing this other thing.

Now, the cost of all of this is that policy is unstable and nobody knows what's really going on.

And that lack of predictability, that lack of stability is very bad for economies.

And it's bad for people.

At the end of the day, people notice the pattern announcement, confusion, clarification, reversal, backtracking.

And then they go, I don't know that I can make any decisions based on what the president is saying.

And so when you constantly are making announcements of things that are either impossible, bad ideas or simply don't hold up, you put others in a position of being unable to make decisions.

You make yourself an unstable steward of the economy and you make yourself a bad negotiating partner.