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This morning, President Donald Trump used the standard diplomatic channel—his Truth Social account—to announce retaliation against Canada for Ontario’s new electricity tariffs, which were themselves retaliatory.

“I have instructed my Secretary of Commerce to add an ADDITIONAL 25% Tariff, to 50%, on all STEEL and ALUMINUM COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES FROM CANADA, ONE OF THE HIGHEST TARIFFING NATIONS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. This will go into effect TOMORROW MORNING, March 12th,” Trump wrote. The rest of the message is much stranger, again promising the annexation of Canada: “The artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear, and we will have the safest and most beautiful Nation anywhere in the World.”

Earlier this evening, Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, pulled back the electricity tariffs after securing a meeting with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and the White House dropped its threat. Ford likely recognized that no matter how belligerent a stance Trump takes, he can be easily induced to change his mind.

Consider what’s happened with tariffs over the past 45 days. On February 1, Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on both Canada and Mexico, to take effect on February 4. On February 3, he announced a one-month pause in implementation. On February 26, he said he might not actually impose the tariffs until April 2; the next day, he said they’d start on March 4. On March 2, Lutnick suggested that the tariff situation was “fluid.” On March 4, the tariffs went into effect after all.

Confused yet? We’re just getting started. That afternoon, with stock markets reacting poorly, Lutnick suggested that the tariffs might be rolled back the next day. Indeed, on March 5, Trump announced that he was suspending parts of the tariffs related to auto manufacturing until April. And then, on March 6, he suspended all of the tariffs until April. Trump once told us that trade wars are “easy to win.” Now he seems unsure about how to fight one, or whether he even wants to.

If the defining feeling of the start of the first Trump administration was chaos, its equivalent in this term is whiplash. The president and his aides have been changing their minds and positions at nauseating speed.

Many of the reversals seem to come down to Trump’s caprices. On February 19, he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “a dictator.” About a week later, he disavowed that. “Did I say that? I can't believe I said that,” he told reporters. “I think the president and I actually have had a very good relationship.” The next day, Trump berated Zelensky in the Oval Office, sent him packing, and began cutting off military help to Ukraine. This afternoon, the U.S. restarted military and financial aid once again.

Another leading cause of whiplash is Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service. Last week, the General Services Administration put up a list of more than 400 buildings that the cost-cutting crew had deemed inessential for government operations. The inventory included some eye-raising entries, including the Robert F. Kennedy building—headquarters of the Justice Department—and the main offices of the Labor Department and the FBI, but also some peculiar ones, such as steam tunnels underneath Washington, D.C. (One imagines that the wrong buyer could cause a great deal of mayhem with those.) Within hours, more than 100 entries had been removed from the list; by the next day, it was gone entirely, replaced by a “coming soon” message—though not before revealing a semi-secret CIA facility.

DOGE and other efforts to slash the federal workforce keep overstepping and requiring reversals. In some cases, officials seem to be discovering that the things Trump wants are either impracticable or too politically toxic to effect. Musk posted on X that if federal workers didn’t respond to an email, it would be tantamount to their resignation. Then the threat was removed. Then Musk sent another email. Thousands of federal workers have been laid off, only to be called back to work. Some workers who accepted a buyout offer were then fired; others had the offer rescinded. Musk tittered over canceling and then uncanceling Ebola-prevention programs, though some officials dispute that they were actually uncanceled. The administration planned to shut down the coronavirus-test-distribution program, then ultimately suspended but did not end it; it killed but then resuscitated a health program for 9/11 survivors.

Trump isn’t just going back on specifics. Some of his core campaign propositions are also looking shaky. Despite campaigning on the deleterious effects of inflation, he now says that it’s not a top priority. He promised booming wealth for Americans; now he can’t rule out a recession and is warning that people will need to endure some pain (for what higher purpose, he hasn’t made clear). And even though Trump has long said that he won’t cut Medicare or Social Security, Musk is now targeting them and calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme.

This kind of vacillation creates an obvious credibility problem for the president and his administration. As I wrote during Trump’s first presidency, foreign leaders quickly concluded that he was a pushover, easily convinced by flattering words. Trump practically always folded in a negotiation. This history, combined with his mercurial moods, mean that counterparts don’t assume they can take him at his word. In the case of Canada, Trump seems to have come out with the worst possible outcome: Canadian leaders believe he’s deadly serious about annexing the country, a quixotic goal, but they have no reason to take his bluster about tariffs, which he can actually impose, all that seriously.

The situation might be even more dangerous if observers took Trump at his word. His dithering has given markets the jitters, but the economic impacts might be more dire if traders acted as though they expected him to follow through on all of his tariff threats. (After he said this past weekend that a recession is possible, markets plunged. Did investors believe he had some secret plan up his sleeve until then?)

Uncertainty is bad for markets, but the problem is larger than that. One of the most fundamental roles of the state is to create a sense of consistency and stability for society. That provides the conditions for flourishing of all kinds: economic, artistic, cultural, scientific. Trump is both seeking to seize more power for himself and refusing to exercise it in a way that allows the nation to flourish.

Today, my colleague Adam Serwer wrote about the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University who has not been charged, much less convicted, of any crime. This, too, calls into question the stability of the rule of law—specifically, the long-standing fact that the First Amendment and due process apply to legal permanent residents. (Last month, I wrote that Trump’s actions were showing that his commitment to free speech was bogus. He seems determined to prove me right.) The first months of the Trump presidency have been whiplash-inducing, but in the long term, the failure to set and follow consistent rules threatens national pain much worse than a sore neck.

Related:

Mahmoud Khali’s detention is a trial run. The free-speech phonies

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

His daughter was America’s first measles death in a decade. ICE isn’t delivering the mass deportation Trump wants. The only question Trump asks himself

Today’s News

Ukraine has agreed to an immediate 30-day cease-fire if Russia accepts the plan proposed by the United States. Ontario suspended its 25 percent electricity surcharge for some U.S. states after Donald Trump threatened a 50 percent tariff on steel and aluminum for Canada. The former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who started a widespread crackdown on drugs, was arrested on an International Criminal Court warrant for crimes against humanity.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: “The chaos emanating from Washington comes at a time when the economy is already slowing,” Annie Lowrey writes. Maybe don’t invite a recession in.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg / Getty; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty.

Anti-Semitism Is Just a Pretext

By Jonathan Chait

The [Trump] administration is threatening more arrests of foreign-born campus activists, and more funding cuts, all supposedly to contain anti-Semitism, at the same time that it is elevating anti-Semites to newfound prominence and legitimacy. Donald Trump opposes left-wing anti-Semitism because it is left-wing, not because it is anti-Semitic. And his campaign to supposedly stamp it out on campus is a pretext for an authoritarian power grab.

Read the full article.

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Read. Literature is still describing the experience of the coronavirus pandemic. Lily Meyer is still searching for a great COVID-19 novel that transforms that experience.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

On my evening to-do list once I finish this newsletter: Pick up my copy of my colleague Olga Khazan’s Me, but Better at my local bookstore. In 2022, she wrote one of my favorite Atlantic stories ever about her three-month attempt to change her own personality. In the book, which is out today, she goes deeper. Olga is a very funny writer and great at sorting through and explaining complicated science, but for me, what makes her such an outstanding journalist is her ability to see and question a lot of the things that most people take for granted. I feel safe guessing that her research didn’t change that part of her personality.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The opening salvo of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign has made immigrants across the United States fear that simply going to work, school, or the supermarket might result in a life-altering arrest.

Sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, real and imagined, are everywhere on social media. Teachers say students are panicked that ICE will take their parents while they’re in class. One Maryland doctor who treats patients with cancer and chronic pain from worksite injuries told me that many are skipping appointments. “They’re terrified,” he said.

That much, according to Trump officials, is going to plan, backed by a $200 million messaging campaign called “Stay Out and Leave Now.”

The results of the actual deportation push appear to be more modest, though not for lack of effort. ICE officers, some working six or seven days a week, made about 18,000 arrests last month, according to internal data I obtained. (ICE stopped publishing daily-arrest totals in early February as its numbers sagged.) By comparison, the agency tallied roughly 10,000 arrests in February 2024. The latest government data show that deportations were actually higher toward the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, when ICE was removing a larger number of migrants picked up along the Mexico-U.S. border.

[Rogé Karma: The truth about immigration and the American worker]

At its current pace, ICE is nowhere near delivering what Trump promised. The president made mass deportations a centerpiece of his campaign and said during his inauguration speech that ICE would deport “millions and millions of criminal aliens.” Vice President J. D. Vance said that the administration would “start with 1 million.” But ICE doesn’t have the resources or staffing to do what Trump wants. The agency has fewer than 6,000 enforcement officers nationwide. Much of their work is essentially immigration case management—ensuring compliance with court appointments and monitoring requirements—not kicking down doors in tactical gear or staging mass roundups in the streets.

ICE has never deported 1 million people in a year, let alone half that many. Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” who has been working out of an office at ICE headquarters in Washington, told me on Friday that the mass-deportation campaign remains on track and just needs Congress to cough up the money to allow it to kick into a higher gear.

Trump is happy with the results so far, Homan insisted. “The president has never told me he’s not happy,” Homan said. “I’m not happy.”

Administration officials are considering ways to help ICE boost its numbers, including legal tools to potentially give officers new authorities to enter homes. But in the meantime, the gap between Trump’s expectations and reality has senior officials in immigration enforcement on edge. The administration is churning through ICE leaders, blaming them for failing to deliver results. ICE staff members were stunned last month when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the demotion of the agency’s acting director, Caleb Vitello, barely a month into the job.

Vitello, a career ICE official who is also a certified mindfulness coach, had been viewed by his colleagues as a solid pick to steer the agency through a stressful time of intense scrutiny. He had worked in the White House with Stephen Miller during Trump’s first term. ICE officials figured he’d be as capable as anyone of managing the agency’s many masters—Miller, Noem, and Homan.

ICE started off the new administration with a conspicuous show of force, but the enforcement blitz soon began to fade. Vitello tried to issue daily quotas for the number of immigrants officers should arrest, but ICE teams were coming up short. They had burned through the lists of names and addresses they’d compiled prior to the inauguration, and they were too busy trying to make their quotas to research new targets. More and more people were refusing to answer the door when ICE knocked, leaving agents waiting outside.

The administration targeted several “sanctuary” cities that limit cooperation with ICE, but their big operations brought underwhelming results.

Noem blamed internal leaks and “crooked deep state agents” at the FBI for the relatively modest figures. It was a baffling claim. She and Homan had been conducting ICE raids on live television, even bringing along Dr. Phil to publicize the effort. Everyone knew they were coming.

On February 11, Noem ousted Vitello’s key deputies at ICE. Ten days later, she tried to demote Vitello. Noem wanted to bring in a trusted former aide and GOP political operative, Madison Sheahan, the head of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, who’d gotten that job in 2023 at age 26.

Noem wasn’t aware that ICE leadership roles typically require years of law enforcement or litigation experience, according to one senior DHS official who spoke with me on condition of anonymity. Although Sheahan had restored black-bear hunting to Louisiana and scored federal dollars for oyster farms, she wasn’t a lawyer or a cop. Vitello remained in the acting-director role, leaving ICE staff puzzled about who was in charge. DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

[Gisela Salim-Peyer: The ‘right way’ to immigrate just went wrong]

On Sunday, two weeks after Vitello’s demotion was announced, ICE named a new acting director, Todd Lyons, a veteran official Noem had promoted less than a month earlier to oversee enforcement operations. Sheahan was named to the deputy-director role. Noem called the pair “work horses” who would deliver “results” and “achieve the American people’s mandate.”

The leadership stumbles point to the core problem with Trump’s grandiose deportation plan, which has the potential to become the “Build the Wall!” equivalent of his second term. Trump wants ICE to erase the immigration wave of the past decade and spearhead a MAGA social and cultural transformation. He has ordered federal law-enforcement agencies from across the government—the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals, even the FBI—to drop what they’re doing and help ICE catch more immigrants.

Homan’s mission is twofold: stopping illegal migration and ramping up deportations. One of those things is already undermining the other.

Illegal border crossings hit record levels under Biden but declined sharply last year as his administration shut off asylum access and worked with Mexico to crack down on unlawful crossings. Trump’s return to office—which has been accompanied by the deployment of thousands of U.S. soldiers and the threat of a one-way ticket to Guantánamo—has sent the border numbers plunging in recent weeks to levels not seen since the 1960s.

Fewer border crossings leaves ICE with a smaller number of easy deportees. That puts more of an onus on ICE to find deportees in U.S. cities and other communities nationwide, a much more resource-intensive task.

Not every ICE arrest leads to a deportation, and so far, Trump’s removal numbers are lagging behind last year’s, when Biden deported more than 271,000 people during the 2024 fiscal year, the highest total in a decade. Most of those deportees were migrants taken into custody along the Mexico-U.S. border, not immigrants arrested by ICE well inside the United States.

Homan was at ICE in 2012, when the agency set its high-water mark with 409,000 removals and Barack Obama was derided as the “deporter in chief” by immigrant advocates. Homan speaks of that era with nostalgia, a time before the sanctuary movement pushed Democratic mayors to eschew cooperation with ICE. During the past decade, the agency has lost much of its ability to work with police and jails in the big U.S. cities that ICE considers its most “target-rich” environments.

Now one of the challenges for Homan, Miller, and others is to get the president to turn his attention to enforcement metrics besides deportations, such as higher numbers of ICE arrests and fewer crossings at the Mexico-U.S. border.

“People have focused on deportations, but they got to remember we’ve secured the border,” Homan said. Under Biden, millions of migrants who crossed the Mexico-U.S. border were released into the United States with pending asylum claims and temporary residency, he noted. Biden curbed access last year, but Trump has ordered that the doors be slammed shut.

Yesterday, DHS said that it will roll out a new mobile-application tool called “CBP Home” for migrants to tell the government when they voluntarily leave the United States. Its name is a play on the CBP One app that Trump pilloried on the campaign trail: Biden officials used CBP One as a queue-management tool for asylum seekers and migrants from Mexico trying to schedule appointments to arrive at border crossings.

Trump has made CBP Home one more way to scare people into leaving. “Self-deportation is the safest option,” the department said when announcing the new app.

The administration is trying a variety of strategies to raise its deportation figures closer to what Trump wants. Other approaches for getting more aggressive are under review but haven’t been attempted yet.

Homan says that ICE’s “aperture”—the demographics of the immigrants it wants to arrest—will widen once the agency finishes tracking down “the worst of the worst.” ICE told Congress last summer that there were about 650,000 immigrants with criminal records on its docket—a pool of potential deportees large enough to keep officers busy, Homan said. ICE data show that the top-three criminal categories in that group are traffic offenses, which include drunk driving; immigration violations, such as illegally reentering the United States; and assault.

[Adam Serwer: The deportation show]

ICE officers have been ordered to drop Biden-era rules that took a hands-off approach to immigrants who lacked legal status but hadn’t committed crimes. An internal memo sent to ICE officers last month that I obtained has instructed the agency to arrest more of the immigrants who report at ICE offices for mandatory “check-ins” as part of the terms of their provisional status in the United States.

That includes immigrants who entered the U.S. legally under one of the Biden administration’s “lawful pathways” programs, if they haven’t already applied for asylum protections. And it directs officers to take a new look at immigrants who aren’t eligible for U.S. residency but whose deportations have been deferred because they are at risk of torture or persecution in their home country.

The ICE memo urges officers to assess whether those immigrants can be sent to third countries, as Trump officials secure deals with El Salvador, Guatemala, and others to take immigrants that the United States can’t easily deport.

The well-worn ICE tactic known as “knock and talk” that attempts to convince immigrants to open their door for officers has had diminishing returns as the publicity around the deportation campaign has left more potential deportees on guard. Officers can’t force their way into a residence without a criminal warrant signed by a judge—a message that advocacy groups and social-media users have disseminated widely. (Homan has called for the Justice Department to consider whether Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others who share “know your rights” bulletins can be charged with impeding federal officers.)

Trump officials have been looking for a work-around to solve the problem of closed doors. Last month, DHS created a registration requirement for immigrants residing in the United States without legal status. Homan and two other DHS officials said that registry violations could allow ICE to bring criminal charges that would potentially give the agency a new way to enter a private residence without consent.

The administration is also working to get ICE more money, the lack of which has been perhaps the agency’s biggest impediment. Trump has backed a continuing resolution to fund the government through September that includes approximately $500 million in new money for ICE, equal to about 5 percent of the agency’s annual budget. The additional funds would allow ICE to continue adding detention capacity and removal flights incrementally, but they wouldn’t buy the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history.

[Rogé Karma: Why Democrats got the politics of immigration so wrong for so long]

That’s the goal of the budget-reconciliation package that GOP lawmakers in the House and the Senate are negotiating with each other and intend to pass without Democratic votes.

The sums they’re discussing are staggering. The bill advanced by Senator Lindsey Graham, the budget-committee chairman, would provide $175 billion for border security and immigration enforcement, roughly 20 times ICE’s entire annual budget.

One Democratic Senate staffer tracking the bill told me that it’s likely months away from a vote but could be approved this summer. “It’s effectively a blank check,” said the staffer, who was not authorized to speak to reporters on the record.

The money could finance the expansion of ICE capacity from its current level of about 45,000 detainees a day to Homan’s goal of more than 100,000. Most important, it would allow ICE to channel federal dollars to pro-Trump states and counties, where the agency can train more sheriff’s deputies and other local cops to make immigration arrests. That’s when Trump’s mass-deportation campaign could get a mass-deportation force to carry it out.