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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.

More From The Atlantic

A great way to get Americans to eat worse The way of the gun America is sleeping on a powerful defense against airborne disease. “Dear James”: I hate playing with my children.

Culture Break

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Watch. Mickey 17 (out in theaters) is sad, strange, and so much fun, Shirley Li writes.

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.

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In the early evening of March 7, 2020, I was on my cellphone in an airport terminal, telling a friend that I was afraid to write an article that risked ruining my journalistic reputation. I had been speaking with the small but close-knit aerobiologist community about the possibility that the new coronavirus could travel easily from person to person through the air—not just through large droplets that reach only a short distance from an infected person or through handshakes. The scientists had stressed that the idea of airborne transmission of the new virus was still mostly theoretical, but they’d seemed pretty concerned.

When my story came out the following week, it was, to my knowledge, the first article by a journalist to make the case that the virus causing COVID-19 might travel efficiently through the air, and could potentially cover many meters in a gaseous cloud emitted with a cough or a sneeze. To avoid stoking undue worry, I had argued against calling the virus “airborne” in the headline, which ran as “They Say Coronavirus Isn’t Airborne—But It’s Definitely Borne by Air.” That idea was not immediately accepted: Two weeks later, the World Health Organization tweeted, “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” As the pandemic unfolded, though, it became clear that the coronavirus did indeed spread through airborne transmission—even if the WHO took more than a year and a half to officially describe the coronavirus as a long-range airborne pathogen.

By then, amid the loud debate over mask mandates, vaccine boosters, and individuals’ responsibility for the health of others, a parallel debate had emerged over ventilation. Wearing an N95 or receiving a third COVID shot were ultimately individual choices, but breathing safer air in indoor spaces required buy-in from bigger players such as education departments and transit agencies. Some advocates held up clean air as a kind of public good—one worth investing in for shared safety. If it had succeeded, this way of thinking would have represented one of the most lasting paths for governments to decrease people’s risks from COVID and from airborne diseases more generally.

In the United States, the federal government regulates the quality of air outdoors, but it has relatively little oversight of indoor air. State and local jurisdictions pick up some of the slack, but this creates a patchwork of rules about indoor air. Local investment in better air-quality infrastructure varies widely too. For example, a 2022 survey of COVID-ventilation measures in U.S. public-school districts found that only about a quarter of them used or planned to use HEPA filters, which have a dense mesh for trapping particles, for indoor air. An even smaller fraction—about 8 percent—had installed air-cleansing systems that incorporated ultraviolet light, which can kill germs.

For decades, experts have pushed the idea that the government should pay more attention to the quality of indoor air. In his new book, Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, the journalist Carl Zimmer shows the long arc of this argument. He notes that Richard Riley, a giant in the field of aerobiology who helped show that tuberculosis can be airborne, believed that individuals shouldn’t have to ensure that the air they breathe is clean. Just as the government regulates the safety of the water that flows into indoor pipes, it should oversee the safety of air in indoor public spaces.

More than half a century before the coronavirus pandemic, Riley positioned this idea as an alternative to requirements for widespread masking, which, he said, call for “a kind of benevolent despotism,” Zimmer reports. If cleaner air was the one of the best ways to reduce the societal burden of disease, then the two best ways to achieve it were to push people to wear masks in any public space or to install better ventilation. The latter approach—purifying the air—would mean that “the individual would be relieved of direct responsibility,” Riley reasoned in a 1961 book he co-authored: “This is preventive medicine at its best, but it can only be bought at the price of civic responsibility and vigilance.”

Medical breakthroughs in the years that followed may have deflated enthusiasm for this idea. Zimmer writes that the huge advances in vaccines during the 1960s made the world less interested in the details of airborne-disease transmission. Thanks to new vaccines, doctors had a way to prevent measles, the WHO launched a campaign to eradicate smallpox, and polio seemed on its way out. On top of that, researchers had come up with an arsenal of lifesaving antibiotics and antivirals. How viruses reached us mattered less when our defenses against them were so strong.

In the first year or so of the coronavirus pandemic, though, one of the only defenses against COVID was avoiding it. And as a debate raged over how well the virus spread in air, the science of aerobiology was thrust into the spotlight. Some members of the public started fighting for good ventilation. A grassroots effort emerged to put homemade air purifiers and portable HEPA filters in public places. Teachers opened classroom windows when they learned that their schools lacked proper ventilation, travelers started carrying carbon-monoxide monitors to gauge the air quality aboard planes, and restaurants began offering outdoor dining after diagrams were published showing how easily one person eating inside can expose those seated nearby to the virus.

The federal government did take some small steps toward encouraging better ventilation. In mid-2023, the CDC put out new recommendations urging five air changes an hour (essentially replacing all of the air within a room) in all buildings. But it was a recommendation, not a requirement, and local governments and owners of public buildings have been slow to take on the burden of installing or overhauling their ventilation systems. Part of this was surely because of the daunting price tag: In 2020, the Government Accountability Office estimated that approximately 36,000 school buildings had substandard systems for heating, ventilation, and cooling; the estimated cost for upgrading the systems and ensuring safe air quality in all of the country’s schools, some experts calculated, would be about $72 billion. Portable HEPA filters, meanwhile, can be noisy and require space, making them less-than-ideal long-term solutions.

For the most part, momentum for better indoor air quality has dissipated, just as interest in it faded in the 1960s. Five years after COVID-19 precipitated lockdowns in the U.S., the rate of hospitalizations and mortality from the disease are a fraction of what they once were, and public discussion about ventilation has waned. Truly improving indoor air quality on a societal scale would be a long-term investment (and one that the Trump administration seems very unlikely to take on, given that it is slashing other environmental-safety protections). But better ventilation would also limit the cost of diseases other than COVID. Tuberculosis is airborne, and measles is frighteningly good at spreading this way. There is also evidence for airborne dissemination of a range of common pathogens such as influenza, which in the U.S. led to an estimated 28,000 deaths in the 2023–24 flu season. The same holds true for RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, which each year causes 58,000 to 80,000 hospitalizations of children under age 5 in the United States, and kills as many as 300 of them. Virologists are also now asking whether bird flu could evolve to efficiently transmit through air, too.

For those of us still concerned about airborne diseases, it feels as though little has changed. We’re right where we were at the start of the pandemic. I remember that moment in the airport and how I’d later worried about stoking panic in part because, during my flight, I was the only person wearing an N95—one that I had purchased months ago to wear in the dusty crawl space beneath my home. On the plane, I felt like a weirdo. These days, I am, once again, almost always the lone masker when I take public transportation. Sometimes I feel ridiculous. But just the other week, while I was seated on the metro, a woman coughed on my head. At that moment, I was glad to have a mask on. But I would have been even more relieved if the enclosed space of the metro car had been designed to cleanse the air of whatever she might have released and keep it from reaching me.

Catch up with the most important stories from around Europe and beyond - latest news, breaking news, World, Business, Entertainment, Politics, Culture, Travel.

Catch up with the most important stories from around Europe and beyond - latest news, breaking news, World, Business, Entertainment, Politics, Culture, Travel.