I think this is a case of an individual having big individual influence that flies in the face of what an institution should rationally do. Trump has been talking about tariffs his entire life, and here in the second term he’s found out that he can just do it and nobody can stop him.

Once he started doing it, the people in his orbit had to react. Some did so by doing insider trading, some have tried to turn this into a part of some grand strategy play to economically isolate China, some possibly hold onto hope that American manufacturing can be rebuilt. While the first group have had some success the other groups are doomed to failure because such a plan would have to be executed over decades by a unified political class - America was able to do that in the 80s and 90s, but now?

So Trump is whimsically declaring, changing, cancelling, reinstating, and delaying tariffs because he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and the people around him are either desperately trying to figure out how to turn this debacle into a win or just shrugging and profiting off of it personally. It’s a situation that is only possible because of the combination of Trump’s incompetence and the perceived power of his personality cult - nobody wants to be the one who goes against him and then doesn’t have a career anymore, so they’re all just going along with it waiting for him to die. It’s pretty much exactly what libs think Stalin’s rule was like.