Is Donald Trump holding the global economy hostage for his own amusement? It certainly looks that way

And he has surrounded himself with small people who elaborately flatter him and puff him up in risible Cabinet meetings. Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, even has a Maoist golden Trump head on his lapel. Barack Obama’s White House portrait was nudged aside for one of Trump pumping his fist after the assassination attempt.

The Emperor of Chaos told us to “BE COOL!” as markets cratered and people got “yippy”, as Trump put it. But how is that possible when everything is so unstable?

Trump may even turn into the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Jami Warner, the executive director of the American Christmas Tree Association, warned Friday on CNN that the holiday may be difficult for a lot of families accustomed to getting their cheap artificial trees, lights and ornaments from China, not to mention presents.

I had to go to summer school for algebra, but I don’t want a government that’s bad at math. O’Brien wrote in Bloomberg News that Trump’s “tragicomic ‘formula’” for tariffs “somehow positioned Cambodia and Thailand at the top of the heap of countries posing major economic threats to the US, and also caused tariffs to be imposed on uninhabited islands near Antarctica.”

The Republicans’ math on the budget bill is also fuzzy. You can’t give trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy and pretend it won’t cost anything.

Even before Trump opened a Pandora’s box of economic woe, we knew numbers weren’t his strong suit. He had six bankruptcies, and his father had to buy $US3.4 million in chips to save one of his casinos.

The most conclusive evidence of his innumeracy was his appearance in 2006 on Howard Stern’s show with Ivanka and Don Jr. The Trump siblings’ insistence that they got into Wharton on their merits inspired Stern to give them a grade school-level pop quiz.

“What’s 17 times 6?” he asked.

After some nervous laughter, Don Jr. replied: “96? 94?” His father interjected: “It’s 11 12. It’s 112.”

“Wrong!” Stern said, adding: “It’s 102!”

Donald Trump repeated: “112.”

Trump should be alarmed that investors are skittish about buying US government bonds, usually considered safe assets.

“And guess who owns a lot of US debt?” O’Brien said. “China, Japan, Europe. Are they feeling good about us right now?”

As everyone else gets yippy – JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon warned of a recession – the president seems to be enjoying centre stage, toying with the strings like a cat.

“All of this unnecessary, orchestrated dissent and doubt and damage for his own amusement,” O’Brien told me. “He’s the kid in the garage with matches standing next to the gasoline tank.”

Now that Trump’s tariff scheme has gone horribly awry – and the administration’s attempt to spin it as an “Art of the Deal” victory has fallen flat – it remains to be seen if this will be a “Wizard of Oz” moment when the curtain gets pulled back on the con man. Will the global chaos puncture the sense of mastery that Trump has projected?

“This is not a reality show,” Axelrod said. “This is reality.”

He continued: “People like the idea of cutting waste and fraud and abuse until it means that the Social Security office in your hometown or veterans’ health programs close down, or there are measles outbreaks because they don’t know what they’re doing. Do these add up so, at some point, people say: ‘You know what? This isn’t really working for me’?”

The former casino owner in the White House brags that he has never gambled. But he is gambling with Americans’ lives and futures. How strange, as even the dollar loses its allure, that a man long considered a branding savant has so badly mucked up the US brand.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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