Quoting Ezra

"I think there's a useful analogy to draw here. I think a lot about an article Mark Danner wrote in the New York Review of Books many years ago about the Iraq War, and it's an article that has stuck in my mind forever, because what he says about it is that one of the difficulties of the politics of the Iraq War is there was no one war; there was everybody's private war that they were projecting onto the Bush administration.

You had the liberal humanitarian vision of why we were going to war and what that war would look like. You had a realist vision for it, you had a vision that was more about weapons of mass destruction and keeping the homeland safe from terrorism. You had people who believed there was an Iraq al-Qaeda connection. There were really dozens of these, which is how you got as broad a coalition behind as bad a policy as that together, because everybody said: "you know they're being a little bit vague about what's really going on here and why we're really doing this. I bet you if you go into their hearts, what they want is the thing I want, even though the policy doesn't quite match what policy you would get starting from my premises".

That's really what I hear here; I hear it on this show, but I hear it in general in the discussion around this, that there are a lot of different objectives being projected onto Donald Trump and his trade war. The objectives do not fit the policies we're seeing. The objectives are not, uh, stably articulated by Donald Trump or the people around him, nor is any specific objective being articulated in a stable way without contradicting objectives also being articulated at the same time. And look, maybe in the end — and this is why I want to push you all on metrics — you get something you like out of this, but you're giving away a lot of clarity just on the trust that what is happening is that people are keeping a good hand of cards with a good strategy of poker hidden from you, as opposed to what's happening, which is what we seem to be seeing in public: Donald Trump is a chaotic and erratic person. They are making policy in a chaotic and erratic way, and that policy is having chaotic and erratic consequences, and then they are operating and moving on the fly in a chaotic and erratic fashion."

Source https://youtu.be/KcmMOZKnKAk?si=XKSSDGIo7tSvp6ei&t=3143