'Call your bluff': Political expert decries Trump tactic that any parent knows backfires

President Donald Trump's escalating threats have produced chaos and fear across American political and economic life, but that dynamic could ultimately undo his presidency as many of those ultimatums ring hollow.

The president has been threatening to fire Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell over his response to global tariffs, but Trump seemingly backed down after advisers warned the move was legally and financially risky — and political scientist David Faris published a piece for Slate explaining how this "depressingly familiar loop" keeps playing out.

"This loop is now standard operating procedure from the most chaotic White House in American history," wrote Faris, an associate professor at Roosevelt University. "In fact, it seems to be more or less the only move that this iteration of Trump has, one that he is deploying against everyone from Canada to Harvard University. And it is eerily similar to the nuclear strategy concept of 'escalate to de-escalate' — using a shocking act of aggression to convince an adversary to negotiate on your terms."

However, that strategy isn't quite working for Trump because his opponents have taken note of his weakness and his administration's incompetence, so they've essentially rerouted their long-range plans around the United States.

"Trump is fundamentally a weak, lame-duck president, whose paper-thin margins in Congress and embarrassing ineptitude at staffing his administration and carrying out his policies are not kinks that will be ironed out with time but rather inescapable features of his already unbearable and disastrous presidency," Faris wrote.

"That weakness, and the servile paralysis of Congress, is leading him to try the same blunt maneuver over and over again, with predictably diminishing returns."

"Rather than doing the painstaking work of enacting his lunatic agenda through that narrowly divided Congress, Trump has been acting, since Day 1, like a leader who has to resort immediately to vindictive threats and massively escalatory decisions to get what he wants," the political scientist added.

Any parent who's tried escalating threats to coerce good behavior out of a child understands how quickly they learn to call your bluff, but Trump doesn't seem to understand how ineffective that tactic is, Faris wrote.

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"If it was a useful tactic, Russia would already have deployed it against Ukraine, Faris wrote, "and China would have come scurrying to the negotiating table to plead with Trump to reduce tariffs."

Voters are already understanding that Trump's tactics aren't working, but he still has nearly four more years left of his term.

"Issuing a never-ending stream of escalatory and often nonsensical threats is also no way to run a country, and voters are fast coming around to the understanding that they made a terrible mistake putting this senescent maniac back in power in November," Faris wrote.

"It is not clear how the United States will even survive another 44 months of this circus with anything resembling the status quo, or our battered psyches, intact," he added. "But if Trump’s incipient authoritarians ever allow another Democrat to be elected president, that person is likely to discover that some of the damage to America’s reputation and interests is irreversible."