Against the Mad King – UnHerd

On Wednesday morning, Jonathan Karl of ABC News asked President Trump whether he can live with Iran instituting a toll system for vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz. The arrangement, already in effect even before the ceasefire, would be codified under Tehran’s 10-point plan for ending the war, which Trump has accepted as a basis for negotiations.

The resulting system would amount to a major concession to the Islamic Republic, which didn’t collect any fees for permitting passage before the war. At least one vessel has already paid $2 million to pass. If that becomes the going rate, Iran could pocket some $70 billion to $90 billion a year, according to a JPMorgan estimate — in effect, obtaining through fees the reparations to which Tehran insists it is entitled for the destruction caused by the war. Hence, Karl’s question.

Trump’s response: “We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it — also securing it from lots of other people. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Ponder the absurdity: a joint venture with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which just showed its capacity to unilaterally close the strait and thus cripple global energy markets. It’s the sort of bullshit — sorry, there’s no better word — that defines his rule, especially in his second term. Call it mad-king governance, in which the intellectual inconstancy, mercurial moods, and sheer gambling audacity of a single man are supposed to substitute for modern technocracy.

Except, mad-king governance is utterly exhausting for Americans and the world. And the process is so messy, the results so lousy, the risks so high, that the mad king is making liberal technocracy look better by comparison. One yearns to cry out: Bring back Hillary, bring back the Obamaian wonks, give us a thousand interagency briefing memos and think-tank white papers — policy formed in the pre-populist age may have been bad, but it wasn’t this bad.

I kid. Mostly. Pre-Trump technocracy, to adapt a famous adage of Mitterrand’s, contained in itself all the elements that made Trump’s rise inevitable. Above all, it removed important questions from democratic contestation; no matter which party voters elected, they got ruinous free-trade deals, pointless foreign wars, and open borders. In 2016, Trump got himself elected president precisely by re-politicizing the questions that voters had been told were beyond their ken.

Trump, in other words, put his finger on a real crisis of democracy, and one that America had confronted going back to the beginning. Given its complexities, modern society requires complex administration. But in carrying out this function, administrative agencies can come to override the democratic will, often to the benefit of themselves and other elites. This, in turn, provokes backlash, with the popular classes sometimes elevating a brash figure to take on all the wonky bastards.  

The classic American case is the Second Bank of the United States. The bank was a pillar of the Hamiltonian state, designed to ensure the steady but disciplined flow of credit in the new republic as it set out to industrialize its economy. The BUS fulfilled this function with admirable effectiveness, as well as serving as a profiteering money-market actor in its own right.

Yet it also came to be seen, not unjustly, as a vehicle for the Northeastern commercial establishment and unfriendly to workers, farmers, and a rising class of small entrepreneurs in the South and West. Moreover, although the bank was established by Congress and partially funded by taxpayers, its leaders strenuously resisted democratic oversight and even used their financial might to bend election outcomes to their preferences.

The bank’s opponents found a champion in Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee militiaman who despised all paper money and saw the BUS as unconstitutional. Jackson, known as “Old Hickory” for his toughness, set out to destroy the BUS — and succeeded. Having failed to plan for the aftermath, however, the Jackson administration turned to local banks to serve as substitute depositories for government funds. 

The Jacksonians soon learned to their chagrin that small bankers were far more vulnerable to graft and mismanagement than the big federal institution. The immediate issue of the Bank War was a rash of wildcat banking and a recession, and a US banking system that for much of the 19th century was much more crisis-prone than those of comparable industrial states, like France and Britain, with more centralized banking systems. What the BUS needed was better democratic oversight. There were good proposals in Congress for ensuring this, which Jackson ignored, choosing instead a Hulk-smash strategy that ended up creating more problems than it solved. 

This fact pattern should be disconcertingly familiar. To be sure, Jackson was far more mentally disciplined and systematic than Trump. Indeed, Old Hickory doesn’t deserve the mad-king label. But Jackson’s flawed fight with the BUS also describes the self-defeating course of much Trumpian “reform.”

“Often, management of the war was based on the state of the stock market.”

Consider tariffs and free trade. Trump identified a very real crisis, of course: a world trade system that profited Wall Street and China but sapped US manufacturing capacity and decimated working-class jobs and communities. But like the Jacksonians, the Trumpians could smash, but not design and develop. They imposed tariffs on certain Chinese goods in the first term, but it was left to the Bidenites to actually implement something like an industrial policy, especially focused on renewables and semiconductors.

Upon returning to office, Trump once more set out to restructure the trade system, with tariffs emerging as his only tool for doing so. Not even bothering with legislation in Congress, he used dubious statutory authority to impose across-the-board tariffs, derived using a cockamamie formula, on every corner of the Earth, including islands uninhabited by humans. It was unclear how imposing levies on bananas would revive manufacturing. Nor could the administration explain why all trade deficits, with all nations and in all sectors, had to be eliminated. Nor, finally, were the tariffs coupled with workforce development or industrial policy — the additional ingredients needed for a genuine manufacturing revival.

Then Trump went into mad-king mode, imposing and removing tariffs, raising rates and slashing them, based on pure caprice and in response to the gyrations of equity markets. Like Oprah dispensing prizes to her audience members, the mad king handed down tariff threats to every foreign country that dared to disagree with him, including some of Washington’s oldest and most reliable allies.

Eventually, the US Supreme Court held that Trump lacked the statutory authority he claimed for his tariffs. Manufacturing revival, the ostensible purpose of the policy, was all but forgotten. And indeed, it isn’t happening: in the first year of the second Trump administration, the United States lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs. And only about a third of voters approve of his handling of the economy, compared with nearly two-thirds who disapprove. Trump’s mad-king shenanigans not only failed to fulfill one of MAGA’s central promises, but may have even undermined the credibility of an important tool for protecting US industry.

It was his recent Iran war, however, that comprehensively sealed the debate on the dangerous folly of this kind of governance. As two administration officials, one current and one former, told me in almost identical words, with the Iran war, “there was no interagency process” — none of the usual compilation and exchange of views between different parts of the security and foreign-policy apparatus aimed at helping presidential decision-making. There was just the king and his favorite senatorial and Fox News jesters.

Start with his rhetoric surrounding the conflict. Shut up, Trump effectively told those of his supporters jarred by his decision to join Israel’s war against Iran, given his 2024 campaign pledge of a “peace” administration. Wasn’t MAGA supposed to pivot away from Mideast wars? “MAGA was my idea,” he countered. “MAGA was nobody else’s idea. I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else.” Le MAGA, c’est moi.

The objectives were ever-shifting: changing the regime and putting Iran’s destiny in the hands of its people; degrading military capacity; stopping a nuclear program that had already been “obliterated” in the course of the earlier 12-Day War; reopening the Strait of Hormuz; not reopening the Strait of Hormuz, because we don’t need it anyway; you better “fucking open it, you crazy bastards,” otherwise America will “wipe out a whole civilization”; OK, how about we both run it in a joint venture?

Often, management of the war was based on the state of the stock market. It became a joke on Iranian state TV that Trump eased up on operations on Sundays to ensure the Dow could climb into the green on Mondays, then ramp up the war come the next weekend, when markets closed. If it were a true war of necessity, of course, the nation would fight it to the end, even if it meant destroying everyone’s 401(k)s. But only a mad king adjusts daily tactics in a war of choice based on equity values.

The upshot is a battered but strategically victorious Iran. The regime didn’t collapse, but hardened its internal position. Iran’s ballistic firing ability was judged to be improving as the war went on. Relief from sanctions and tariffs are on the way, per Trump himself. And above all, Tehran realized it doesn’t need a nuclear weapon when it can shut off one of the world’s economic arteries at will. And notice: Trump devoted nearly all of his remaining political capital to carrying out one of the long-time goals of the very hawkish “deep state” that had long sought his political destruction. Except he did it poorly, in mad-king fashion.

So what’s a better way? In the view of the American Founders, the answer is political contestation and compromise of the kind that’s supposed to take place, especially, in the legislative branch. But so long as Congress is more or less moribund, and American lawmakers see their jobs as auditioning for cable news, the country is fated to lurch between mad kings and imperious bureaucrats. Both are bad. Still, after what we lived through in 2025 and 2026, I say bring back the wonks.