Empty shelves at a Dollar Tree store in Alhambra, California Frederic J. Brown/Getty

Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office may have been the longest, figuratively speaking, of any U.S. president in history. But we can also say definitively that they were the most disastrous, ever. His draconian deportations, destruction of the federal government, and insane tariff Tilt-a-Whirls have driven his approval numbers so low as to be a modern marvel; the last time a president was this disliked after 100 days, we were fighting a world war and the Slinky was the country’s most popular toy. Trump has ended up here for no other reason than that he pursued the very policies he promised to pursue on the campaign trail. That’s the story of his first 100 days: Americans elected a dumb asshole, and natural consequences followed. 

Now let’s consider the next 100 days, which look to be even worse for all of us—including the president. As TNR’s Alex Shephard wrote this week, there are a lot of good reasons to believe Trump’s standing with the American people hasn’t hit bottom yet, the main one being that the worst is yet to come. The president, Shephard writes, "is still stubbornly clinging to tariffs, which inevitably will cause product shortages and rising costs in the near future—not to mention a potential recession, the odds of which are worryingly high."

On May 14, TNR’s editor, Michael Tomasky, and staff writers Matt Ford, Timothy Noah, Tori Otten, and Greg Sargent will host the next in our series America in Crisis, live and livestreamed from the Atlas Performing Arts Center in D.C.

With the new administration in place, this event will bring together influential political commentators with TNR’s most engaged readers to explore what we can do to fight back against Trump’s antidemocratic rampage.

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Last weekend, Apollo Global economist Torsten Slok published a preview of coming attractions in the form of a report documenting what he’s calling the imminent "Voluntary Trade Reset Recession." As Slok documents, Trump’s economy—though quite sluggish—has been boosted by the fact that inventories rose rapidly as firms acted in anticipation of tariffs being imposed. Now that tariffs have arrived, the sugar high is over and collapse is on the way. The most straightforward way of looking at the future is on page 4 of Slok’s report.

What we have here is the prelude to the summer of scarcity, coming soon to a retailer near you. We are already well and fully in the stage where activity at our ports falls off a cliff. As TNR’s Tim Noah wrote this week:

This is how it begins. The recession has arrived in Seattle, with cargo shipments down 60 percent. Los Angeles will be next. As recently as November, the Los Angeles Times reported that cargo traffic at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach reached record highs. But last week it quoted the port’s executive director, Gene Seroka, predicting that "in two weeks’ time, arrivals will drop by 35 percent." The reason, Seroka said, was that "essentially all shipments out of China for major retailers and manufacturers have ceased, and cargo coming out of Southeast Asia locations is much softer than normal."

From here, Tim says, there will be less cargo to ship across the country, and inevitably, fewer people employed to do that work. Already, UPS has laid off 20,000 workers because of "current macro-economic uncertainty" that I really think wasn’t all that uncertain when Trump was reelected. This only highlights another grim reality: Even if Trump called off his tariffs tomorrow, much of the coming mayhem is baked into our future, as it would take a substantial amount of time to restart the global shipping machine. "Expect ships to sit offshore, orders to be canceled, and well-run generational retailers to file for bankruptcy," says Slok. 

The latter half of that prediction may well be the more devastating part. As Marketwatch’s Steve Goldstein highlighted, Slok said that "small businesses that account for more than 80 percent of employment and capital expenditure don’t have the working capital to pay tariffs." In other words, Trumpnomics will soon be best known for that which is absent: products on the shelves of retailers, and businesses on the streets where you live, now shuttered.

Here is where the Wall Street versus Main Street divide is going to be keenly illuminated as Trump’s tariffs start the economic bloodletting. The White House has rather persistently explained away the turmoil its tariffs have wrought as a harm done only to high-flying financiers, and claimed that the benefits to ordinary people would soon emerge. A day after he got hit with a hundred dreadful evaluations of his first 100 days, Trump was spinning out on Truth Social, promising that the boom was on the wing. 

But even as the stock markets have pitched and yawed as investors cling to their naïve beliefs that Trump has a plan (he doesn’t), those plying their trade on Main Street are planning for a different sort of boom. To hear Casey Ames—the founder of Harkla, a small, 10-person firm in Idaho that sells products for special needs children—tell it, Trump’s tariffs have already forced him to make some grim considerations. 

Ames told the Idaho Statesman that his company was set to have a banner year. "We had just hired more people, and we were forecasting a really good year, even with the initial Trump tariffs," he said. Now, however, he’s facing a massive hike in the amount of import taxes he’ll have to pay, from $26,000 to $346,000. With no domestic manufacturer capable of supplying the same goods, and knowing that even modest price hikes could crater sales, Ames is suddenly facing a situation where he may have to lay off employees.

Ames has garnered a lot of attention for sharing his experiences on social media, taking his audience behind the curtain to reveal what small-business owners have to expect as the summer of scarcity begins. Over at The New York Times, where they’ve been doing a long-running bit where Frank Luntz interviews the 14 dumbest voters in America, this fissure recently emerged: Meagan, the focus group’s lone small-business owner, told Luntz that the tariffs were a "very, very scary thing" and that she was, as a result, in "crisis mode." If reality has started to penetrate Luntz’s Delulu Conclave, we’re all in for a world of hurt.

And that’s probably the most dreadful reckoning, as we mark the 100th day of Trump’s second term. Trump’s collapse in public opinion polling—along with the fact that he’s not likely to reverse many of his worst decisions or repair the things he’s broken—has probably set his presidency on the road to ruin. But if Trump has truly sown the seeds of his own undoing, it will be ordinary Americans who reap the proceeds of that dire harvest first, in the form of lost livelihoods and scuppered wealth. It’s going to be a rough summer—and many seasons thereafter, until one day we finally hit the nadir of Trumpian despair.

—Jason Linkins, deputy editor

P.S.: If you’re a small-business owner with a story to tell about how tariffs are impacting your bottom line, contact my colleague Grace Segers. 

This week, TNR editor Michael Tomasky sums up Trump’s first 100 days as a hot mess of seething autocracy and thunderous incompetence. Matt Ford games out Trumpworld’s latest play to take over the federal judiciary. Bryce Covert spoke to several trans federal employees who all attested to how Trump has turned a supportive workplace into a place of constant fear. Trump’s attempt to quell dissent on campus is well known, but as Indigo Olivier reveals, his plot against higher education is much more elaborate. For fans of creeping fascism, Parker Molloy drills down into one of the more disturbing moments of Trump’s interview with ABC News. And Elliot Haspel suggests that the nascent pronatalist movement is not something that Democrats can—or should—dismiss out of hand.

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