May 21, 2025 | Yuval Levin

First, he raises tariffs. Then he drops them. He halts grants. Then a judge reinstates them. He fires federal workers and then they get rehired. If you feel like you’ve got an acute case of whiplash after the first few months of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, you are not alone.

The obvious upshot of these frantic reversals is costly and dangerous uncertainty. Decision-making is difficult when some basic rules of American life seem always in flux.

But the deeper implication of this frenzied approach is not uncertainty. It is a widespread and dawning recognition of vulnerability.

In foreign capitals, in corporate boardrooms, and across the institutions that compose U.S. civil society, leaders are coming to the realization that America’s federal government is not as steady or reliable a partner as they have long imagined. After decades of tacitly counting on Washington, they now see that they have to start making other plans.

This realization is less a function of the instability of federal policy than of its sheer capriciousness.

It turns out that much of the infrastructure of the post-World War II domestic and global order was always subject to the whims of the American president, but that our postwar presidents have generally been invested in sustaining the stability of that infrastructure. This has led corporate, civic, economic, academic, and foreign elites to assume that infrastructure was independently stable and reliable. Trump has shown them that it isn’t, and they will not soon forget what they’ve seen.

America’s allies around the world now recognize that the reassuring constancy of the American colossus is not a dependable fact. Trump has shown them that our country’s willingness to secure the seas for trade, or bear a lot of the costs of defending European and Asian democracies, has been revocable at any president’s whim. At any moment, the United States could start behaving like a traditional imperial hegemon. World leaders have always known this in principle, but they never quite believed it could materialize. Until now.

Business elites at home and abroad now recognize that the generic capitalist impulse that has broadly framed American economic policy for generations is subject to election returns. This was not as obvious to them until Trump’s Liberation Day last month. Even after Trump’s inauguration, many savvy CEOs refused to believe the president’s trade talk was serious. Now they see they were wrong, and they have learned something important about the dependability of the federal government as a guarantor of the preconditions for markets.

The leaders of America’s elite universities thought they had assumed the worst about Trump when he won reelection, but their situation has proved more serious than they realized. They never quite imagined that the immense and intricate architecture of federal grant support for academic scientific research was vulnerable to instant elimination, or could be leveraged to pressure them to alter basic campus governance practices. Having now come face-to-face with the dark side of their dependence on federal support, they will not think of the federal government the same way again.

The same has happened in many other American institutions. Across the charitable sector, throughout civil society, in law firms and accounting firms, in media and finance, the sense that the federal government functions as a kind of underlying infrastructure for American life is evaporating, and elites are confronting the immense contingency that has always been right in front of them yet had escaped their notice.

This news is less surprising to those among such elites who lean right. They’ve long known that the federal government is a political entity that can and will push them around—targeting them with tax audits, putting politicized conditions on grants, threatening lawsuits, and imposing a progressive agenda dressed up as unbiased regulation. But even for more conservative elites, the practical scope of the capriciousness they face—of the sheer risk involved in depending on the federal government—is now painfully clear. For most elites, who don’t lean right, this reckoning has come as a bolt from the blue. How did they get it so wrong?

The fundamental lesson that Trump and his team learned from his first term in office was that he needed to be liberated—that his own personal impulses should administer the government directly, unmediated by establishment advisers and civil servants. This was the wrong lesson to draw, and Trump is likely to pay a political price for it. But it is a governing assumption of this administration, and it has revealed how exceedingly vulnerable the implicit arrangements foundational to much of modern life have always been to the whims of an American president.

At home and abroad, the big lesson of the first few months of this administration is not about Donald Trump, but what he has revealed. It is about the perils of depending on America’s federal government.

In a sense, this is a danger that conservatives in our politics have warned of for decades, and that progressives now cannot ignore. But that it is being exposed by a Republican president has left some conservatives unsure if they should cheer or grieve, and made it harder for progressives to see that they should have been more careful about government power all along.

But that lesson will likely endure whatever happens next. It will not become moot if Trump’s term is a failure, or when he is replaced in the White House. America is a democracy, and it has lately given over an immense amount of power to its presidents. That means its government can suddenly and sharply change course with each election. Most of our presidents haven’t wanted to do so quite as sharply as Trump, but that means the stability that so much of the world has counted on for so long has nonetheless been a function of what America’s presidents happen to want. That is too precarious a foundation to support all that has been built on it. Grasping that is going to change how a lot of powerful institutions relate to the American government.

This lesson therefore won’t become irrelevant if many of Trump’s early and aggressive actions are undone—as many surely will be. Such reversals will mostly be a function of Trump’s inclination to violate the procedural rules of American government. Most of what he wants to do could be done within those rules. If a future president had the patience and the congressional support to break alliances, withdraw grants, or recur to mercantilist economics while following constitutional procedures, he could do it far more durably and effectively.

The institutions most vulnerable to the resulting instability have now had the visceral experience of the danger and pain it involves. Even if the courts get federal money flowing to universities again, academic administrators have now done the math on how dangerously exposed they are to federal policy changes. Even if the markets or public opinion force Trump to reverse his tariffs, business leaders have grasped how quickly the ground could collapse from beneath their assumptions. Even if commitments to Europe or Taiwan survive the next few years, leaders there now know those commitments could evaporate in a heartbeat.

Some may have known this in the abstract. But the concrete experience of vulnerability to the whims of the American government will forever change many institutions and the elites that run them.

That change could bring some real benefits. Some of America’s allies surely have leaned too much on our good graces and neglected their own defense and development in ways that have not been good for them or for us. Realizing they are less sheltered than they thought could make these allies better partners and more responsible nations.

There is also some benefit in America’s corporate sector grasping that if they want government support for capitalism, they will need to build public support for it, and to earn and justify that support.

That universities and nonprofits understand the perils of their extreme dependence on the federal government is even more valuable. It could help them see that they owe a debt—and therefore some degree of loyalty and gratitude—to the larger society, and cannot approach it with smug, unremitting hostility while assuming an endless flow of taxpayer subsidies.

Trump and his team certainly see these benefits, and tout them as key to the case for their efforts. They argue that federal largesse has only rewarded corrupt elites at home and abroad. But as usual, they see only the dark side of the postwar order and recklessly ignore or take for granted its enormous achievements and advantages.

These advantages have been especially great for America. The trust that nearly every elite institution in the West has put in our government has functioned as an immense invisible subsidy for American life for generations now—giving Americans special privileges we have not even noticed. From the benefits of universal trust in the dollar and in our public debt, to military-basing rights around the globe, access to foreign ports at will, an immense engine of discovery and innovation always humming in the background of our society, and far more, we have gained from good will and vast resources that we have rarely had to think about.

Just as America’s allies, the business world, the academy, and civil society have come to take our government for granted, so our society—and now its new Trump-supporting leadership class—has come to take the confidence of all those institutions and actors for granted. We have not begun to grasp what we will lose now that this confidence is ebbing away.

Maybe an American leader with more vision and administrative prowess could have renegotiated our government’s relationships with its dependents better—keeping their trust while compelling them to restore some independence and responsibility. Maybe not, and the tragic logic of Trump’s path was unavoidable in some form. Either way, on this path, the costs of vitiating the nation’s and the world’s assumption that the federal government is a reliable partner are likely to vastly exceed the benefits.

This waning of America’s reputation could well end up being Donald Trump’s lasting legacy. The pandemonium of his frenetic mode of governance will fade. The impact of his more focused administrative actions will soften with time, too, and many of them will be reversed through court decisions, legislation, or the shifting priorities of future presidents. But the nation and the world will not easily be able to unsee what Trump has exposed about just how precarious the foundations of our confident prosperity and peace have been and how dependent we all are on an assumption of stable cooperation from Washington—an assumption we may never quite recover.