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So far the story of the Trump administration when it comes to the economy is a tale of two countries: There are two paths that the United States might take under Donald Trump, and they end in very different national environments. What country America is becoming at any given time depends on which member of the administration is speaking on television and/or what mood Trump is in.

This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only Trump’s JFK Files Release Didn’t Interest the Conspiracy-Heads Much. But I Found Something in There That Changes Everything. This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only Republicans Smuggled a Horrifying Provision Into Their Midnight Megabill This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only The Supreme Court Just Rewarded Trump for Brazenly Breaking the Law Mike Johnson Pulled It Off. The Midterms Will Certainly Be Interesting.

The first country is a more dynamic version of the current one, in which the stock market keeps rising and America remains an international center of innovation and production—but in a superpowered way, thanks to Trump using the threat of tariffs to renegotiate trade deals with foreign powers in a way that further opens up markets for U.S. companies. It’s the art of the f—ing deal!!! This is, according to figures like Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent and sometimes Trump, what Trump is always working toward, using said art of the deal.

The second country is a modern version of, I don’t know, shogunate Japan, where tariffs are enormous and permanent, foreign professionals are actively excluded from the country, science and medical research is nonexistent, children’s dolls are as precious as gold, and Americans are funneled into manual labor jobs like making screws for Apple. This is the vision for the future held by figures like White House counselor Peter Navarro, Vice President J.D. Vance, and sometimes Trump: A nation of serfs—who are happy, despite being serfs in 2025, because the country has been returned to its prior state of cultural homogeneity (read: most of the population is white people) and spiritually rewarding manual labor.

Financial markets would very much like the first country, rather than North Korea With Energy Drinks, to be the one that the U.S. moves toward becoming in the next three to four years. When Trump announced a temporary tariff détente with China, markets went crazy; you could practically feel the collective desperation of the world’s financial people to reward him for not screwing up the good thing they have going.

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Bad news for those people (and many others), though: The administration’s Isolated Peasantry Caucus has been racking up some wins.

1. Republicans pressed forward last week with a budget bill that would create $4 trillion in deficits (LOL!) in order to cut the heck out of tax rates for millionaires and billionaires. In response, U.S. bond interest rates have flown upward—in effect a signal that investors are becoming more skeptical about the country’s ability to pay back its debts, and thus more hesitant to put their money here. (The international inclination to use the dollar as a “reserve currency” is believed by most observers—notably excluding a few key Trump advisers—to have been very useful for the U.S. over the course of the past 80 years.) Moody’s recent downgrade of the U.S.’s credit rating reflected a similar concern.

• The administration told Harvard it has to expel all its international students. This was ostensibly an escalation of Trump’s ongoing war with the school over allegedly “woke” curriculum rather than a broader attack on foreign academics, and was almost immediately put on hold by a judge. But it probably doesn’t make the world’s smartest and most innovation-generating biomedicine and computer science graduate students more likely to apply to U.S. schools.

• The slowdown of vaccine approval under vaccine-truther Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continued. (We’re including this one because foreign visitors may become less interested in traveling to the U.S. as it becomes gradually ravaged by diseases that no longer exist elsewhere.)

• Trump came out of nowhere with a social media post claiming that he has informed Apple CEO Tim Cook that he intends to eventually put a 25 percent tariff on iPhones unless they’re entirely manufactured and assembled in the United States. Apple stock, as they say, took a tumble.

OK! Time to Google “What is subsistence farming and how do I start doing it in my yard?” Have a nice week!

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