It’s been seven mind-blowing days since President Trump announced his global tariff plan on April 2—“Liberation Day,” he called it—and all of that before the steepest “reciprocal” tariffs take effect today. In that time of turmoil and melting markets, there has been no more stunning moment than Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s April 3 interview with CNN, in which he told everyone to calm down and defer to the president.
“Let Donald Trump run the global economy,” Lutnick instructed. “He knows what he’s doing. He’s been talking about it for 35 years. Let him fix it. . . . You’ve got to trust Donald Trump in the White House.”
From the perspective of the U.S. constitutional order, the hallmark of which is checks and balances—and which is intended to prevent just the kind of grandiose one-man rule Lutnick was advocating—the secretary’s comments seemed somewhere between ill-informed and dangerous.
But as a statement on how far the United States’ political reality has strayed from its constitutional design, and on where the system’s true center of gravity now lies, Lutnick’s comment made all too much sense.