Watching the wild lines of the S&P 500, U.S. Treasury bond yields, and various foreign markets is how I’ve spent most of the past week. This felt familiar; I’d spent much of 2017 doing the same, following the vagaries of the first Trump administration and tracking the markets’ reactions like a nurse checking a patient’s heart rate.
But despite that familiarity, this isn’t the same as last time. I actually wish it were. This time, there’s no coming back from this quickly.

The director Alex Garland’s 2024 film, Civil War, was gritty, realistic, and often horrifying to watch, but it was fundamentally a flight of fantasy. One could debate just how fanciful its near-future depiction of America going to war with itself over a president who refused to leave office was, but for all that movie’s intense effort to depict combat realistically, Garland was only imagining the reasons for it.

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Donald Trump’s trade war has unleashed global uncertainty.

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Seed oils—think canola, soybean, corn—have long been “maligned by both the crunchy left and the MAHA right,” Rachel Sugar wrote yesterday. Many consider them to be unhealthy, despite no scientific evidence to back up that claim. (Just don’t use a black plastic spatula to spread oil around.

When Donald Trump launched his tariff war on April 2, lawmakers in Europe struggled to understand the strategy. Was it a bluff, or did he really mean to collapse global trade, stock markets, and the Western alliance in one reckless game of 4-D chess?
On April 9, however, the president discovered something that we in the United Kingdom already know: Against the bond market, there is only 2-D chess, and you always lose. Because the Brits have been here before.