How can anyone, after April 9’s U-turn on tariffs, argue that President Donald Trump is following some brilliant strategy? The readiness of conservative commentators and politicians, almost all of them free traders before Trump altered their career incentives, to pretend to see genius in the president’s repeated contradictions is starting to scare me.

Trump is forever pulling the rug from under his apologists. No sooner have they come up with some sophist explanation for what he is doing than he reverses direction. But it never dents their sycophancy.