To thrive, America needs stability Trump won’t provide | Opinion
If I were to pick one thing that has given America such a successful economy, it is predictability and stability. Business leaders, whether they be the owner of a corner shop, a family farmer, a tech entrepreneur or an industrial CEO, need to be reasonably sure of what is going to happen in the near and medium term to make hiring decisions and investments in everything from a new store, a new app or an expanded factory.
The way our Constitution was written, it is hard to get anything big done. That and a predictable Federal Reserve gifted America with a policy environment from year to year that moved pretty slowly, if at all, for nearly 250 years.
If there is one big thing that Donald Trump has done wrong, it is to jack up uncertainty to never-before-seen levels. That showed in the dismal employment report released Friday. Even jobs in health care were down, and no business has more predictable customers than health care providers in a rapidly aging America.
And that data is from before the president launched a war in Iran, spiking oil prices and reinvigorating fears of inflation that were already high due to his administration’s profligate spending and erratic tariff policies. (They were erratic even before the Supreme Court threw a wrench in the works, often turning on how Trump felt about a single phone call with a foreign leader.)
If anything, I fear things are about to get worse.
If there were one aspect of the Trump administration that was stable and predictable, it was the president’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. No matter what, you knew from border to border and everywhere in between, immigration enforcement was going to be over-the-top tough even when it didn’t need to be. Now Trump has fired the manager of that stable policy, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
We don’t know exactly why she was fired. We don’t know what is different about the little-known Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a former MMA fighter, who is to replace her. Moreover, we are not exactly sure what about Noem’s tenure that rubbed Trump the wrong way. Now, even the stable immigration policy is up for grabs.
That could be just the beginning. With the midterms just months away and primaries already sorting out the candidates for the fall, Trump is going to be under increasing pressure and scrutiny. Jobs down. The economy sputtering. Congress absent. The world in more chaos than we’ve seen in a while. People are going to be asking who is in charge and what the plan for fixing things is.
The real answer is nobody is in charge and there is no plan, but if Trump wants to dodge accountability for the sorry state of affairs, he is going need scapegoats. Noem may be only the first to go.
David Mastio is a columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy.
This story was originally published March 7, 2026 at 5:07 AM.
