'A huge mess': How this Trump policy has led to a 'tsunami' of consistent 'chaos'

Atlantic writer David Frum says he recently paid a $26.05 tariff on a small purchase from the United Kingdom. But now that the legality of that tariff has been rejected by lower courts and is on its way to the Supreme Court, who has to pay Frum back his money if the highest court also declares tariffs illegal?

“I didn’t pay my $26.05 to the U.S. government. I paid it to the shipper, who in turn (I presume) remitted one big check to the U.S. government,” said Frum. “How does that process get reversed?”

It’s easy to claim “the U.S. government should refund one big check to the shipper, who will in turn reverse all of its small credit-card collections to its customers,” said Frum, but making so clear-cut a prediction undermines the complexity of the kind of chaos President Donald Trump unloads onto the world and U.S. voters.

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Real life, said Frum, doesn’t provide easy solutions to Trump’s messes.

Frum’s shipper, DHL, might have the technology to cope with the small-dollar refund obligations of thousands of U.S. buyers before the company threw up its hands and stoppedshipping packages to the United States. "But what about all of those companies that collected money that’s much harder to trace?” Frum asked.

“Almost every U.S. producer of almost every good and service is paying more for almost every input because of Trump’s tariffs. But determining who paid what to whom and when will create a tangle of claims and counterclaims,” Frum warned, adding that the U.S. government collected $94 billion in tariff revenue in the first half of 2025.

“Creating a huge mess is a consistent Trump method,” Frum said. “Over and over again, the administration commits to actions at, or beyond, the outermost limit of executive power, then confronts the courts with a risk of chaos if the limits are enforced.”

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“If Trump is allowed to keep the proceeds of his illegal taxes, then Congress has lost the power of the purse and Article I of the Constitution has been repealed. If Trump must return his illegal taxes, then millions of disgorgement actions will follow,” said Frum.

Similarly, the administration has detained and imprisoned thousands of individuals without due process. If the courts allow these detentions, habeas corpus will be “more or less dead in America,” Frum said, but “if the courts refuse, brace yourself for a tsunami of wrongful-arrest litigation."

“Trump is chaos,” said Frum, quoting former president Bill Clinton. “So it is proving true, on a scale that is only beginning to come into view.”

Read Frum's Atlantic essay at this link.