Trump's rug-pull presidency

The big picture: Across-the-board tariffs on Mexico and Canada — two of America's three largest trading partners — have been on and then off and then on and then off. Colombia knows the feeling.

• The government put 80 million square feet of its real estate up for sale, only to then take the "for sale" sign down.
• Trump has fired federal employees at the CDC, the FDA, the National Nuclear Security Administration, and the Department of Agriculture, only to then re-hire them.
• He touted the use of military aircraft to carry out high-profile deportations, only to suspend the flights after finding them costly and inefficient.

For the record: "This is the art of the deal," a White House spokesman tells Axios about the tariff reversals, adding that the General Services Administration and individual agencies, rather than Trump himself, are responsible for other executive-branch actions.

• Elon Musk is also distancing himself from the firings of federal workers.

Flashback: In a matter of days, Trump denounced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, then made up and invited him to Washington, then chastised him in the Oval Office, then expressed openness to rebuilding ties, then cut off arms and intelligence sharing.

Zoom in: Republicans in Congress have repeatedly found themselves boxed in by Trump's flip-flops.

• He spent weeks equivocating on whether Congress should pass his agenda in one bill or two — then blindsided the Senate by backing House Republicans' one-bill approach.
• He promised not to cut Medicaid, then backed a House GOP budget plan that could force exactly that in order to meet its proposed spending cuts.
• He has vowed to achieve the unthinkable by balancing the budget — while endorsing trillions of dollars in tax cuts, plus new campaign promises like no tax on tips or overtime.

Follow the money: The stock market, for one, is tiring of such shenanigans. On Wednesday, stocks fell on news that tariffs were being imposed — and then on Thursday, when those tariffs were suspended, stocks fell again.

• Foreign investors like French energy company Engie are on the record as saying that they need clarity and predictability in order to invest in the U.S. — something that's clearly missing at the moment.
• "I'm not even looking at the market," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Thursday, disavowing his longtime favorite metric for economic success.

Zoom out: In crypto, a rug-pull is any project that's announced and then abandoned — often at great expense to anybody who believed the initial announcement.

Between the lines: Elon Musk — who may or may not be the head of DOGE, depending on who you ask — is at least partially responsible for the administration's "move fast and break things" ethos.

• "We will make mistakes. We won't be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we'll fix it very quickly," Musk said in a Cabinet meeting last week, pointing to the reversed cancellation of Ebola funding.
• DOGE has made plenty of mistakes, but has not always been transparent about fixing them — quietly pulling down billions of dollars from its online "wall of receipts" on multiple occasions.

The bottom line: This is just exhausting.