GEOFF BENNETT: President Trump's trade war is in the spotlight this week, with the back-and-forth causing tension for global markets.

On that and more of the week's news, we turn now to the analysis of Capehart and Ponnuru.

That's Jonathan Capehart, associate editor for "The Washington Post," and Ramesh Ponnuru, editor for "The National Review."

David Brooks is away this evening.

It's good to see you gentlemen.

JONATHAN CAPEHART: Hey, Geoff.

RAMESH PONNURU, Senior Editor, "The National Review": Thank you.

GEOFF BENNETT: So, from the indiscriminate firings of federal workers to the now on-again/off-again tariff plan, confusion has been a real feature of this second Trump term.

Jonathan, let's talk about the tariffs first, because that has been the story of the week.

What stands out to you about the degree to which the tariff reversals and delays have really injected chaos into the economy and the financial markets?

JONATHAN CAPEHART: Well, that's what I was going to point out.

This on-again/off-again, yes, no pause, no, we're a go, no, we're not, I don't cover business, but I have been following business for a long time, and I have long heard that business loves certainty.

And what the president has done since his inauguration and definitely this week is inject an amount of uncertainty into the economy, into business, that we have seen wild gyrations of the stock market.

And one of the reasons I think the president backed away a couple of times from these tariffs is that the market was tanking.

And even though he said in the Oval Office, I'm not paying attention to the markets, we have been covering him long enough to know that he absolutely watches the market.

He absolutely takes phone calls from Fortune 500 and from Wall Street leaders, telling him, like, hey, you have got to do something about this.

And until the president decides that he's actually going to pull the trigger on these tariffs, I think we're going to go through weeks like this for a while.

GEOFF BENNETT: And Donald Trump has been a fan of tariffs dating back to the '80s.

So why not now have a concrete plan?

Why this hasty rollout, where things have to be reversed after the fact?

Or is the chaos and the unpredictability, is that the point?

RAMESH PONNURU: Well, I think that a certain degree of impulsiveness may be more central to Trump than any particular conviction, even one as deep-rooted as his love of tariffs, which he continues to say is a beautiful word.

Over the last six weeks, I have read dozens of references in the commentary to energy in the executive, how energetic the new administration is being.

Energy in the executive is a phrase that comes from Hamilton, Federalist Papers No.

70.

He says, it's essential.

Why is it essential?

For the steady administration of the laws.

I don't think that's what we're seeing here.

I think we're seeing the very opposite of that.

GEOFF BENNETT: Well, meantime, President Trump said yesterday that the next phase of his plan to cut the federal work force would be conducted, he says, with a scalpel, rather than a hatchet, in what appears to be a step aimed at restraining Elon Musk.

We will see what comes of it.

But The New York Times has this incredible reporting on a Cabinet meeting, where the Cabinet secretaries' frustration seems to have boiled over.

And it includes this exchange with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.

It says: "Mr. Duffy said the young staff of Mr. Musk's team was trying to lay off air traffic controllers.

'What am I supposed to do?'

Mr. Duffy said.

'I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers?'

Mr. Musk told Mr. Duffy that his assertion was a lie.

Mr. Duffy insisted it was not.

He had heard it from them directly."

This suggests that it's not just Democrats who are concerned about the speed and intensity of these cuts.

JONATHAN CAPEHART: What's interesting about this story is that, in some ways, it gives me a level of relief that on the surface they seem to be lockstep with the president, lockstep with Elon Musk, but, behind the scenes, they are doing the business of governing.

Elon Musk is an unelected person who is wielding a wrecking ball through the federal government, and air traffic controllers, the people who are safeguarding the nuclear stockpile, researching bird flu.

There's no nuance.

There's no scalpel here.

And I think it's too late for the president to say, oh, please go with the scalpel.

How can you use a scalpel on an organization that's been ripped to shreds?

GEOFF BENNETT: Here's what doesn't make sense to me about this, the way the administration is slashing government.

We know that Donald Trump seems to relish punishing people who don't support him.

But, with these cuts, he's targeting his supporters.

I mean, he wants to slash the work force at the VA, which employs a lot of veterans.

Donald Trump won the veteran vote by a wide margin, something like 60 percent.

He wants to get rid of the Education Department, which would hurt red states because red states get far more education funding from the federal government than do blue states.

These decisions, these actions don't seem politically aligned in many ways.

RAMESH PONNURU: Right.

But I also think that some of it is government-cutting theater.

So if you look closely at the Department of Education proposals that Republicans, including Trump and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, have talked about, they don't actually get rid of the programs.

They just shuffle them to different parts of the federal bureaucracy.

You can say, well, we no longer have a department, we no longer have a building called the Department of Education, but everything is still there.

And I think, in some ways, DOGE is a way of pretending that you're cutting government, while you're not actually doing any of the things that it would actually take to cut the deficit.

And you're seeing pushback now from Congress also.

Congress wants to be in on the action.

On Wednesday, Musk met with senators, and they said, these cuts have to go through Congress first.

They have to have a constitutional form.

That's the only way they're going to make any lasting change.

But the chasm right now is between what they can accomplish and what Musk and Trump keep talking about.

JONATHAN CAPEHART: I'm sort of leaping on your saying that this is cutting theater and pretending to cut the government.

But tell that to the thousands of government workers who have lost their jobs or who have lost their jobs and been told they're reinstated because suddenly someone realizes, oh, this person who we thought was not essential is actually essential.

This theater is having a real-life impact.

RAMESH PONNURU: Absolutely.

You're going to have the most disruption for the least in savings, Right?

You may get -- some people are going to lose their jobs.

Some of them will get reinstated in the legal process.

But even if they don't, we're not going to see a balanced budget, which is what Trump is talking about.

GEOFF BENNETT: If you look internationally, though, as Donald Trump seeks to downgrade the transatlantic alliance that has kept this world safe for the past 80 years, he has set off this unprecedented rearmament among NATO allies, which is something that a number of presidents have tried to do to get Europe to care about and pay for their security as much as the U.S. does.

Did the chaos, did the unpredictability in that sense work, Jonathan?

JONATHAN CAPEHART: Sure, it worked.

They're going to spend more money on their own defense.

But why?

Because they can no longer depend on the United States to protect them if Russia rolls over into the Baltic states, if Russia rolls over into Poland, if the United States doesn't satisfy Article 5, which is an attack on one NATO member, is an attack on all.

I view their comments as, we don't know the United States anymore.

We certainly don't know the United States under President Trump.

And we need to safeguard our own security from him.

That's the way I read it.

RAMESH PONNURU: Well, I mean, I think the U.S. security guarantee has been something that Europeans have relied on.

And, unfortunately, that has led them to underinvest in their own defense.

I understand the impulse among a lot of Americans to get the U.S. to -- and Europe to rebalance these commitments.

What I don't see from the administration, what I have never really seen from Trump is any acknowledgement that NATO is the most successful alliance in history and that it still serves an important role in keeping the peace in Europe and around the globe.

GEOFF BENNETT: In the time that remains, let's talk about Gavin Newsom, shall we?

Because the California governor, he's broken with many elected Democrats by saying he thinks it's deeply unfair to allow transgender women and girls to compete in female sports.

Take a listen to what he said in this podcast.

CHARLIE KIRK, Founder, Turning Point Usa: Would you say no men in female sports?

GOV.

GAVIN NEWSOM (D-CA): Well, I think it's an issue of fairness.

I completely agree with you on that.

It is an issue of fairness.

It's deeply unfair.

GEOFF BENNETT: So this is coming amid a debate among Democrats about, how much did cultural factors play a role in their huge defeat in November and how do they address it?

How does this strike, Jonathan?

JONATHAN CAPEHART: Well, look, Governor Newsom is somebody whose credentials in LGBTQ rights were cemented 21 years ago, when he, against the advice of every Democrat in the country, issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

So this is not a question of whether he has thrown the community under the bus after two decades.

But what this shows is, and what I wished he had done, because I actually listened to the podcast and this entire section.

And he kept talking about fairness, which I get, but he didn't talk more fully about, what exactly do you mean?

In the conversation with Charlie Kirk, I mean, the way he says no men in female sports, just the way he talks about that, we're not talking about men in drag pretending to be women in sports.

We're talking about trans women, trans girls.

But what I really like and what I loved about this segment on trans athletes with Dr. Bradley Anawalt, he puts it -- he says it perfectly.

This is -- that there's a tension here between fairness and allowing people who want to play sports to play sports.

What we need to do is, as Americans, and certainly elected officials, have a more nuanced and thoughtful conversation.

This is not a black-and-white issue.

This is something that requires a lot of thoughtful -- a lot of thoughtful conversation led by scientists, led by doctors, led by people who actually know something about this.

And the last thing I will say is, I -- look, I'm an out gay man.

I came up during the 1980s, when there was the AIDS epidemic and people were out in the streets saying, hey, we are here.

"Will & Grace" comes along, and suddenly there's a cultural change, a change in the country in how they viewed LGBTQ folks.

We need to have that same kind of cultural conversation when it comes to the T, one that is nuanced and thoughtful, and not sort of bombastic in the way that Charlie Kirk talks about.

GEOFF BENNETT: We will have to leave it there.

I'm so sorry.

We're out of time.

JONATHAN CAPEHART: Sorry.

(LAUGHTER) GEOFF BENNETT: Jonathan Capehart.

We will have you back, and we will get you to weigh in.

Thanks for your time.

JONATHAN CAPEHART: Thanks, Geoff.

RAMESH PONNURU: Thanks.