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I think some of the alternate explanations given below make the most sense. Trump is notably narcissistic, even for a politician(!), and since he’s been publicly opining on politics, has been comfortable flip flopping on a great many issues based on what response he expects to receive.
However, two things he has always been consistent on have been his dislike for immigration and free trade, going back to his presidential exploratory committee as a Reform Party candidate, and even further, with his publicly espoused hostility to Japanese investment in America in the 1980s. He’s a rather narrow-minded zero-sum fellow. And not that great of a real estate developer, which is why he had to exit the business and move into licensing and television (most of the buildings that still have his name attached were developed by others, the general public is dumb in that way). I think getting pushed out of that industry due to his own incompetence (he opened a casino that went bankrupt), hardened his flawed view that absolutely nothing is mutually beneficial in business.
Maybe Ackman missed one of the two political views Trump has held for decades? Couldn’t say.
Everyone is saying this now but Trump wasn't campaigning on throwing down tariffs on everyone in the world. He had a softer stance on Tiktok than the Biden administration!
The rhetoric was mass deportations, law and order, no men in women's sports, Puerto Rico is a shithole, drill baby drill, lower taxes.
Well, even among those examples, drill-baby-drill was about energy-independence and autarky. Cheap Canadian fossil fuels delivered efficiently by pipeline wasn’t harming our economy.
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Trump absolutely campaigned on a yuuge tariff policy, even if it wasn't the message he was repeating often enough to get through to low-information voters. I agree he didn't campaign on this tariff "policy".
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I think for a lot of people immigration is the thing Trump is most associated with. It's what he initially got the most buzz and criticism for .
He's also just a liar armored in sycophants trying to "translate" his thoughts to something acceptable to win power which always makes it harder. At a certain point I give people a little grace for not knowing that he actually has values.
I think people in general, and elites especially, should be held responsible for the consequences of acting with insufficient information, particularly when the relevant information was readily available if you could be bothered to look. Trump's protectionism was not secret. If Ackman was holding his nose and voting and campaigning for a protectionist in order to see pain inflicted on annoying anti-Israel campus activists, he is a bad person who should feel bad. If he didn't know Trump was a protectionist, he was culpably stupid and deserves to lose all his money, this being the traditional punishment for culpable stupidity in the hedge fund and private equity industry.
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