4D Chess?
Looking for the game rules is fruitless.
The E in DOGE stands for Efficiency. But DOGE was sold as a method of reducing undesirable government spending specifically looking at waste, fraud, and abuse. So far the spending reductions have been miniscule. But you wouldn't know that if all you listened to were the lies coming from Elon Musk and his crew.
At the same time the move-fast-and-break-things manner of DOGE has thrown a lot of babies out with the bathwater. The people who know how government actually does and should work (even if we don't all agree with all of the things government does) aren't around to make it function. So perhaps the vastly expanded and extended tariffs are all a ploy to distract us from Elon's lies and DOGE's failures.
To the extent tariffs risk throwing the U.S. economy into recession, they greatly help the Trump administration's desires to reduce immigration—immigrants come to the U.S. for job opportunities; if those diminish, there is much less demand for immigrants.
The administration would also like to score victories with deportations because . . . (well, I'm told these are terrible people ruining our country and they are so bad that due process is beyond the pale). If we are in a trade war with nearly the entire rest of the world, perhaps that further justifies radical actions to get rid of supposedly bad actors living among us.
The tariff threats give some leverage to the U.S. in getting other nations to accept our self-created refugees. Therefore, the tariff penalties create a deal-making setting for those who can help deportation efforts. Think of it as a most-favored nation status extended to nations that accept these forced refugees. So perhaps we should expect this to be a central issue, accepting deportations, in efforts to negotiate down tariff rates.
Trump also loves low interest rates. Presumably this is from his history as a real estate developer thinking this is necessarily a good thing in general economically. Regardless, it helps in a couple regards. It might lower the value of the dollar, which would reduce the demand for imports. That in turn could reduce the trade deficit—something Trump hates despite it not meaning what he thinks it does.
More directly, lower interest rates would certainly lower the interest costs on the U.S. debt. Since he has no plans to meaningfully lower government spending, this would help reduce the budget deficit.
A recession would also help lower the deficit as a percentage of GDP allowing him to claim a partial victory in a relative sense. I'm not sure he would promote fiscal restraint in the face of a recession, though. He didn't when the Covid recession hit. So these effects might be nullified.
Yet a recession would certainly allow him to claim emergency powers to some degree and give him more latitude for radical actions. Some of those radical actions might be, say, proposing to make Canada a U.S. state, taking Greenland by hook or crook, and establishing a U.S. outpost at the Panamanian border of South America. Some might say it started with renaming the Gulf of Mexico signaling to the world we are ready to expand territory.
Efforts at territorial expansion also might serve as cover for a negotiated settlement in the Russia-Ukraine War. Trump is attempting to divide up Ukraine between Russia and the U.S. such that Russia keeps the territory it has claimed in battle while the U.S. claims the minerals. Don't be surprised when the Dnieper River becomes the Ukrainian equivalent of the 38th parallel and a war separates Kyiv much like existed in Berlin.
I'm just trying to make sense out of this senseless stuff.
PS: The nonsensical math behind the tariffs, the shock-and-awe campaign that has been DOGE, and the headline-generating sensationalism behind deportations all signal a "we-don't-give-a-shit" approach to installing the Trump regime. We ignore this signal at our peril. Trump is showing that he is serious about his objectives and quite unserious about the means of achieving them. The message is give him what he wants or suffer him trying to attain it through the most destructive and clumsiest of ways possible.