If the secret of authority is never to disappoint, as critic Walter Benjamin put it, then what a gamble President Trump is running by throwing up punitive tariffs on America’s top trading partners. He had previously suggested a month’s delay on threatened levies of 10 percent on Communist China and 25 percent on both Canada and Mexico. Yet the president’s press secretary says that the tariffs are full steam ahead. “Promises made and promises kept,” she says.