It’s difficult, if not impossible, to believe that the U.S. president makes decisions on a whim that have both immediate drawbacks at home, as well as long-lasting negative ripple effects, all of which undermine the pivotal role of the dollar and his mantra to “Make America Great Again.”

Lower economic growth and high unemployment are easy enough to predict from the wrong-headed, chaotic tariff policy that’s wreaked havoc on both the U.S. domestic economy and the global economy. But there’s more.

About the U.S. dollar, it’s important to keep in mind the so-called exorbitant privilege of the dollar, a legacy of the Bretton Woods meetings and post-World War II reconstruction that made the U.S. dollar nearly the equivalent of a world currency. The United States benefits from this arrangement domestically, allowing borrowing more cheaply, whether it’s mortgages, car loans or credit card debt. Careful estimates of the discount U.S. residents get on their loans because of the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” is somewhere between 0.5% and 1%.

The foundation of that discount is that investors around the world have wanted to park their earnings in U.S. assets, such as Treasury securities with low interest rates, because of U.S. economic stability. In Asia, the simple, mutually beneficial strategy has been to sell goods to the United States and invest the proceeds in U.S. assets. Now, however, these proceeds are beginning to cascade through global markets.

Of course, there have been other reasons for the dollar’s dominance besides the safe haven aspect. It’s an exchange rate anchor. The dollar is the most used currency in international trade invoicing and borrowing. That’s even though the United States only accounts for 10% of global trade. And those transactions use the U.S. SWIFT financial messaging system. Before President Donald Trump, the U.S. legal system and rule of law were a measure of trust in the fairness of application that’s been true not just for U.S. securities but for stocks, corporate bonds and property as well.

Most importantly, under Trump, confidence in the trajectory of a stable U.S. economy has eroded. The U.S. debt trajectory under Trump is worrisome, possibly exploding above 200% of gross domestic product in two decades if Trump’s tax cuts become permanent. Just the interest on the U.S. debt now approaches $1 trillion per year, even more than defense spending. “Ferguson’s Law,” drawn from economic historian Niall Ferguson, states that any great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defense risks ceasing to be a great power.

Trump’s threats to the independence of the Federal Reserve are all in play, too. Trump’s weaponization of tariffs is haphazard, and so are his punishing sanctions and trade controls, causing not just a few countries to look for other currency systems.

It’s too early to write the obituary for the U.S. dollar’s dominance, mainly because of the lack of alternatives. Still, it’s an easy bet to expect the Chinese yuan and the euro to encroach on the dollar.

In China, the unraveling of the country’s property markets causes domestic strains for domestic confidence. And China hardly has the trust of foreign investors whose assets would be subject to the iron grip of the Chinese Communist Party. In the eurozone, economic and political integration are incomplete, and core economies have shown rising budget deficits and political instability. Cryptocurrencies will gain in the underground economy.

The global economy moves with inertia, so immediate dramatic change is only part of an uncertain timeframe. What’s certain is that the dollar shows irreversible signs of decline, made faster by the erratic policies of the U.S. president.

T. Nelson Thompson (analytics2002@aol.com) was a Woodrow Wilson fellow in international economics at the Johns Hopkins University. He has taught economics at various universities in the United States and is the author of “After Babel: Reflections on Language and Languages.” He lives in Mount Rainier in Prince George’s County.