The Trump administration appears to be headed for a trade war on three fronts. As far as anyone can tell, it is simultaneously going to take on China, the European Union and our partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement. The economic fallout will be ugly.

But that’s probably not the whole story: There’s also likely to be ugly political fallout, not just abroad but here at home, too. In fact, I predict that as the downsides of hard-line trade policy become apparent, we’ll see a nasty search by President Trump and company for people to scapegoat. In fact, that search has already started.

To understand what’s coming, you need to understand two crucial points.

First, the administration has no idea what it’s doing. Its ideas on trade don’t seem to have evolved at all from those expressed in a white paper circulated by Wilbur Ross, now the commerce secretary, and Peter Navarro, now the trade czar, in 2016. That white paper was a display of sheer ignorance that had actual trade experts banging their heads on their desks. So these people are completely unprepared for the coming blowback.

Second, this administration is infested — I use that word advisedly — with conspiracy theorists. In fact, it seems, literally, to treat belief in absurd conspiracy theories as a job qualification. You may remember the case of an official at the Department of Health and Human Services who was temporarily suspended after reports that she had worked for a conspiracy-theory website. Well, it turns out that she listed that connection on her résumé when she applied for government employment. She was hired not despite but because of her connection to paranoid politics.