Axios co-founder and CEO Jim VandeHei on Thursday's broadcast of 'Morning Joe' on MSNBC:

JOE SCARBOROUGH, HOST: Jim VandeHei, the president, getting ready for Masters weekend by employing that famous golfing term, the yips, is what you say about somebody standing over a putt that doesn't know how to get it in the hole, but said that things were getting a little yippy. That included also, of course, the bond markets, where a real concern, this one Scott Besson and others went to the president saying this could go sideways very quickly.

JIM VANDEHEI, AXIOS CEO: Yeah, I mean, make no mistake, he panicked is probably the first time we've seen him blink in such a public way. He was under a lot of pressure from GOP senators, a lot of CEOs, a lot of investors, Elon Musk. People calling him saying, listen, look, not just the bond market, look at the regular market, look at the bond market, look at the dollar, that a real economic collapse was in the offing.

And he saw that and he hit pause. And then you had his entire team come out and say, no, this was like part of the art of the deal. And I don't think anyone's buying that.

Certainly a lot of people internally aren't buying it. They under they did. They underestimated the effect it would have on the markets.

And now, yes, the markets surge. But if you talk to CEOs, there's still so much unpredictability. You basically replace the largest, maybe the largest trade war of a gen of generations with another, maybe the second largest trade war, which is us versus China, which might be a bigger deal.

And it's now escalated, which still creates a hell of a lot of uncertainty for CEOs and businesses who are trying to plan on do they invest in people, do they invest in buildings? What is their supply chain going to look like? And that uncertainty is going to continue to hover over the economy.

And I think that is the pickle that the president is in right now. Somehow, he has to figure out a way to thread that needle where he can get what he wants in terms of getting more fairness and trade between us and most of those nations, but also send a signal to these businesses and to the markets that there's going to be stability, that there's going to be a new regulatory environment, a new tax environment and a trade environment that you can trust enough to make those investments.

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