President Trump

Europe is still in denial

If you want to know how to respond to Donald Trump’s trade tariffs, just think back to what happened between the EU and the UK after the Brexit referendum. The EU thought it could pressurise the UK either into reversing Brexit or accepting a bad deal. The EU, as the larger power, believed it had a stronger position — and the media concurred.

But the EU had a big trade surplus against the UK, and so had more to lose from a trade war. And this is how it played out. The single biggest victim of Brexit was not the UK economy, but German industry. Germany’s spectacular decline started in 2018, kicked off by Brexit and followed by a string of supply shocks including the pandemic and then Russia’s war in Ukraine. Trump’s tariffs will be next. The overarching lesson here is that if you are the surplus country, no matter how large you are, you should not engage in trade warfare.

After Trump slapped tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, economists of Left and Right called him a lunatic: protectionism surely means higher prices, disrupted supply chains, trade war. Super triple bad!

Yet philosophically it makes sense, and the inability of journalists to see the President’s point of view betrays how far free trade has become a religion – a faith, like any other, that’s prone to myth and hypocrisy.

Love him or hate him, Trump’s political comeback and his early executive actions make him an historic figure.

Ever since Election Day 2024, various supporters and conservative journalists have been voicing the prediction that President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office will be “the greatest ever.” Former aide Steve Bannon has prophesied for months that Trump’s start will be “the most aggressive” rollout since FDR’s first presidential term in March 1933. The New York Post went even further on Inauguration Eve. With visions of a new Camelot, the newspaper headlined that Trump’s second term promises to inaugurate “a golden age in the U.S.” As if on cue, President Trump used the same phrase in his inaugural address on January 20.

Come April 30, Donald Trump — and countless allies — will compare his opening salvo favorably with the achievements of FDR and LBJ.

Never in living memory — and probably not since the most tempestuous times of the Second World War when the world was dominated by such extraordinary personalities as Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, and in their way, Stalin and Hitler — has anyone had such an impact on the ambience of international relations and the prevailing trends in public policy as U.S. President Donald Trump has had, at time of writing, only 10 days into his second term. His appearance by video conference last week at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the dismal little Swiss town of Davos was an astonishing change from his appearance there five years ago. At that time, the only ripple of applause that he received was when he said that the United States would participate in the United Nations tree-planting program. The Euro-federalist elites looked upon him then, in emulation of the shellshocked bipartisan Washington political establishment, as a dangerous mountebank, an interloper, a dreadful meteor briefly altering the pink socialistic skies of an ”ever-closer Europe,” especially when viewed from one of the Spartan hotels of Davos.

Conservatives from all over the USA, the moment you’ve all been waiting for is here! The Trump Spending Freeze—an act of executive frugality so seismic, so chilling, that it has sent shivers down the spines of bureaucrats from Washington to the farthest corners of the federal empire.

The Left is outraged because Trump made promises during the campaign and now has the audacity to actually deliver on those promises.

The Left is agog at the audacity of Donald Trump. They are because Trump is doing as president just what he promised to do as a candidate. This astounds the Left because their candidates always run to the center and then govern to the left. Since their candidates never do what they promise, they cannot come to grips with someone who does. The contrast may be no less jarring than Trump’s policies themselves.