While the president has identified the need to do things differently, his strategy risks a slump, hitting the very Americans he claims to champion
It would be “liberation day” in the US, the White House announced. Well, we shall see. Yet even if one puts the noise and nastiness that accompany a Donald Trump announcement to one side – in this case tonight’s pronouncement that there will be an executive order announcing “reciprocal tariffs on countries throughout the world”, a 10% tariff on the UK and 20% on the EU – the significance of the theatre is hard to miss. Whether they presage the US’s liberation, or instead the disintegration of the global trading order, Trump’s tariffs add up to an attempt to transform a badly broken economic model. And that is something that affects us all.
Trump’s announcement was awash with insult and rambling nonsense. The rest of the world had looted, raped and pillaged, had scavenged and ransacked America – shocking claims if they had come from any other US president, yet water off a duck’s back today. But the hard core was there all the same: tariffs on the whole of the rest of the world. The shutters were up.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
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