The great tariff disaster burnishes Trump’s credentials as Pantomime Villain-in-Chief

In a crowded field of his colossal manmade cock-ups, the US president’s humiliating U-turn on global tariffs exposes him at his hubristic worst, says Sean O’Grady

No one should look back at the last week and forget that millions of people, perhaps more, were and will be directly worse off thanks to Donald Trump.

People watched their pension funds gyrate in value and liquidated their savings in panic at what was happening. There were people across the world whose businesses lost orders and who, especially in China and America, will continue to suffer hardship. Behind the stock market indices, the breathless reporting and Trump’s cynical, shameless, reckless grandstanding lie the lives of traumatised, blameless people.

It may be some consolation that Trump himself has been humiliated. In a very crowded field of disasters, and with the sole exception of the attempted insurrection of 6 January 2021, this was Trump at his very worst.

When he emerged from his capitulation at the hands of the capital markets, he was characteristically brazen about what had just happened, even hubristic. The bond traders, it would seem, are more effective at protecting the rights and prosperity of the American people than their Congress, their courts and their media combined. They are the last guardrail left against the autocratic ways of President Trump, and at least here they were successful.

When in trouble, Trump usually weaves some fantasy to convince himself and his followers that he’s been right all along. Some were at it again after the great tariff experiment was over, claiming it was all part of Trump’s plan. Of course, it wasn’t – and Trump even admitted as much: “You’ve gotta have flexibility.”

He was abandoning the supposedly revolutionary policy just as those charged with executing it were defending it to a Senate committee on the media. When Trump makes a clown of himself, he takes everyone else down with him.

It was, in its way, even grimly amusing to watch. Trump rambled and blathered his way through the embarrassing and costly failure. The tariffs were supposed to bring in trillions of tax revenue, to bring back jobs, to reinvigorate manufacturing, to end the rape of America’s industrial base, and to make America wealthy again (not all of which could ever have been logically consistent aims, in any case). Instead, it turns out it was all a ploy to end tariffs – in which case there would be no wave of tax revenues, and the Vietnamese will carry on making cheap Maga hats, with no silly import taxes on top.

Trump had the audacity to try to claim credit for the big rise in stock prices after he’d ditched his flagship “Liberation Day” tariff campaign, and it was he who caused stock markets around the world to crash. He’s like a guy who deliberately lets his dog maul your kid and then expects thanks that he drove you to the hospital so quickly.

The dog, a vicious and retrograde return to extreme protectionism, has been locked up for a few months rather than euthanised. We hope it won’t be let out again. But in the meantime, amid the relief, we should remember that Trump has effectively frozen trade with China. The world’s two biggest economies are still engaged in an unprecedented trade war, tariffs generally have been left higher, and that means the world remains at risk of recession.

The fact is that the uncertainties generated by Trump’s chaotic presidency will continue to depress investment as well as trade. And there was absolutely no need for it. Trump did not inherit some disaster from Joe Biden, as he keeps saying, but a healthy, fast-growing economy, with stock markets riding high, boosted by Trump’s arrival and some misguided hopes that he wasn’t as irrational (as experience should have taught us) as he really is.

It’s tempting to see this as a sort of “emperor’s clothes” story, a moment in the Trump presidency when he was revealed for the charlatan he is. Because we like to add the suffix “-gate” to such seismic events – thank you, Watergate – you might even call it “Tariffgate”.

Yet we should all know, from three presidential campaigns, his first term in office and the experience of the last few weeks, that Trump is still what he always has been – and the only reason we should ever get shocked by what he does is if we forget that we’ve been in this rodeo, or something quite like it, before.

He did, after all, have a go at raising tariffs and provoking a trade war in 2018, though certainly not on this scale. But we know what his instincts are: he’s been publicly advocating them since he became a celebrity in the 1980s.

The great tariff disaster serves as a warning that in this, his second term, Trump is more dangerous and more ambitious than first time round – and we can see how he is using the presidency and the instrument of executive orders to go after his enemies, most notably by ordering the Department of Justice to organise a witch hunt against Chris Krebs, an administration official who said the 2020 presidential election was secure and not rigged.

The more we see of Trump, the less impressive he becomes. We can, or should, see all too clearly that Trump is not the great dealmaker, or the man who can play poker like no other, or some kind of grandmaster of strategy. Those who worked with him last time around – including his vice president, Mike Pence – warned us about him. His secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, came out of a meeting in despair at having to deal with this “moron”. An aide repeatedly says now that: “Some people seem to think Trump’s playing chess, when most of the time the staff are just trying to stop him from eating the pieces.”

Elon Musk has seen the light – one benefit of the tariff fiasco. So has Ted Cruz and some other congressional Republicans. It would be nice to think that this will prove to be a turning point, but the Maga mind virus remains highly resistant to treatment by reason or bitter experience, and the Republican Party is still more or less a religious cult led by a megalomaniac.

We still have another four years of this. The pantomime is far from over – but the bond vigilantes are acting as our guardian angels.