Trump’s credibility as a business genius has taken a big hit. I blame the penguins. If he hadn’t rolled out a set of global tariffs on the lawn of the White House that hit a bunch of deserted islands near the Antarctic, we wouldn’t have been enjoying all those AI-generated, penguin-themed memes, but would have felt more reassured he knew what he was doing.
Biden’s approval rating was hovering around 50 per cent in the first year of his presidency until the exodus from Kabul in August 2021. This led to a plunge in the polls to the low 40s, from which he never recovered. Americans wanted to get out of Afghanistan but felt humiliated by the chaos.
Just as Biden’s loss of credibility on Afghanistan led to a lack of trust in him on other issues, so Trump’s loss of face over tariffs is leaving a question mark over his other judgements, such as the drastic pruning of the federal workforce, which affects far more than just jobs in the Washington “swamp”, and banging up of innocent men in El Salvadorian hellholes.
I’m sceptical. Trump is scaring people, including many who voted for him. Nobody wants to spend anymore. Small businesses, as well as global producers, are frightened. The US establishment is reasserting itself. Everybody is looking to Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, to be the “grown-up” in the room who stops Trump being Trump.
The journalist Bob Woodward, known for Watergate, has been reminding people of his inside account of the first Trump presidency in his 2018 book, Fear. There is a telling section in which Gary Cohn, then his chief economic adviser, tries to explain to Trump that trade deficits are good for the US and tariffs are bad.
Cohn and his ilk were contemptuous of Peter Navarro, the current trade secretary, regarding him as a “flat-earther” on tariffs, and did their best to keep him out of the Oval Office. But Navarro went to jail for Trump for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena over the 6 January Capitol riot and has his gratitude.
Maga voters still love him for it. But rule by one man has its limits.
Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting
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