Has a doddery, stubborn old man in the White House been replaced by a president who is just as old and stubborn and far more unpredictable? Trust the plan, Donald Trump’s cabinet members chant, like QAnon cultists, as the markets cause mayhem. But as Joe Biden found after his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, once your reputation for competence has been torched, everything else you do is judged through the same sceptical lens.
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.
When Trump boasts about all those world leaders “kissing his ass” and begging, “Please Sir, make a deal, I’ll do anything,” I can’t unsee all those penguins in their best suits and flippers descending from airplanes, ready to negotiate. On the upside, Trump has retained his capacity to entertain, even as he drains our wallets. That represents his best hope of recovery – as long as he stops playing the fool with people’s finances.
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.
A new Quinnipiac poll showed Trump’s favorability rating at 41 per cent, with 53 per cent disapproving of his job as president. It is very Biden mark two. Seventy two per cent of voters think tariffs would hurt the US economy, at least in the short term. It is remarkable how fast presidents can squander their political capital.
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.
Mark Penn, the Harris pollster who used to work for Hillary Clinton until crossing sides, is more bullish about the President’s prospects. “It’s time for Wall Street to get a grip,” he wrote in the New York Post. Trump was taking a “calculated gamble” that could tilt the global economy in America’s favour. If the 90-day pause were to lead to successful one-on-one trade deals, Penn thinks all will be forgiven.
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.
Bessent, a patrician figure, who pleaded with Trump last weekend to negotiate with trading partners rather than blow up the system and was ignored, is now riding high. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, has been sidelined for talking like an idiot on television about “the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones” that will come to the US.
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.
Trump would bang on about the deserted steel mills of Pennsylvania and Cohn would point out, “There were towns 100 years ago that made horse carriages and buggy whips. No one had a job either. They had to reinvent themselves.” But Trump wouldn’t buy it – then or now.
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.
Navarro is temporarily out of favour as the “grown-ups” try to seize control of the wheel. But Trump thinks nobody has the right to stop him anymore. At a White House event this week, he said, “My first term, I said, ‘Do it.’” And I don’t know. I think the second term is just more powerful. They do it. When I say, ‘Do it,’ they do it, right?”
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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