Never has Oscar Wilde’s observation about a cynic been more relevant than during Donald Trump’s bombast on Thursday as he tossed around endless figures – some of them possibly accurate – to justify blowing up the world’s trade system.
Lovingly cuddling a big poster detailing the tariff vengeance he was about to unleash, the president of the United States presented himself modestly as the master of an event that would “forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again!”
Donald Trump lovingly cuddled a big poster detailing the tariff vengeance he was about to unleash.Credit: AP
Ah, yes. Wealth. The thing that gets Trump’s cold heart thumping.
Everybody’s gotta pay!
Except, apparently, his very good friend Vlad Putin, whose Mother Russia, mysteriously, was about the only country on Earth spared Trump’s fusillade of punitive tariffs.
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Why, even Australia’s Heard and McDonald islands shivering down there towards Antarctica, inhabited only by penguins and seals, were named on Trump’s great big list of trading nations to be handed a flogging.
The White House’s Gen Z press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, attempted to stretch credulity to breaking point by arguing that Russia’s failure to make an appearance was because US sanctions on Putin’s war-waging country already “preclude any meaningful trade”.
Depends on how you define meaningful, really.
