The most important meeting in Donald Trump’s first 100 days back in the Oval Office, a totemic milestone he will pass next Wednesday, took place earlier this week.
The bosses of some of America’s biggest retailers – Walmart, Home Depot, Target – trooped into the White House with a single, stark message for the President: thanks to his punitive 145 per cent tariffs on imports from China, they’d soon be jacking up prices and many store shelves would be empty within weeks.
The significance of this was not lost on Trump. These are the cut-price stores where blue-collar MAGA Americans, the core of the political support that has twice propelled him to the presidency, do their shopping for just about everything: food, clothing, electronics, beer, toys, hardware, even guns (well, it’s America).
What they sell is sourced largely from China: 60 per cent in Walmart’s case, 50 per cent for Target. It quickly dawned on Trump he’d be blamed for soaring prices and growing shortages of MAGA shopping basket basics – a rather bigger problem than the ‘little disturbance’ Trump warned about when he first unveiled his tariff tsunami on
April 2, his so-called ‘Liberation Day’.
Cue yet another Trump tariff retreat as the dire implications of his reckless, self-harming trade policies registered yet again. He would be ‘very nice’ to China he told the retailers and that 145 per cent tariff wasn’t written in stone – it could be negotiated down.
But China has made clear that, contrary to White House claims, no trade talks are taking place. To drive home its point, Beijing refused delivery of two US-made Boeing 737s worth £41 million each.
It’s too late for Trump’s latest concession to make a difference anyway. Trans-Pacific container traffic will plummet next month by as much as a third as China and America stop buying stuff from each other.
Prices in American shops are set to soar this summer (further fuelled by a declining dollar, which makes imports more costly) and shortages will spread. It will hardly endear Trump to hard-pressed Americans – and by some measures he can already lay claim to being the least popular new president of modern times.
Trump revealing tariffs April 2, his so-called ‘Liberation Day’
Trump's first 100 days have been marked by a blizzard of executive orders (137 so far, three times more than Joe Biden in his first 100 days and 100 more than last time for Trump)
According to the latest sampling by the FiveThirtyEight pollsters, Trump’s approval rating is down to 41 per cent. Every other new president going way back to the 1930s had a rating of at least 53 per cent after 100 days. Some, including Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson, were above 60 per cent. And for Trump, things can only get worse.
His first 100 days have been marked by a blizzard of executive orders (137 so far, three times more than Joe Biden in his first 100 days and 100 more than last time for Trump) on everything from climate change (not interested) to illegal migration (you’re being deported, pronto) to paper straws (banned in federal premises).
It’s been a shock-and-awe approach to government: overwhelm the opposition and the media with such a flood of initiatives that they can barely keep up.
It has revolutionary pretensions, with aspirations to reconfigure the US economy (more manufacturing), reform the bureaucracy (root out the Left-leaning so-called ‘deep state’), transform culture (a headlong attack on all things woke and anything dominated by the Democratic elite, like foreign aid, public broadcasting and Ivy League universities) and up-end the global order (no more Pax Americana outside the Western Hemisphere).
In its way, it’s a formidable agenda, perhaps the most radical any US administration has ever attempted. But Team Trump is too chaotic to be an effective force for lasting change. The fact its weapon of choice is the executive order rather than legislation means a new administration could quickly reverse all it’s doing with executive orders of its own.
More immediately, its attempt to change the face of America is being overshadowed, even undermined, by that most unnecessary policy of all: Trump’s obsession with tariffs.
It is thanks to the on-off, on-again, off-again tariff omnishambles that the dollar has fallen 10 per cent since Trump’s return. The benchmark S&P 500 stock market index is down 8.5 per cent; investors are demanding a premium for lending money to the federal government; consumer and business confidence is biting the dust; and economic forecasters worry that the coming marked slowdown in US growth could so easily tilt into recession.
That is the most scary prospect of all. The US fiscal position — ballooning national debt and huge annual budget deficits – is already precarious enough. Trump has no plans to deal with it. Indeed many of his policies (more tax cuts, more defence spending) would make it worse.
No wonder Elon Musk is throwing in the towel and returning to his beleaguered Tesla electric car venture
Elon Musk’s spending cuts don’t even touch the sides: maybe $100 billion in savings over a few years which, from an annual federal budget of over $6 trillion, is barely a rounding error. No wonder he’s throwing in the towel and returning to his beleaguered Tesla electric car venture.
But a recession would take America’s fiscal profligacy into a whole new dimension. For the first time since the American Revolutionary War of Independence in the late 18th century, the country could have real trouble financing its debts. A fiscal storm made in the USA would soon engulf the world economy.
Yet it is precisely at this critical juncture that Trump has chosen to wage a trade war with China, assuming that Beijing, somehow, would be the first to fold. But in an economic standoff between China and the US, would you really bet on America?
After all, who has the higher pain threshold? A totalitarian state using the latest intrusive digital technology and brute force to keep its people in line – a people who’ve never known freedom but have endured great hardship within living memory?
Or a shopping mall America in which most consumers are already on maxed-out credit cards and have close to zero savings? In which the ruling Republican Party faces tough mid-term elections in only 18 months?
Washington is too busy with its ongoing clown show to give such weighty matters much thought. The Defence Department is the most important arm of the federal government with an annual $800 billion budget and two million personnel around the world. But under the lightweight Pete Hegseth it is, according to a very senior official, ‘consumed with chaos’ as top aides are fired or resign and witch-hunts are mounted to discover who’s behind a series of damaging (to Hegseth) leaks. He recently threatened America’s most senior admiral, suspected of disloyalty, with a ‘f*****g polygraph test’.
Yet Hegseth, who looks and sounds increasingly deranged, was the minister outlining war plans against the Houthis in Yemen to an unsecured chat group which included a journalist.
Now it transpires he has also invited his wife, brother and lawyer to sensitive online meetings. All this when the world is at its most dangerous for over three decades and the Pentagon needs to be a well-oiled machine.
After 100 days of mayhem and madness, the clowns are also starting to fall out – at the very heart of government. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently had a shouting match with Musk over who should run America’s equivalent of HMRC.
Musk was pushing his favourite, Bessent thought the appointment his prerogative. Expletives and personal insults were exchanged. An aide had to step in to stop them coming to blows. All while the Italian prime minister was within hearing distance in the West Wing visiting Trump.
It’s no way to run a banana republic never mind the most powerful country in the world. But after 100 days of Trump that is where we are. He will spend the remaining 1,300 or so days either doubling down or trying to repair all the damage done in his first three months. Neither is an appealing prospect for America or for its remaining allies around the world who can only look on appalled — and shake their heads in disbelief.