All through Thursday morning, Donald Trump was so content with the alarmed worldwide response to “Liberation Day” that he did the one thing which is alien to him. He stayed silent. The previous afternoon, he had stood in the Rose Garden of the White House and, in the space of an hour, summoned up an economic tempest which, he vowed, will return the United States to its golden dream.
On Thursday, the economists and world leaders warned of dire consequences, of remaining calm. The newscasters spoke of the Dow, the S&P, as though delivering last rites.
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They wondered how long the tariffs might last: if this was just a hard bargaining opening to a negotiation that will rectify some of the wrongs Trump perceives have been inflicted on the US without causing a catastrophic malfunction of the global trading ecosystem. Or whether April 2nd marks the end of globalisation. In true Trump fashion, the more words he spoke, the less clear everything became.
But on Thursday morning his vice-president JD Vance hinted that the tariff announcements will form the foundation of the central ambition of Trump’s second term: to impose a new dispensation on the world’s established trading patterns. And to return the US to a lost Valhalla.
Vance described the four decades of open trading as disastrous for the Republican heartland of America, when the US wilfully “incurred a huge amount of debt to buy things that other countries make for us”.
Vance continued: “To make it a little bit more crystal clear: we borrow things from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture. That is not a recipe for economic prosperity, it is not a recipe for low prices and it’s not a recipe for good jobs in the United States of America.
“For 40 years we have gone down that pathway. We have seen closing factories, we have seen rising inflation, we have seen the cost of housing so high that most Americans can’t afford to buy a home right now. President Trump is taking this economy in a different direction. He ran on that. He promised it.”
Almost all perceived economic wisdom, outside the Trump cabinet room, is bellowing that they are chasing unicorns: that their plan will just inflict economic disaster on everyone, maybe even wreck the Bretton Woods model. The Democrats are still banging their drum about the impending Republican tax cuts which will benefit the billionaire class. Fingers were pointed at the fact that almost uniquely among the nations of the world, Russia avoided sanction. The White House retort is that Putin’s Russia is already under sanction.
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“This is a common sense policy,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted in her bright, steely way on Thursday morning, as questions circulated over the 185 countries which made Trump’s tariff chart.
“And if these countries wanted to do what’s right, they’ve had 70 years to do it.”
And that’s what Trump was attempting to do on the dank April occasion in Eleanor Roosevelt’s old garden. Reverse time itself.
“My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day. Waiting for a long time,” Trump declared on his arrival in the Rose Garden. He wore his good coat as the day was brisk.
“April 2nd, 2025, will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed and the day we began to make America wealthy again. For decades our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike.
“American autoworkers, steel workers, farmers and skilled craftsman, they really suffered gravely. They watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream.”
Returning the US to its roaring, manufacturing postwar zenith is what Trump promised over and over again in his campaign. Nobody can accuse him of not having a bold vision.
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“Everyone seems to decry the fact that we don’t make cars here any more,” Tim Sheehy, the newly elected Montana senator, said on Thursday.
“There wasn’t some force field that dropped down, there wasn’t a magical wand that sent manufacturing overseas. It was government policy incentivised those companies to go overseas.”
Now, Trump has summonsed them back, as though Henry Ford himself is waiting on the factory floor for the happy workers to return. Build it and they will come.
Just three months into his presidency, Trump is going for broke in his bid to enforce a new order and essentially re-cast the US. On Wednesday, then, liberation. On Thursday, he met his intelligence officials before flying south, to his Doral National golf course, where some of the best players in the world were gathering in advance of the LIV tournament this weekend.
