Educating The Donald – “Trade War” on hold as adults start surrounding Oval Office incumbent

Rational Perspective

Compared with the complexities of the portfolio he now manages, US president Donald Trump’s domain of real estate is simplicity itself. With more than 200 nation states and seven billion people, our world is a complicated place with an infinite number of moving parts.

This complexity tends to deliver a minefield of unintended consequences for those who under-estimate or are ignorant of this reality. Trump is finding this out the hard way as one seemingly idea after another, things that looked perfectly do-able on the campaign trail, have bombed, usually ending up in another senior aide being blamed and fired.

But Trump is finally starting to realise this isn’t reality TV. After trumpeting by presidential tweet inanities like “trade wars are good and easily winnable”, the president is discovering simplistic conclusions rarely work in the real world. Latest humiliation is the realisation that the proposed trade war with China will hurt America and its allies far more than the intended target. So once again a roll-back on a campaign promise.

Also in this edition, we try to answer the key questions of how America got into such a chaotic place? How was it possible that the leader of the free world, the largest economy on earth, the home of the great technological innovations become better known for its blunders than leadership?

Bill Schneider, who served as CNN’s senior political analyst for two decades before joining Third Way, a Washington Think Tank, has just written a book called Standoff – How America Became ungovernable. In his quest to understand how America ended up with a populist president, Schneider examined elections over the last 50 years. And tracked the US’s path to a unique brand of populism that is economically progressive – think tax cuts – and culturally conservative – anti-immigration and isolationist.

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