Trump’s been right before.   

There are occasions when he’s come out with something seemingly crazy —totally bananas— earning him all the ire and ridicule of the expert class and the media, only to maybe be proven right over time. 

The one that springs to mind is the travel ban with China, shortly after Covid-19 took off. One minute he was being rinsed for it, the next, everyone had a travel ban with China. 

That being said, it is so hard to see how his extraordinary move this week is going to work out as he says it will.   

Overnight, China has reacted to the tariff plan and share markets around the world have continued to shed trillions of dollars in value. Today is not the day for checking your KiwiSaver balance! But even as the US Federal Reserve says America should expect slower economic growth and higher inflation, the White House insists his plan is working.  

One of the curious things about this term is how little he’s seemed to care about the stock market. In his first term as President, anything that hurt share prices elicited an immediate backdown, and Trump constantly bragged about how he had the strongest economy ever. It’s going to be extremely difficult to make that argument when almost everything costs more.  

Still, if we’ve learnt anything from the past it shouldn’t be that sometimes Trump is right to buck conventional wisdom, it’s that in the absurd polarised world we live in, personality and teams are more important than facts. This applies to many of his opponents as well – people on the absolute opposite end of the political spectrum. But Trump’s keenest cheerleaders are so slavishly loyal, many refuse to even acknowledge the most obvious objective failings.  

So his team accidentally messaged war plans to a journalist? Well, we’ll just insist they weren’t classified. So he’s slapped tariffs on uninhabited sub-Antarctic islands? Of course he has! Those penguins have been getting away with murder! He’s kicked off a global trade war that’ll leave a majority of us worse off? Fantastic. All part of the genius.   

It’s a fool’s game to try and predict Donald Trump’s next move but for the little it’s worth, my best guess is that none of these tariffs are set in stone. Countries are going to try and placate him. Companies in the US are going to try and negotiate their own little carve-outs. Trump’s gonna absolutely love picking favourites, but his approach will lurch all over the place, defined only by spur-of-the-moment whims and incoherence.   

Regardless of what happens, he will claim success. His supporters will agree, but the global order looks that much more unstable.