Editorial
The anti-gravity chamber

Whether or not Donald Trump intended to reshape the world order within 100 days is unclear. What he certainly didn’t intend was for his ill-considered actions to expose the vacuousness of his entire administration.

Even before the full suite of the United States president’s made-up tariffs are deployed – assuming they ever will be – he has descended into a retaliatory brawl with China. This has thrust the world deeper into what even Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has described the “dumbest trade war in history”.

Global financial markets have convulsed in the kind of synchrony that augurs a deep and economically destructive rout. Trump’s transactional allies across the political and financial spectrums are sounding more nervous about the blowback on the US economy, and a new world in which they may no longer be ascendant.

Of America’s five top richest men, the only one who has gained rather than lost tens of billions in the trade war so far is veteran investor Warren Buffett. He was also the only one not to attend Trump’s inauguration. The numbers will veer around, as astronomical numbers do, but the fury among those who expect only to win will be mounting. It is this, not the stacking of the Supreme Court, nor the gutting of USAID, nor the deaths of unvaccinated children from measles in Texas, nor the deportations of innocent migrants, that is most likely to set the clock on this administration.

Trump so fully epitomises the anti-gravity of US privilege that allows the rich, white and stupid to fail up – the schadenfreude is tempting. As was evident from this week’s unravelling of Coalition policies borrowed straight from the US, most Australians have no sympathy for Trump’s agenda.

Nevertheless, it will be hard to escape the fallout.

The only good thing that can be said about the past few years of racking inflation is that the labour market didn’t suffer. Unemployment has been low for so long it’s easy to forget the immense pain of an economy that is shedding jobs. While some commentators have been enthusing about
the certainty of interest rate cuts to come, it’s distressing to think of the conditions that might bring them about.

Australia’s top financial authorities in their urgent meetings must consider how best to shield this country from a global economic and markets downturn. This may distract our leaders for a while from the only slightly less urgent – and even more difficult – question of how we extricate ourselves from an ailing superpower that seems hell-bent on pulling the rest of the world down with it.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 12, 2025 as "The anti-gravity chamber".

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