Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is Director General of the IEA.
No one should be surprised by what happened. Travelling through a clutch of Midwestern states last month, I could feel the coming tsunami in the mild autumn air, and was astonished that local pundits were still hedging and hanging back.
The anti-Trump feeling was especially pronounced in the Great Lakes states where I found myself; states that depended heavily on cross-border trade with Canada, importing and exporting component parts; states that had been plunged into chaos by Trump’s constant, petulant trade wars.
Driving out of Milwaukee airport, I passed a large roadside billboard. “What’s worse than Chicago?” it asked, a reference to the city that Milwaukeeans love to hate. “Tariffs!”
The rejection of the central pillar of Trumpism, the only policy that the President and his sycophants have consistently favoured, will have a big bearing on what happens next.
Donald Trump has flip-flopped on almost everything. He decried Obama’s national debt and then promptly doubled it. He wanted America to be strong and respected, but he whined and cringed before autocrats. He promised to stop “forever wars”, and is now stuck in one in Iran.
Indeed, it is hard to find any ruling principle behind MAGA beyond the convenience, at any given time, of Trump.
Except one. The President has been a lifelong opponent of free trade. “I am a tariff man,” as he likes to say. Well, all the other tariff men, which is to say everyone in his administration, are now tainted by that association.
They must have known that Trump’s trade policy would fail, for they are not fools. They must have grasped that it would not reshore jobs or raise revenue.
They must have understood that tariffs would fall on American consumers, not foreign governments – which is why no foreign governments are queuing to get their money back following the Supreme Court’s decision that the tariffs were illegal.
Above all, they must have realised that trade deficits, which so obsess Trump, don’t matter. The United States has been running them solidly since 1975, and has outperformed the rest of us.
Basic economics would have told them trade deficits are matched by investment surpluses (or vice versa) and that Trump’s demand for both surpluses and simultaneous increased investment was mathematically impossible.
But, ambitious, obsequious or frightened of the MAGA voting bloc in Republican primaries, they never objected. Instead, they flattered and amplified Trump, like so many eunuchs around a vicious child emperor.
They will surely pay a political price. JD Vance, who had previously been the bookies’ choice to succeed Trump, has seen his stock plummet. Newt Gingrich, the shrewd tactician who led the Republicans to their greatest Congressional victory of the late twentieth century, saw immediately what it meant.
“If the administration had won a big victory, Vice President JD Vance would have had an enormous argument to be the inevitable nominee,” he wrote on X. Instead, he observed, the race was wide open. He listed half a dozen possible candidates: Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Ron DeSantis, Pete Hegseth, Glenn Youngkin.
In fact, proximity to the regime will do for some of them, too. The Democrats have already moved articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth, the gormless Secretary of War, whom they blame for launching unconstitutional conflicts without Congressional approval.
The clever thing for Democrats would be to leave Trump alone and impeach some of the more grotesque figures around him; but, under pressure from their own base, I am not sure their members of Congress will be able to resist.
In any event, the Republicans who stood aside from this circus-show of an administration deserve more credit than they have had. Glenn Youngkin, the former Governor of Virginia, kept his distance from MAGA and governed his state in a recognisably conservative way, cutting taxes while running surpluses.
Ron DeSantis, who is coming to the end of his term as Governor of Florida, was the man Trump beat in the last set of primaries, and has never had anything like the recognition he deserves for the success of that sun-drenched state.
Indeed, Florida is a living rebuke to Trumpery: patriotic but cosmopolitan, full of high-skilled legal immigrants, booming and open to the world – it even signed its own separate trade deal with Britain.
“Basic economics would have told them trade deficits are matched by investment surpluses.”
While Trump was musing about whether injecting disinfectant might kill the coronavirus, DeSantis resisted the massive pressure for lockdown, and was as thoroughly vindicated as a man can be in politics. Not only did Florida avoid the economic hit suffered by others; it also had a lower excess mortality rate.
More interesting is the case of Marco Rubio, whom many Reaganites and free-marketeers have until now backed as the most obvious alternative to Vance. The Secretary of State, they say, has moderated Trump’s excesses, tempering the worst of his behaviour.
Perhaps so. Still, it was on his watch that the US embraced the most revolting foreign policy in its 250-year history, turning on long-standing allies while cosying up to autocrats.
It was with Rubio’s hand on the tiller at the State Department that the US demanded the annexation of Canada and launched a trade war against that loyal friend. It was during his time in office that it threatened to seize Danish territory.
It is true that these initiatives were Trump’s, not Rubio’s. I imagine that the Secretary of State viewed them with horror. Still, we must in the end judge a man by his actions, not by his misgivings.
When Rubio began negotiating with the Russians in Riyadh, alongside that prize ass Steve Witkoff, he trotted out the Trumpian line, like a hostage reading his captors’ script, talking of “the incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians”.
Some things, once seen, cannot easily be unseen.
Trump’s characteristic response to the electoral meltdown was to declare: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
In fact, Trump had been telling his voters at every rally to act as though he were on the ballot. And that is precisely what they did. The MAGA core still exists, but it has shrunk as Trump’s policies have failed in their own terms, and as the wealth of his friends and family has expanded in the manner of an African kleptocracy.
There is a gap in the market for a party that stands for limited government, the rule of law and the principles of the American founding.
Both main parties at present seem to want to mobilise the full coercive power of the state against people they dislike. Both elevate outcome over process. Both are inclined to treat election results as contingent unless they win.
Americans deserve better. Theirs is the world’s greatest republic, designed to be “a government of laws, not of men”.
I see little prospect of the Democrats becoming such a party, at least not in the short term. They have drawn the worst possible lesson from the election result, seeing it as an endorsement of their own most radical policies.
Are the Republicans, as their name suggests, prepared to step up and defend republican principles – the idea that the citizen should be elevated above the government, the individual above the collective?
Someone has to. The rest of the world needs a free America just as Americans themselves do.