Like all businessmen, Trump loves being on the phone. Liberation Day was a grab for attention, and boy did it deliver, writes Helen Thomas

Liberation Day certainly delivered the kind of audience its director was looking for. The US President has the world’s attention, having slapped tariffs on everyone, even the islands with penguins for inhabitants. Whilst economists ridicule the formula for calculating the tariffs and the establishment consensus reels from an attack on the previously settled question of the benefits of free trade, Trump sits in the director’s chair, happily setting the narrative of this particular high-stakes thriller motion picture. In the face of the biggest one day drop in US stock markets in five years, he simply noted with pleasure: “The tariffs give us great power to negotiate, every country has called us.”

Getting on the phone with world leaders is just an extension of the typical day he outlined in his 1987 book The Art of the Deal, which begins with his proudly mundane explanation that “I usually arrive at my office by nine, and I get on the phone. There’s rarely a day with fewer than 50 calls”. He loves calls. This is how he gets deals done. Attention is power in the mind of The Donald.

But he is now more than just a New York real estate broker or reality TV star. We now have a CEO in charge of a country, running a business where he can make the laws. This is unsettling.

Trump’s long obsession with tariffs

It should not,........

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