This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

Donald Trump’s ambitions literally loom over Washington DC, for the most noticeable feature of the whole of the downtown area around the White House is the huge crane that is lifting the stuff to build his gigantic ballroom.

But here’s a strange thing. When you talk with ordinary Americans about their plans and priorities he barely features. Yes, he’s on the news the whole time saying one thing and then changing tune the next day, but people seem to have learnt to tune out. They just get on with it.

I think there are two reasons for this. One is that he does not directly affect most people’s lives. Yes, they are furious that the Middle East war has pushed up the cost of fuel, and here in Washington I know people who have lost their jobs as a result of the slashing of the federal bureaucracy. But it’s not as though he can suddenly clobber everyone with higher taxes as our next prime minister may well do. At a global level government is far more powerful, but at a personal level it is much less intrusive.

The other reason is that the US economy is left pretty much to itself and unlike ours, or indeed that of most of Europe, is doing rather well. On some counts it is now double the size of the EU – 26 per cent of the world economy as against 13 per cent –though the real gap may........

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