I am, as often, lost in admiration for my colleague Freddy Gray. Whenever Donald Trump does something that looks, on the face of it, like a toddler tantrum backed by the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and announces said tantrum in an erratically capitalised screed on Truth Social – and when the world responds as one to this apparent tantrum with utter bewilderment – Freddy is there with one finger raised sagely. Let’s take a pause, he says. Let’s look at what this really means. And then he explains, in a wholly plausible and authoritative manner, that the president is actually doing something bold and well-calculated – albeit characteristically dramatic – to secure the long-term strategic interests of the United States. Trump knows exactly what he’s doing, Freddy says. The bewilderment is all part of the plan.

The president of the United States is not playing four-dimensional chess with long-term global politics but, rather, is a complete maniac

There he was again this weekend, unpacking the out-of-nowhere announcement that president Trump would be levying 10 per cent tariffs on any country that raised objections to the US acquiring the sovereign territory of an ally, and upping them to 25 per cent if they didn’t give him what he wanted by early summer. It was a humdinger. Sure,........

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