Donald Trump is breaking all the rules on North Korea and trade, and maybe that’s a good thing
Niall Ferguson says Donald Trump’s bold positions on a summit with Kim Jong-un and tariffs on China have stunned and infuriated the Washington consensus, including Republicans, but may actually pay off
I am a middle-class Scotsman, so at school I played rugby. One day, a new scholarship boy arrived at the Glasgow Academy. He was tall for his age, and his working-class roots had given him an aptitude for verbal and physical violence. He walked with a swagger we looked upon with awe. This magnificent specimen’s only defect was that he knew not a single one of the rules of rugby.
Advertisement
In the course of his first appearance in the school’s colours, however, he swiftly proved that this ignorance was no handicap. So large was he, and so aggressive, that all we had to do was give him the ball and point him in the right direction. He broke rule after rule. He passed forward. He tackled high. He tackled off the ball. For all of this, he was penalised. It didn’t matter. Every time he got the ball, he scored. I can still remember the sight of him rampaging towards the other side’s try line, utterly unstoppable.
I learned an important lesson that day: while the rules may apply to us all, they do not constrain us all equally.
I have been reminded of my old school friend by the latest antics of US President Donald Trump. Over the past week – indeed, over the past year – Trump has broken one political rule after another. “When I signed up to be a conservative”, an eminent Washington think tanker recently said to me, “I thought conservatism stood for free trade, fiscal responsibility and personal character”. He might have added firmness towards dictators.
US House Speaker Paul Ryan has kept the standard Republican focus on tax cuts, free trade and opposition to foreign dictatorships, and has occasionally clashed with President Donald Trump’s positions as a result. Photo: Bloomberg
In fairness to Trump, he is not the first Republican president to impose tariffs on imports, to run a very large budget deficit and to agree to meet a communist tyrant. Both Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford imposed tariffs in the name of national security. Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush ran substantial fiscal deficits. And if Trump goes to Pyongyang, there will be an unmistakable echo of Nixon’s famous trip to Beijing in 1972.
