As Liberation Day dawned our editors had a feeling that, after weeks of suspense, President Donald Trump’s big tariff announcement was going to be an anti-climax. And because he was due to speak on Wednesday, just an hour before our cover had to go to the printers, we wouldn’t have much time to react. So we prepared two covers—one squarely on trade and the other on China, in case Mr Trump’s squib was damp.
We could not have been more wrong about the thunderbolt the president was about to unleash. What he had to say was more unhinged and more wantonly destructive than we had ever imagined.
We knew a few things in advance of the Rose Garden rant—that Mr Trump has an archaic obsession with the trade in goods, to the exclusion of services; and that extra tariffs will hurt America and the world.
Those ideas led to our first designs. In one we had a container hanging over the speaking president like the sword of Damocles. In the other we had a container-grenade about to blow a hole in the global trading system.
We thought these designs might seem like hyperbole. We needn’t have worried. Mr Trump began his address by asserting that America was being “looted, pillaged and raped”. That’s quite an accusation to level against countries supplying you with tennis shoes.
A month ago we had a cover of Mr Trump about to torch a heap of dollars. Perhaps we could offer readers an update, with the president striding gleefully away from a conflagration of greenbacks, a bit like the Joker after bombing a hospital in Gotham City. But surely that would be too extreme…
We settled on the motif of Mr Trump sawing around America, because it focused on the needless harm of his policies. As we have written many times, America’s economy is the envy of the world. But under Mr Trump’s foolish policies, its consumers will pay more, and have less choice. Its savers will suffer from a slump in markets. Its workers will be hit by slower growth. And, spared the discipline of foreign competition, its companies will fall behind.
Our working title was “Ruination Day”. As we waited for Mr Trump to begin speaking, we wondered if we’d need to revise it.
Mr Trump’s new tariffs take America back to the 19th century. They have been calculated using a formula that, when you strip away the pretentious Greek letters, treats every bilateral trade deficit as unfair—which makes as much sense as complaining that Ford suffers by buying in the parts it needs to make money selling cars. And almost every word the president uttered to justify his economic vandalism was arrant nonsense.
We called it Ruination Day. We were being generous.
Leader: President Trump’s mindless tariffs will cause economic havocFinance & economics: Trump takes America’s trade policies back to the 19th centuryAsia: India sees opportunity, as well as risk, in Trump’s trade warEurope: Europe cannot fathom what Trumpian America wants from it
We were loth to waste the China cover we had prepared, because it provides one more reason to think that Mr Trump’s announcement will harm America: it could benefit China. So we published the cover in our Asian edition.
Tariffs now totalling 65% will hurt China’s economy, no doubt. The retaliation announced in Beijing after we went to press will exacerbate the harm. However, our argument is that American protectionism will put pressure on China’s leaders to correct their worst economic errors. It may also allow President Xi Jinping to redraw the geopolitical map of Asia in China’s favour.
In short, it is a big, beautiful opportunity.
That gave us the idea of showing a golden fortune cookie. It was good, in that it got across the notion that China has an opportunity, but may not seize it.
If China is to make the most of Mr Trump’s self-harm it will need to boost domestic consumption and steady the property market, as well as stop persecuting the private sector. All those things require Mr Xi to change course.
But there was a problem with that cover. Restaurants inside China don’t serve fortune cookies at the end of a meal. That is something they do in Chinese restaurants abroad. This design therefore illustrated how Americans see China, not how the Chinese see America.
MAGA Mao was much better. Indeed, as we have reported, many Chinese make comparisons between Mr Trump’s whirlwind executive orders buffeting America and the chairman’s Cultural Revolution, which tore China apart after 1966. Whether China seizes this moment depends on one man: Mr Xi. But the fact that the opportunity exists owes much to another: Mr Trump.
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