Donald Trump’s tariff strategy has at least one biblical connection: like the peace of God, it “passeth all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). Rival attempts to extract a rationale from the chaos include the idea that he is trying to devalue the dollar, or that he is seeking to “reshore” the manufacturing capacity that the US lost through decades of globalisation. My own hunch is that he just wants to show who’s the big boss around here – or as British science fiction author Charles Stross puts it, that he “expects individual nations to come to him, hat in hand, like terrified shopkeepers pleading for mercy from a mafia don”.
Cue the UK’s very own Trump whisperer, Keir Starmer, who, according to Politico, plans “to put a review of online safety rules on the table in trade talks” with the US. Which, translated, means that things such as the Online Safety Act and copyright rules that hinder US AI companies from looting the intellectual property of the British creative sector may soon become history. The only remaining question is whether Starmer possesses a suitably distressed hat for his penitent journey to Washington.
