A Mad Mad Mad World

(Read on, or view here: https://youtu.be/tTCibfurAW4 )

It’s like deciding in the middle of a blizzard that now’s a good time to don a bikini. A lurid but apposite image in the case of the Don who thinks starting a trade war is a great idea. But as everyone else gasps for breath and no one has the foggiest how it’ll pan out, it’s worth trying to figure out why any of this is happening. And why it shouldn’t be.

The hit song from the swinging sixties, The Hippy Hippy Shake, is worth a re-release under the revamped title the Yippy Yippy Shake.

This thanks to Donald Trump’s bizarre approach to both the workings of money and the English language.

It’s hard to find a clear dictionary definition of the word yippy, and impossible to find a economist who thinks putting a block on international trade is a good idea.

But Trump explained his decision to take his finger off the financial red button last week on the grounds that people were: ‘Getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid.’

Glad that’s sorted then. At least we know what he thinks the word means.

The jury’s still out though on why he put a pause on huge taxes on just about everything anyone tries to sell to America. Anyone, that is, apart from the Chinese, who he’s hitting even harder.

It could be his billionaire buddies like Elon Musk dared to protest that the plan was burning a deep hole in their own pockets.

Or maybe it didn’t stop there.

The highly respected former Bank of England economist Andy Haldane put it simply. ‘We just saw Trump wet his pants in front of the world.’

Surprise surprise, Trump’s merry band of yes-men say it was all part of the plan.

Yerright, says Haldane. Ok, the Prez didn’t seem too fussed about stock markets going bonkers, but it was a different matter when the bond markets joined in.

They after all don’t just mess with ordinary folk’s money, they also buy and sell government debt. And, if the entire US economy went down the Swanee, The Donald really would be in a pickle.

Which makes you wonder why our Prime Minister isn’t a little more forthcoming on the subject.

Certainly the Labour grandee Harriet Harman thinks it’s about time he was.

‘Ministers,’ she sighed, are avoiding the: ‘Elephant in the room … that Trump is wrong on this, we don’t agree with him.’

When President Bush tried a stunt like this a couple of decades back, she stressed, Tony Blair did say: ‘This is unacceptable, this is wrong, it’s unjustified, it is breaching the World Trade Organisation rules.’

Now, by contrast, she added: ‘ It feels as if there’s a kind of restricted vocabulary amongst ministers at the moment where they are speaking in code.’

Of course she’s right. But maybe so are they, given that we’re on the very long list of nations desperately trying to negotiate our way into better trading terms with The Donald.

Or, as he put it in his eloquently poetical way: ‘These countries are calling me up, kissing my ass.’ Another rather lurid image, it has to be said. But he wasn’t done yet.

‘I know what the hell I’m doing. I know what I’m doing, and you know what I’m doing too.’

Well, he’s certainly right about that latter point. Though views about what he’s doing could hardly be more diametrically opposed.

In his mind he’s making America great again. Stopping all those beastly foreigners ripping off poor Uncle Sam by undercutting the prices of things he makes, or might one day make, right here at home.

Except that it doesn’t really work like that these days. Take what most of us have to hand and what most of us rely on to such a large extent. The smartphone. Or our laptop or desktop computer.

Very likely the display was made in South Korea or Japan. The camera module’s from Japan too. The batteries will have come from India or China, the memory chips from South Korea and the logic chips from Taiwan.

In fairness, some of the chips originate in the US, though the company behind them sometimes farms them out to factories in Taiwan anyway. Meanwhile, other ingredients come from Germany.

And it seems even Trump can spot a truth when it’s sprayed across both his eyeballs and up his nose. On Saturday he lopped those very items off the list of things to be subject to his extra tax.

The fact that myriad other products cross loads of national borders before they get anywhere the shops or showrooms still seems to have escaped his notice, however.

As to how that is even possible, it’s worth taking a peek under the orange bonnet. He might come across to everyone as a three-year-old boy at the wheel of a forty-ton truck, but it’s more complicated than that.

And it seems many of those who know Trump best love him least. Take John Bolton, National Security Adviser during part of his first go at being Prez. A think piece he wrote in The Telegraph last week pulled no punches.

‘As with Ukraine,’ Bolton fumed, ‘Trump listens primarily to himself, not to others. He creates his own world, this time an imaginary trade world, and then lives in it.

‘Trump isn’t lying so much as he is ruling a parallel universe, like a boy’s tree house, where numbers mean what he says they mean.’

That’s a critique that seems to resonate back here in Blighty, as the latest YouGov poll suggests those of us who dislike the man outnumber those who don’t by four to one.

His popularity could slump even further as parliament holds an extremely rare emergency debate about British Steel, arguably yet another bit of collateral damage stemming from the new world trade disorder.

Something for Reform leader Nigel Farage to bear in mind as he, like most other MPs just now, gets out on the campaign trail in readiness for the town hall elections in a couple of weeks or so.

Until Trump set out on his destroy-the-world-order mission Farage was wooing his right wing voters with what a close mate he was. Now, suddenly, this chummy bravado is looking more like an Achilles’ heel.

Little wonder then that he’s standing on his head, like so many others, for various other reasons.

While the Chinese are limbering up to be just as horrid to Trump as he’s being to them, Farage is having to fall back on a bleat that maybe The Donald’s trying to do much too soon. Er, like Liz Truss.

But while her cackhanded attempt at running the country broke all records for lack of longevity, another one got broken this week for doing the opposite.

One of Philadelphia Zoo’s most intriguing residents has been trying for a baby for years. And now her patience has been rewarded with not one but four little ones. And finally earned her name ‘Mommy’.

So far so relatively unremarkable. Not like creatures in captivity never reproduce.

But what does rather mark her out from the herd, so to speak, is that Mommy is no spring chicken. Impolite of course to ask a lady’s age, but it is no secret that this one is approximately one hundred years old.

Still, best not rush at things, eh? That adage is particularly appropriate in the case of former inhabitants of the Western Santa Cruz Galapagos. Especially those who happen to be … giant tortoises.