Trump 2.0 deserves no more or less than fair scrutiny from the media

US President Donald Trump has polarised the media since his first election in 2016.

Then, as now, many of his media critics and admirers jumped too early in their assessments of him.

Without Covid-19, his first term would have ended a success with strong economic growth and the lowest rates of African-American unemployment since World War II. He kept America off the battle field, sealed the Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain and United Arab Emirates and was unquestionably a good president for US-Australia relations.

The Democrat-left establishment – and big city media, big tech and the Obama-era intelligence community – undermined Trump from the start with the bogus Russiagate story.

It gave The New York Times and Washington Post lots of new young online subscribers who wanted confirmation bias about Trump. It also killed the credibility of many journalists.

Despite a powerful performance last Wednesday afternoon (AEDT) during his address to a joint sitting of the Senate and the House, it is too early to judge Trump’s second term, despite the high ratings he gave himself.

This column was appalled by last week’s White House Oval Office press conference with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

But it was unwise to judge too early: only five days after slapping down a leader many in the free world regard as a hero, Trump on Wednesday welcomed a letter from Zelensky that day asking for a resumption of peace talks and negotiations for a joint US-Ukraine deal on rare earths in Ukraine.

Volodymyr Zelensky stands his ground against Donald Trump and JD Vance in the Oval Office meeting. Picture: AFP

Trump, always a fan of strong leaders, seems to cut Russian President Vladimir Putin inordinate slack. This column reckons Putin is a murderous gangster who may just be the richest man in the world when we find out how much of his poor country’s wealth he has plundered.

Those making excuses for Trump’s threats to Ukraine need to remember Zelensky represents his country’s interests, not America’s. And his country in 1994 signed up to international treaties with Russia, the US and UK to respect Ukraine’s borders.

In return, Ukraine surrendered all its nuclear weapons: no small thing given it then had the third largest nuclear stockpile on earth, behind Russia and the US.

This column reckons Zelensky would be mad to agree to any peace deal without strong guarantees against future attacks by Putin.

A reading of the full transcript of discussions between Trump, Vance and Zelensky provides context. We suspect many journalists did not read it, relying instead on the fireworks of the 10 minutes that blew up the end of the meeting.

It is clear that for much of the meeting Trump believed Zelensky was already on board with the proposed minerals deal.

Trump is wary of Ukraine’s ambition to join NATO because Russia would not accept a NATO state on its border and the alliance could potentially force the US into any future conflict with Russia to defend Ukraine as a NATO member.

This is Trump’s World War III scenario. Trump is about peace, prosperity and reducing government spending and US debt.

Yet where Trump’s second term is already a success, globally, is in challenging the madder agenda of identity politics that consumed the Democrats under president Joe Biden.

The business world is better off without DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). Business leaders have welcomed the triumphant return of merit.

Sensible mainstream opinion supports the end of mis-gendered sport and a clear statement of biological truth in gender. Most Americans applaud the return of common sense to US border policy, proper support for policing and the President’s determination to clamp down on drugs killing 100,000 Americans every year.

Many will applaud Trump’s plans to reboot the US car and ship building industries.

Here we arrive at the central contradiction of Trump: US businesses were the main drivers and beneficiaries of globalisation. They relocated factories to places with cheap labour and their profits soared. Much of the US car industry has moved to Mexico. US textile manufacturing moved to China, then Bangladesh and Colombia. Computer chip-making, once the domain of Silicon Valley, moved to Taiwan.

This supercharged the profits of corporate America, cut the prices of consumer goods to working Americans and left US business innovators to focus on much higher-value production in new technology.

The world’s biggest companies no longer make cars or steel. They make iPhones, develop software programs that have culminated in artificial intelligence, or they build global audiences for social media and streaming of content.

The world’s leading companies by market capitalisation at the end of October were: Apple ($US3.56 trillion), Nvidia ($US3.23 trillion), Microsoft ($US3.11 trillion), Alphabet, the parent company of Google, ($US2.05 trillion), Amazon ($US1.95 trillion), Meta ($US1.48 trillion) and Berkshire Hathaway ($US1 trillion).

The only traditional US industrial company in the global top 10 is Indiana pharmaceuticals giant Eli Lilly, with a market cap of $US868bn.

While the US sharemarket is down over the past few weeks, the top five in October each had a larger market cap than Australia’s annual GDP ($US1.7 trillion) and all dwarfed the market cap of the entire Australian stock exchange ($US1 trillion).

Many of these companies did not exist before globalisation and they are the biggest beneficiaries of open international markets. Yet their success has left Middle America behind as unskilled jobs in manufacturing moved offshore.

Trump believes the key to reviving Middle America is the reimposition of tariffs to bring manufacturing back to the US. And he thinks tariffs are a revenue honey pot for government that will allow tax cuts and perhaps eventually balance the federal budget.

The trouble is that tariffs raise prices and reward inefficiency, and countries whose exports to the US are penalised this way introduce reciprocal tariffs against American exports.

Trump was sure in Wednesday’s speech that the US’s farmers would appreciate the tariffs he will impose on imported agricultural goods.

This ignores history: the US Civil War was not just about slavery. The north was dominated by industrialists who wanted protection from European imports. The farmers of the south wanted free trade so the costs of imported inputs used to grow their cotton and other goods could be kept lower.

Economists say Trump’s plan will boost inflation and hurt American consumers as well as producers that use imported components.

Yet this column can see one counter-argument and suspects China, globalisation’s biggest beneficiary, can too: the US is not a particularly open economy. That is, trade is a much smaller fraction of US GDP than it is for many trading nations.

In the US, two-way trade is 27 per cent of GDP compared with Germany (90 per cent), France (68 per cent), China (37 per cent) and even Australia (48 per cent).

Trump may also be using tariff threats to demand the removal of other non-tariff barriers used in places such as Europe to protect inefficient farmers, and by China, where investment rules for foreigners are opaque.