Donald Trump remains as polarising as ever, but as time goes on his policies and advice have come to look prescient.
Loathe him or love him, and there’s no shortage of either group, the former US president was exactly right about Europe’s dangerous dependence on Russian energy, a claim for which he was consistently mocked by his opponents and Germany.
Delivering a speech at the UN in September 2018, Trump praised Poland’s efforts to wrench itself away from Russian gas and warned Germany its growing dependence on Russia would end in disaster. The German delegation laughed at him.
“Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course,” Trump said at the UN. Germany went on to import about 40 per cent of its energy from Russia, paralysing the powerhouse in the face of Russian aggression only a few years later.
That was no small matter on which to be correct; indeed, Germany’s policy has proved one of the greatest geopolitical blunders of the past half-century.
Trump also argued European nations, especially Germany, should spend more on defence; that’s now happening too.
The Trump administration encouraged the Keystone oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada, through to Texas, which would have brought an additional 800,000 barrels of oil a day into the US, according to Canadian officials – about four times the amount the US imported from Russia last year.
The Biden administration cancelled the pipeline permanently on coming into office and now is flailing about trying to increase fossil fuel energy production as it parrots the need to transition to solar and wind power. It’s an invidious position.
Also in late 2018, the Trump administration imposed tariffs on Chinese imports to much gnashing of teeth across the political spectrum. Some called it racist. The Biden administration not only has kept the tariffs in place, it also has doubled down on the Trump administration’s tough approach to China.
Trump’s policies on Iran and North Korea were similarly ridiculed but both nations remained relatively quiescent throughout his presidency, unlike now, when North Korea is firing ever more advanced missiles every other week.
The Biden administration hasn’t reversed Trump’s controversial shift of the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem or reopened a consulate there for Palestinians. Trump also planned, to the chagrin of the military-industrial complex, that the US would withdrew from Afghanistan, on which Joe Biden followed through.
In recent weeks Democrats have proved reluctant to end Title 42, a US regulation enacted during the final years of the Trump administration to expel unauthorised immigrants crossing the border from Mexico. Numbers have soared beyond 200,000 a month since Trump left office.
To what amounted to guffaws of laughter, Trump repeatedly claimed he was spied on by Democrat operatives before and immediately after he became president in 2017. “This is 60 Minutes, and we can’t put on things we can’t verify,” senior journalist Lesley Stahl said in an interview with Trump in late 2020.
Justice Department special counsel John Durham, appointed to investigate the matter in February this year, has proffered evidence that Trump was right. It also turned out the so-called Steele dossier – front page news throughout 2020, alleging Trump had colluded with Russian President Vladimir Putin and even cavorted with prostitutes in Moscow – was entirely made up, as Trump had argued all along.
More recently, evidence that Hunter Biden was striking deals with Ukrainian and Chinese businesses while his father was vice-president – evidence from the younger Biden’s own laptop, negligently left at a computer repair shop in Delaware – was ignored by mainstream US media for more than a year.
Trump was mocked repeatedly throughout 2020 for arguing vaccines against Covid-19 would be ready before the end of the year, in part owing to his government’s Operation Warp speed.
“If Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it,” said Kamala Harris, then a senator, now vice-president, who along with many millions of people around the world did indeed take at least one of the vaccines.
Trump suggested SARS-CoV-2 had accidentally escaped a lab in Wuhan, a claim initially derided but now within the realm of possibility according to Biden administration intelligence officials.
Most US states copied China in trying to snuff out Covid-19 with unprecedented, multi-month lockdowns, which before 2020 had been considered a fringe idea for dealing with a contagious virus that most people survived.
Trump’s intuition has been vindicated by umpteen studies that struggle to find much of a relationship at all between states that did and did not copy China’s approach to mitigation of contagious diseases. More people have died from or with Covid-19 since Joe Biden took office, suggesting the political contours of Washington matter little for disease mitigation.
A research paper released last week found US states such as Utah, Nebraska and Vermont that did relatively little to try to stop Covid-19 did best overall in terms of wellbeing.
“The correlation between health and economy scores is essentially zero, which suggests that states that withdrew the most from economic activity did not significantly improve health by doing so,” according to the analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
On these, the biggest domestic policy and geopolitical issues of the past decade, Trump was right or at the vanguard of a new political consensus.
Widespread hatred for Trump among political and media elites has obscured the former president’s prescience on a range of issues. That doesn’t make him a good candidate for president in 2024 or validate his highly dubious claims about the 2020 election being stolen. But it’s a salient reminder so-called experts can be, indeed often are, wrong.
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