Politico EU - How Trump cost America the world

Friend and foe alike will start piecing together a different global trade order that the U.S. might like a lot less than the one it trashed.

April 5, 2025 4:00 am CET
By Jamie Dettmer
Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

“America is lost!” a distressed King George III had noted, reviewing the causes and consequences of the American Revolution. But will today’s would-be monarch in Washington one day similarly regret having lost the world?

Unlikely. U.S. President Donald Trump isn’t a man to admit mistakes — nor is he one to express regret.

And as U.S. stock markets plunged following his announcement of sweeping tariffs on 180 countries this week, Trump beamed that all would soon rebound and boom. America’s heading to glory days. Vice President JD Vance, meanwhile, complained critics were taking far too short-term a view: “We’re going to have a booming stock market for a long time because we’re reinvesting in the United States of America,” he said.

But the heavy-handedness Trump displayed, all based on cockamamie calculations and deeply flawed economics, is as maddening as King George’s restrictive trade practices toward the American colonies — and at least the British monarch had the mitigating excuse of episodes of clinical madness.

Trump’s declaration of economic independence and embrace of 19th-century protectionism amounts to slamming the door on the rest of the world — and it will likely have the unintended consequence of the rest of the world deciding, albeit painfully and slowly, to remake a new global trade order to replace the one America shaped, prospered from and has now abandoned.

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