The Telegraph – The sneering reaction to his agreement with the EU fails to capture the upsides of his approach.
The deal “will bring stability. It will bring predictability”, said EU President Ursula von der Leyen at Donald Trump’s Turnberry golf resort in Scotland on Sunday. “Stability” and “predictability” are not words the EU typically employs when discussing anything connected with the US president. But when you lead an economic bloc that has just been comprehensively outmanoeuvred in a trade dispute, forced into a deal that even your own side says favours the US, you could be forgiven for acting out of character.
The basic rate of 15 per cent that will now be charged on most European goods entering the US was perhaps not coincidentally the same rate that Trump had extracted from Japan in a similar deal last week. It is the same rate that could, pending an announced review, become a new general norm in US foreign trade relations. It is also substantially higher than the less than 2 per cent effective rate that the US charged the EU before Trump returned to office.
It was “the best we could get”, von der Leyen said almost apologetically in a news conference after the deal was announced. Indeed, a hard US-imposed deadline to conclude negotiations loomed on August 1, only four days after the agreement was reached. Without the deal, US tariffs on EU imports, which form about 20 per cent of the US’s total foreign purchases, would have shot up to 30 per cent across the board, with high levies on automobiles, pharmaceuticals, and other key industries in which the EU has a competitive advantage left painfully in place.
In other words, Trump appears to be winning his trade war. US markets were flat on Monday, largely in anticipation of corporate earnings reports, and have risen strongly in the year to date. Wiser commentators have also come to the realisation that Trump’s tariff strategy is not the economic disaster that so many of them had predicted – noting robust aggregate data and little sign that households are under pressure. The IMF’s latest forecasts indicate that the US will continue to significantly outperform its developed world rivals. The president has secured commitments for considerable new investment in the US from a range of trading partners, alongside a more level playing field for American exporters.
America’s discredited legacy media, however, refuses to accept that there might be any advantages to the president’s approach. “Few are cheering,” said CNN of Trump’s EU deal. It also felt compelled to argue that the agreement will not allow the president to escape questions about the simmering scandal around the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. For good measure, the Left-wing news network featured a human interest story claiming Trump’s tariffs could “ruin” a women’s golf apparel brand.
“Questions, critiques and discrepancies are hanging over the framework agreement,” declared a sceptical New York Times analysis, apparently written by seven reporters, who accused the deal of having “drawn plenty of grumbling” from critics just hours after its announcement.
On Monday, a follow-up New York Times article warned that the tariffs could inflict higher prices for Botox, Ozempic, and other cosmetic drugs. One could argue that the former paper of record, as it is often called, knows its remaining audience, but that same day it also unironically published an article observing that doctoral graduates in economics, an academic field overwhelmingly critical of Trump’s tariffs, now face poor employment prospects. In fairness, on Tuesday, it did acknowledge that the slew of deals “has seemingly proved Mr Trump right that his tariff threats are a powerful bargaining tool”, but it couldn’t resist casting doubt on whether they would prove an economic success.
“Much of this would have happened anyway”, sniffed the lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal of the EU’s commitment to invest hundreds of billions more in the US. Pointing out that EU investment increased by about $200bn from 2023 to 2024, it joylessly observed that “those investment inflows will increase the US trade deficit because of balance-of-payments accounting”.
Perhaps some of these criticisms will be proven correct. But it is not hard to detect an unwillingness among the president’s detractors to accept any upside to his approach, or to acknowledge when their own gloomy predictions have been proven disastrously wrong.
Not all observers are so down in the mouth. “The stock market is at record highs … I don’t see a country in a depression … And I would have thought … that these tariffs were going to f‑–ing sink this economy by this time, and they didn’t,” admitted the liberal American comedian and political commentator Bill Maher, a sometime Trump critic who has a record of giving the president credit when it is due. If the rest of the news media wants to recover ground among the 69 per cent of Americans who say they place little or no faith in it, its practitioners should recognise a good thing when they see it.