Trump’s second term: Let’s hope his campaign was mostly rhetoric

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. As the US presidential race reached its last laps, Donald Trump raised his pitch on women. Describing former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, he theatrically began to spell out “B...," goading the crowd to shout out the word.

This was days after suggesting that Liz Cheney, a Republican who broke ranks to vote for his impeachment after the Capitol Hill riots of 6 January 2021, should be shot. This strategy of polarization has succeeded beyond expectations. High inflation has certainly played an equal part.

As the conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation estimated, “the highest inflation in decades “means that the average weekly paycheck is $160 larger than when President Joe Biden and Harris took office, but it buys $35 less." The irony is that US GDP growth and job growth have been unusually good; the Biden administration’s gamble was that this would push up wages at the bottom of the pyramid. Although it did happen, voters with better-paying jobs usually credit themselves for getting a raise or a new job—and blame the incumbent for higher prices. As the US reconciles itself to a second Trump presidency, the key question will be how much of his tactics were theatre to energize his mostly male support base and how much defines what his second term in office will look like.

In between the name-calling by both sides, there was enough—well, just about—discussion of policy to give us an outline of Trump’s action plan. The clearest, from a man who recently called tariffs the “most beautiful word in the dictionary," is a likely 60% import duty on Chinese imports and 10% on shipments from the rest of the world. The implications of this would extend well beyond China and mean higher prices in the