Trump has failed, but the world needs to carry on presuming that Trump is the biggest threat it has faced in generations, because a man who's failed in the way he has might turn to violence, and violence will not resolve anything.

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Trump has failed.

Let's be clear about it. Everything that he has so far tried to do during the course of this, his second term as President of the USA, has not worked.

He said he'd end the war in Ukraine. He very clearly has not.

He said he'd end the war in Gaza. He very clearly has not.

He said that he would negotiate with Canada, and they would love to be the 51st state of the USA. It's very clear that they do not want to have that status.

He said that the USA must have Greenland, and all that he has so far succeeded in doing with regard to that strategy is to alienate both Greenland and Denmark.

But worse still, the whole of the DOGE - the Department of Government efficiency - the Elon Musk exercise - is very clearly failing.

The scale of savings has already been wound back considerably.

He isn't going to cut out over a trillion of US federal government spending, as was the goal.

He might, if he's lucky, cut out a bit over a hundred billion, and the harm from doing so is almost uncountable.

Musk himself has disappeared from the scene. It looks as though even he thinks that this exercise has failed.

But then we come to the biggest failure of all, and that, of course, is the tariff policy.

Trump had talked about tariffs forever. From the 1980s onwards, he has been obsessed with the supposed benefits that tariffs would supply to the USA. He seems to have genuinely believed that somehow or other, tariffs imposed a tax charge on people outside the USA who exported goods to it, when the reality is that tariffs impose a tax charge on the US consumer. He's tried to do that, and very obviously, he's created a number of quite dramatic outcomes.

One is total confusion because it's very clear that Trump has not known what he's doing.

He's imposed tariffs.

He's withdrawn tariffs.

He's upped the tariff rate.

He's cut the tariff rate.

He's declared that there's a moratorium and then there isn't.

Now, where are we? Who knows? All we have for certain are 10% tariffs on most countries, excluding things like cars, where the rate is 25%, probably on top of the 10%, but again, we're not sure. And we have 145% on China, and we find there are already exemptions appearing.

The confusion is staggering.

Markets are collapsing.

That's not just the financial markets, although we have clearly seen financial markets for shares around the world falling heavily as a consequence of what he's done, and we have seen the value of the dollar collapsing, whilst the interest rate on US Treasury Bonds has increased significantly in a way that just should not have happened in a normal period of time. It has taken the most extraordinary inability to produce that outcome of falling 📍 share prices, falling bond prices , falling dollar valuation, and collapsing trade underlying all of this.

And at the same time, inflation is going to increase because the price of many products to US consumers is going to rise dramatically. The suggestion was that an iPhone would've gone up in price from $1,200 on average to $2,100 on average, and whilst that may now change, there is not going to be a significant change in the increase with regard to the price of cars, for example, where significant quantities of foreign components are included.

And as a consequence, not only is there going to be an increase in inflation, but of course, there is going to be an increase in taxes paid by most people in the USA. Fifty per cent of all people in the USA hardly pay any federal tax at all, but they will all pay the price for tariffs included in the prices they have to pay for the goods and services that they buy.

Trump has delivered nothing that is working.

Literally nothing at all.

No policy that he has so far talked about has created a positive outcome, and we then have to face the reality that this might create an extraordinary new situation to deal with.

What does a caged egotist like Donald Trump do when he finds that he cannot get what he wants?

This is a man who is the equivalent of a spoiled little brat. He's always got whatever he's wanted throughout life. And now what he wanted was to impose tariffs on the world so they would sit down and as he put it, lick his ass to get favours in exchange for releasing those tariffs. And now he's finding that the tariffs are failing and that no ass licking will be going on.

How will he react? The answer is, I have no idea.

A man like this is utterly unpredictable, so irrational is he, whilst clearly being in charge of his mental faculties. I personally believe that he is not suffering senile dementia or anything like it. I think he is actually forming a strategy, which in his own mind works, and which those around him are not challenging and therefore he is sane in the sense that the world as he sees it, is not reacting as he expects, while the rest of us think that he's outta touch with reality.

But he is in control of what he thinks he wants, but what he wants is not what he's getting. What does the spoiled brat do in that situation?

Well, he starts by throwing his toys out of the pram. We can expect that to happen. He's going to get very angry somewhere very soon.

Will he take out his anger on Mexico? He might, because, of course, they are vulnerable to any challenge from the USA, which could include invasion. The argument being that imports of fentanyl are enough to justify such an action.

He could increase his aggression against Canada, where it is clear that he has the opportunity again to invade if he so wishes, although what the pretext would be is very hard to work out.

He might increase tariffs, although as he's already found, China has now called his bluff there. They are not accepting the tariff regime because 📍 they're refusing to export key items like rare earths, which the US can't survive without so that there is no tariff at all to be imposed because quite simply there is no product that's going to be sent to the USA and that has no real cost to China, by the way, because the rare earth, of course, will still be there to export in time to come. It's just a cash flow consequence that China will suffer as a result, and it's big enough to suffer that.

So, where are we now? We have Trump, a failure in charge of the White House.

Trump's looking like a fool in charge of the White House.

Trump's being mocked in charge of the White House.

And Trump, with no idea what to do next, is in charge of the White House.

I worry that he will turn to aggression as his next course of action. We need to watch that carefully. But the one thing we do know, and I make it very clear. Is that the world needs to join together to challenge what he's doing.

The danger of Trump and his tariffs has not passed. If anything, the danger is increasing precisely because his tariff policy is failing.

We do need to have Canada, Japan, South Korea, the European Union, the UK, and other states - looking to some of the Brics countries too - we might want to include India and Brazil, for example, in this new alliance that creates free trade and maybe uses another currency apart from the dollar to undertake that trade in, which need not be the Euro, but could be some basket of currencies agreed between them - what Lord Keynes once called the Bancor.

Whatever it is, the world needs to carry on presuming that Trump is the biggest threat it has faced in generations because he really is, and a man who's failed in the way he has might turn to violence, and violence will not resolve anything.