When Trump was re-elected, The New Yorker went into mourning.  The agony was increased when he announced his cabinet.  As Thomas Friedman reminded us in The New York Times, if you pick clowns, you will get a circus.  But when it came to tariffs, you had also to fear what may happen when little boys play with matches.

The New Yorker’s editor made another point.  Trump has no sense of humour.  You never hear him laugh.  But he is terrified at being laughed at.  Do you remember his glacial anxiety when Obama made fun of him in public?  On the hilariously named Liberation Day, even celebrated in the Gulf of America, Trump said up until then the joke had been on ‘us’ – now the U S could laugh at the world. Until Trump discovered what Friedman called ‘the art of the squeal.’