Which is the best way of dealing with Trump - bombs or tariffs?

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Two of the big stories in August 1968 were the Russian invasion of what was then Czechoslovakia, and the ongoing ‘troubles’ in the north of Ireland. It may be apocryphal – I’ve failed to trace the report directly – but there has long been a story about a newspaper publishing a picture of a youth throwing stones at a tank, which attracted a response from one reader asking whether the youth was a Czech patriot or an Irish hooligan. Fact or fiction, the story underlines that what we observe sometimes owes as much to our own prejudices as to objective fact.

Two stories from Trumpland yesterday underline the same phenomenon. Firstly, there was this one, with Trump officials in the wake of the apparent murder of Renee Good warning potential protesters that they will deal severely with anyone protesting against the repressive actions of the masked snatch squads which Trump has despatched to roam the streets of US cities. Then there was this one, in which Trump urged Iranians to keep protesting against the repressive actions of the Iranian authorities, threatening violence against the regime if they continue to kill protesters. Whether protest is good or bad depends on who’s doing the protesting and against what – nothing new there, it’s exactly the approach he adopted to the assault on Congress in January 2021.

He seems to have only two solutions to any problem, both of which are under consideration in relation to Iran. The first is violence: there must be somebody he can bomb. And the second is tariffs – in Trumpland, increasing the cost of goods or services for Americal consumers is axiomatically a way of seeking compliance from foreign governments. If those are the only things he understands, it gives the rest of the world a question about how we should respond to the growing lawlessness of the US authorities: should we bomb Washington, or impose tariffs on all US products? It's not a serious question, of course - but it's hard to think of anything else that he might even begin to understand.