Saudi Arabia and other producers must cut oil prices, global central banks “immediately” needed to slash interest rates, and foreign companies must ramp up investments in US factories or face tariffs. The EU — which came in for particular opprobrium — must stop hitting big American technology companies with competition fines.

Trump’s demands came amid a frenetic first week in office in which the president launched a blitzkrieg of executive orders and announcements intended not just to reshape the state but also assert America’s economic and commercial supremacy. Tariffs of up to 25 per cent could be slapped on Canada and Mexico as early as February 1, riding roughshod over the trade deal Trump himself negotiated in his first term.  China could face levies of up to 100 per cent if Beijing failed to agree on a deal to sell at least 50 per cent of the TikTok app to a US company, while the EU was told to purchase more American oil if it wanted to avoid tariffs. Underscoring the new American unilateralism, Trump pulled the US out of the World Health Organization, as well as exiting the Paris climate accord for a second time.

This proposal throws a “hand grenade” at international tax policymaking, says Niels Johannesen, director of the Oxford university Centre for Business Taxation at Saïd Business School. The move suggests a determination to “shape other countries’ tax policy through coercion rather than through co-operation”, he adds.

“Those around Trump have had time to build up a systematic, methodological approach for protectionist trade policy and it shows,” says former UK trade department official Allie Renison, now at consultancy SEC Newgate. The approach will be to build up a case file of “evidence” against countries, she says, and then use it to extract concessions in areas of both economic and foreign policy.

The question remains how far Trump is willing to go. The danger of trampling on the rules-based order, says Jeromin Zettelmeyer, head of the Bruegel think-tank, is a complete breakdown in the diplomatic and legal channels for settling international disputes. If Trump were to pull out of a wider range of international frameworks, such as the WTO or the IMF, he warns, then the arrangements that help govern the global economy could get “substantively destroyed”.

Some caution against being awestruck by Trump’s threats or his espousal of capitalism without limits, because his agenda was so incoherent. “What we are seeing is huge doses of American hubris,” says Arancha González, dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po. “We are blinded by the intensity of all the issues put on the table and by Trump’s conviction. But we are not looking at the contradictions. It’s like we are all on an orange drug

Since 1949, job growth under Democratic presidencies has been more than twice as large as that during Republican administrations (2.47% to 1.07%). Excluding public sector jobs, the advantage is even greater (2.55% to 0.97%). Other key averages reveal a similar distinction during this period: Real business investment growth advanced 6.58% under Democratic presidents and 2.98% under their Republican counterparts; real personal income — excluding government transfers — increased 2.66% and real economic growth per capita (net domestic product) advanced 2.6% under Democratic chief executives, but only by 1.41% and 1.28%, respectively, under Republican leaders. Inflation has also been much more modest under Democratic presidents (2.91% compared to 3.28% under their Republican counterparts), with an even more decided advantage when volatile energy and food markets are excluded (2.87% compared to 3.59%).

Of the 11 U.S. recessions we’ve endured over the past 75 years, 10 began in Republican presidential administrations; only Jimmy Carter — embracing Republican-style fiscal, monetary and regulatory policy much more completely than any other recent Democratic president — presided over a “Democratic” recession. The two “double-dip” recessions of 1980 and 1981-82, straddling the late Carter and early Reagan administrations, are almost indistinguishable in their policy origins.

We are reminded consistently by pundits, journalists and scholars that tax cuts represent what may be our most readily available and useful tool for economic stimulus. Flat, or flatter, taxes, we are told, are the only means to the achievement of tax simplicity and tax compliance.

Even on the question of who tends to favor lower or higher taxes, it is easy to be deceived. When income taxes are reduced (at the federal and state level) and the entire tax code is rendered less progressive as a result, two things happen almost automatically: other much more regressive taxes rise to fill the vacuum created by universally demanded (if not readily acknowledged) public services and consumer demand falters as higher taxes begin to fall on those compelled to spend all that they earn. Overall economic activity and prospective revenue growth, in turn, begin to stagnate, triggering a vicious cycle of tax rate increases (among the untouched regressive tax vehicles), just to maintain public services and economic activity.

Republican politicians have stumbled upon a remarkably effective political strategy: preach tax cuts as the be-all and end-all of successful economic policy; ignore the ways in which federal income tax cuts often lead to increased tolls, fees and property, sales, and excise tax increases; relinquish all but rhetorical opposition to the federal deficits created by federal tax cuts; and cap it off by hinting repeatedly that more could be done — allegedly to great effect — by reducing government spending directed at “undeserving” and “unambitious” poor people of color.

Republican political leaders have their cake and eat it too, riding a diffuse anti-tax sentiment to political victory. Actual results in this game don’t often matter, at least as long as their Democratic opponents succeed in staving off the most precipitous decline with safety nets and the preservation of some progressive fiscal policy elements.

Begun quietly with what Republican activist and Wall Street Journal editor Jude Wanniski called the “Two Santa Claus Theory” — under which Republicans could counter the Democratic social spending Santa Claus with their own tax-cutting Kris Kringle — this approach promised political “success” even amid policy failure, for opponents could be pinned with the deficits and damage it produced.

Exploiting normal psychological tendencies to imagine that “more money in my pocket” and “less money in theirs” simply must be good policy, the widespread ignorance of actual public spending and significant intergovernmental fiscal policies (where federal change forces state and local change, or vice versa), and the compelling notion that personal economic opportunity or success must be derived from personal talent and initiative (rather than significant public policy reform), the “Two Santa Claus” strategy has buoyed a Republican Party that has consistently delivered sub-par results.

Coping with things is the prevailing mood in my corner of the universe. As I write this, America has just completed an election in which many people voted primarily for the idea of voting. The prevailing candidate? Less an individual than an avatar of civility and liberalism.

We are a country founded on an idea and not an identity.

Americans have a way of obscuring reality through grand symbolism and none of the accompanying semiotic rigor. As if the facade of democracy can be upheld by not looking too closely at increasingly undemocratic outcomes — our high tolerance for multiculturalism tenuously predicated on everyone struggling equally. The difference between idea and identity is both our saving grace and our downfall. Democracy: watch the gap.

The idea of the American individual, part of the national optimism that fueled the Space Race, is far less prominent than the citizen-consumer. Attaining a degree of celebrity, still a coveted means to financial stability, thrusts one into the category of “celebrity,” where image overtakes personhood.

Lifestyle, like work, is something we can only see in aggregate. Technological gains don’t relieve the pressure for ownership; they merely reinforce it.