Miranda Devine: Trump nailed the biggest trade deal in American history and proved everyone wrong – again!

New York Post

7 days ago

When President Trump nailed the biggest deal in history on Sunday with the European Union on trade, you could almost hear the sound of egg splattering all over the faces of experts across the Atlantic.
Economists, Democrats and Never-Trumpers have confidently predicted economic doom and gloom, ever since the self-proclaimed Tariff Man declared April 2 as 'Liberation Day,' fulfilling fulfilling his long-held personal theory that tariffs are key to economic wealth.
Trade war! Recession! Stagflation! Skyrocketing inflation! Stock market crash!
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You name it, they predicted Trump's tariffs would sink the economy.
Trump was defying economic orthodoxy so he just had to be wrong.
But it's turned out that the lofty group-thinkers were wrong, not that most of them will admit it.
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He slapped a preliminary 10% tariff on imports of countries seeking to do business with the US and called it a 'declaration of economic independence.'
(Later, like an 800-pound gorilla, he escalated his threats to include a 145% tariff on China, since reduced and still to be negotiated.)
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says $300 billion revenue will flow in this year from tariffs and Trump expects trillions more to come, which he will use to pay down the debt.
He's also teased the idea of giving Americans back some of their own money next year in the form of checks for $1,000 or two thousand dollars $2,000, likely means-tested, and with any luck spent in America to benefit the economy.
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That's on top of the $5 trillion or $6 trillion of direct investment in America that has been pledged by foreign countries and investors.
Some in the president's inner sanctum call it 'reparations' for years of the US getting 'ripped off' by friends and foes alike.
It's a win-win
Any way you look at it, Trump's revolutionary upending of the world trading system has been a win-win for America.
He has confidence in the might of America and isn't afraid to leverage it to our advantage.
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But even Ursula von der Leyen, the icy European Commission president who schlepped to meet Trump at his majestic Turnberry golf resort on the west coast ofin Scotland, looked happy and relieved coming out of the final grueling 90 minutes of a months-long negotiation Sunday.
She even hugged various members of the US trade delegation as she left, having agreed that Europe would accept 15% import tariffs on most goods, up from almost nothing previously but less than the 30% Trump had threatened.
She also agreed Europe would invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the US and buy $750 billion of American energy products.
After Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had deftly 'set the table,' Trump sealed the deal just before 7 p.m.
Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington. Subscribe here!
Observers inside the trade meetings say the president has an uncanny knack of knowing exactly where the pain threshold of his prey is.
'You have a woman president who's very, very brilliant and very good, very talented at what she does,' Trump told me, heaping praise on his opponent-turned- trade partner, 'Ursula,' minutes after striking the deal, when he sat down for an interview overlooking the Irish Sea for our 'Pod Force One' podcast.
'We were all respectful, but she's very good at what she does and her people are very good and our people are very good. And when you think of it, we were getting nothing in the old days, you know, meaning prior to this. We were getting nothing and now we're getting a lot.'
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'It's going to be good for everybody and I think it's going to pull a big part of the world together too.'
After pulling off one-sided deals with Japan, the UK, Indonesia and the Philippines that favor the United States, the next big fish is China, says Trump.
Bessent was in Stockholm over the weekend grinding through continuing tough negotiations with the Middle Kingdom.
A flock of South Korean trade negotiators descended on Turnberry late Sunday night to bend Lutnick's ear after dinner.
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Bessent and Lutnick's task gets easier with every country that succumbs.
'Outsmarted all of us'
And now even prominent tariff-skeptics like Wall Street economist Torsten Slok, of Apollo Global Management, admit the president might have 'outsmarted all of us.'
That's music to Trump's ears.
Not that he expects much thanks or recognition.
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The story of his two terms as president is that he eliminates crises and scores goals, and everyone moves on to the next complaint.
Thus it was that in a press conference in Scotland to trumpet the EU deal, a journalist asked him if it was just a distraction from the Epstein scandal.
The reporter asked, 'Mr. President, was part of the rush to get this deal done to knock the Jeffrey Epstein story' out of the headlines?
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'Oh, you gotta be kidding with that,' Trump said.
Despite being sabotaged with the Russia hoax — 'a coup, a failed coup,' Trump calls it — for the first two years of his first term and then ambushed by COVID at the end, Trump achieved a lot.
He closed the border, defeated ISIS, corralled North Korea, impoverishing Iran through sanctions, presided over tax cuts, economic growth, the creation of 1.2 million manufacturing and construction jobs, historic low unemployment rates for black and Hispanic workers, and achieved the historic Abraham Accords with their promise of future peace in the Middle East.
He withdrew from the Paris climate scam, unleashed US energy production, appointed three Supreme Court justices, more than any president since Herbert Hoover.
But he got very little credit for any of it, and then Joe Biden came in and worked to unwind it all.
He figures the same thing will happen this term.
'And by the way, I get no credit for it,' says Trump on the topic of leveraging peace through trade in Cambodia-Thailand, Rwanda- Congo and India-Pakistan.
'They'll give the Nobel Prize to somebody that wrote a book about Donald Trump and analyzed his mind perfectly,' he says wryly.
Trump admits to feeling 'a little bit' angry now about the sabotage of his first term by 'the ringleader' Barack Obama and his minions, who have been referred by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation over their scheme to falsely frame Trump as an agent of Vladimir Putin.
'But in the end, we won'
But he doesn't agree the Russia hoax wrecked his first term.
'We had a great first term,' he told me.
'But it certainly made it less comfortable and you know it was false, you know it was all bullshit. It was absolutely disgusting.'
'But you have to explain that to other people. But in the end, they got it. They got it and we won . . . everything.'
'We won every swing state. We won the popular vote. We won the Electoral College by a lot . . .'
'The people understood it and the people understand it now.'
Like the Boy who Cried Wolf, the Dems and Never-Trumpers went too far, and now everyone sees them for what they are. Liars. Cheats. Traitors. Pathetic worms.
'Lowlifes,' says Trump.
'These are losers and you know, I've been beating them for 10 years. You know how many times they were after me for so many different things? And when you think of it, I've been beating them for 10 years.'
Victory is its own reward.