America's Caesar is gambling that the UK will help pick up the tab for his 'beautiful bill'

Will Hutton

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The United States is the strongest and biggest economy on Earth. It produces a quarter of the world's GDP, the same proportion it did 45 years ago. Of the world's top 100 companies, 63 are American. More than half of world trade is financed in dollars. The US is the global leader in science, research and development.

Yet it has elected a president on the pretext that America is weak and needs to be made great again. The US is certainly suffering a cost of living crisis, as wages for average workers have stagnated while inflation has remained high. The high price of food staples such as eggs has become part of an angry national conversation. Social, racial, income and wealth inequalities are chronic and destructive. Profits as a share of GDP have climbed to all-time highs. America's economic strengths are not translating into a sense of collective wellbeing.

Trump's genius has been to exploit this simmering discontent, telling blue-collar workers and good old boys that their complaints are rooted in out-of-control immigration, woke liberals, an army of bureaucrats and a rotten disregard for manufacturing. As the world knows, Maga-ism has become a potent popular rightwing political force - but less well known are the intellectuals and bloggers who have taken rightwing thinking to new extremes, informing Donald Trump’s policies, and without whom it is impossible to understand the political choices of last week’s high risk “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA) - or his successful parallel attacks cowing the media and academia alike.