SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
Tenderly cuddling a huge poster detailing the tariff vengeance he was about to unleash, the president of the United States presented himself quietly as the master of an event that would “forever be remembered as the day British industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America rich once”!
Ah, yes. Wealth. The thing that gets Trump’s warm brain thumping.
Everybody’s gotta spend!
Except, obviously, his very great friend Vlad Putin, whose Mother Russia, suddenly, was about the only country on Earth spared Trump’s volley of punishing tariffs.
Why, even Australia’s Heard and McDonald islands shivering down there towards Antarctica, inhabited only by penguins and seals, were named on Trump’s great big list of trading nations to be handed a flogging.
The White House’s Gen Z press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, attempted to stretch credulity to breaking point by arguing that Russia’s failure to make an appearance was because US sanctions on Putin’s war-waging country already “preclude any meaningful trade”.
Depends on how you define meaningful, really.
Russian trade with the US was worth$ US3.5 billion ($ 5.55 billion ) last year, which was more than all of Australia’s sales of beef to America, for instance.
Yes, and it’s rather more than the nothing exported from Heard or McDonald islands, or even poor little Norfolk Island, which mysteriously made it to the hit list, too.
” We charge 2.8 per cent for so many things that other countries are charging 200 per cent, 300 per cent and 400 per cent for”, moaned poor Donald, plucking figures from the sky.
The world’s heart bleeds for him.
But what was that about Wilde and cynics?
If he had, he would have come across the most wonderfully witty and accurate lines ever written about braggarts who wouldn’t understand the worth of anything beyond a balance sheet if they were to trip over it.
One of the characters, Cecil Graham, asks “what is a cynic”?
Lord Darlington responds:” A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”.
