‘Lettuce pray for America, the place the Trump commerce warfare will make inexperienced veg a luxurious’

This is what happens when you let Liz Truss visit America.

Not five minutes after the presidential inauguration where she was pictured in a MAGA cap in Washington DC, there is a trillion dollar trade war and warnings the world’s biggest economy is about to go into a freefall not seen since the Great Depression.

Thanks to tariffs on the farmers of Mexico, lettuces are about to become luxury items, available only to billionaires or very determined satirists. Because of taxes on Canadian oil, prices for petrol and heating will soar by the end of the week in a country only ever a hair’s breadth from armed insurrection. And the only US industry about to go into overdrive is the hot air emanating from the White House about how this is all someone else’s fault.

It might be possible to feel sorry for America, if this hadn’t already just happened to one of its close allies by someone with very similar ideas and it all ended disastrously. Donald Trump seems to be the only person in the world who doesn’t know that hitching your wagon to Liz Truss is considered the most direct route to economic collapse.

But that’s probably overstating her influence by, ooh, about 74 megatons. It’s more likely that our own dear Liz, former Liberal Democrat of this parish, was herself infected by the neo-conservative ideals of the Republican ultra-loons who, simultaneously, were prepping Donald for his return to power. The political ideology that says business knows best, asset-strip whatever isn’t nailed down and let dog eat dog is the only tune tinkling in those two tiny brains.

Those ideas would be disastrous in any arena outside the Coliseum of Ancient Rome, but when implemented by people with the intellectual heft of a rabid pigeon the only route an economy will take is straight down.

Britain’s finances steadied after Truss departed Downing Street, and her chancellor Kwasn’t My Fault Kwarteng ran away. But Liz stayed in her nosedive, the controls jammed as she tunnels with her skull to the centre of the Earth, threatening to sue anyone who questions her decisions and writing comical op-eds about how she was right all along, and where she still hasn’t understood that she’s the joke.

Yet billionaire deal-maker Trump said at the time: “I think she might be right.” He added: “I like some of the things – you know, it’s inverse. A lot of the time, finance is inverse. I cut taxes very substantially, and we did much more business and she’s done that. I know she’s taken some hits for it actually, which surprises me, but it could be at the end of the day, you do bigger revenues. It’s going to be very interesting.”

That same financial genius has been in office for 15 days, and has created devastation at a speed and scale Truss could only dream of. He’s offered to fire 2m people, blamed the mentally-ill for a plane crash that killed 67, threatened to invade several countries, and violated about 74 separate parts of the US constitution. This week, he’s whacking Mexico, Canada and China with trade tariffs in an effort to stop those countries exporting immigrants, drugs, and in the case of Canada, wilful un-Americanness.

To Trump, it makes him look like the biggest bully in the playground. What’s $1,000 extra on every household budget, when your houses are made of gold? Except 61% of US oil imports come from Canada, which means the tariffs will ramp up the cost of fuel in a country where people won’t countenance walking to the end of their own driveway. And this time of year, the fruit and veg flood in from the south, which means that, ironically, in a few months Trump will be one of the few people in America who can still afford to buy a lettuce and see how long it lasts.

Trump was once an entertaining whacko with a toddler’s grip on power. Now he’s taken a leaf out of Liz’s book, and is acting before he has a Cabinet or any lawsuits that might stop him. Truss managed 49 days before her party and the markets turned on her after knocking about £30bn off GDP. Trump has been in power for just 30% of that time, and has arguably just spaffed a trillion dollars up the wall. It’s like he saw what happened to her, and thought, yeah, like that, but more.

The question is: why?

All right, most Americans prefer doughnuts to avocados anyway. But in a land where the car is king, even a single cent rise at the pumps gets people reaching for their right to bear arms. And imposing tariffs requires thousands of extra civil servants to administrate them, and hang on he just fired millions of them.

Trump is banking on this trade war being short and sweet. That other economies will suffer more, and sooner, so they’ll roll over and prices will fall and he’ll take the credit. And if it was just trade, that might work. But in Mexico it’s a war against drug cartels, and if the US government can’t stop them crossing into Texas it’s unlikely Mexico would do any better. In China it’s about cheap labour, which he can do nothing to change, and in Canada he’s just trolling the Mounties at this point.

What this is about is disruption, and the idea that if you upend a Monopoly board it gives you chance to snaffle some cash without anyone noticing. Trump’s orders to turn off the foreign aid taps have closed soup kitchens in Sudan that fed 800,000 people; Rohingyan refugees have been kicked out of hospitals and denied medication; 1,700 Afghani women who worked for US aid programmes have been fired and are at the mercy of the Taliban; and malaria jabs for children have ceased, meaning there will be thousands of unnecessary deaths for years to come.

As Brexit, wars, and Vladimir Putin have proved, in chaos there is money to be made. You can bet your moral compass that Trump’s money, his family money, and his friend’s money, will be increased by the turbulence, which again puts him ahead of Truss. She lost two jobs, and seems destined to see out her career with I’m A Celebrity and Instagram endorsements. He’s already made $100m with a meme coin, what would he want a healthy dollar for?

The answer: not much, unless he wants to retain public support. The fact he’s risking it all on tariffs that might hurt him and his country shows how little he cares for American opinion. But then, unlike Liz, a second-term president cannot ask for votes to help him hold on to power. But a toddler who holds the purse strings no longer needs your permission.