Buckle up as Captain Trump seizes the controls

Tokyo

LIKE someone who, knowing only the rudiments of flying, stumbles into the cockpit of a sophisticated airliner and then tries to change its course, Donald Trump risks putting the "plane" into a stall and possibly a catastrophic crash as he pushes and pulls indiscriminately on controls. The US president's skills in this regard are limited to those needed to pilot "small aircraft" (hotels, in his case). Yet he presumes to be able to cope with the extremely complex matter of managing the global economy - trade policy, currency management and monetary policy, to name but three aspects. Since we are all passengers on his flight (the US economy is, after all, by far the world's biggest and most powerful), we should be very nervous, clutching our seat arms and hoping against hope that the co-pilots are more skillful and can edge or push their way into the pilot's seat.

The global economy's trade engines were already throttling back even before self-styled Captain Trump took the pilot's seat and seized the controls, seemingly without consulting the flight engineer, navigator or co-pilot before take-off.