With the world continuing to reel from Donald Trump’s global tariffs – and the markets still in turmoil from the shock of their announcement – it makes sense to look for parallels in US political history to try and better understand the plan.
The law-breaking of the Nixon administration and his eventual resignation may be comparable, as may Eisenhower’s bitter anti-left attacks of McCarthyism in the early 1950s. You could perhaps also compare Trump’s actions to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential directive to intern 120,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were held for years in grim conditions, after Pearl Harbour in 1941.
But the most relevant and most recent comparison is that of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) barely 25 years ago.
