Because it wasn’t profane or even vivid, the most telling statement Donald Trump has made since leaving office didn’t hold the world’s attention. Asked in a Fox News interview last summer whether he would defend Taiwan with force, he said the island, which makes a fortune from semiconductors, “took our business”.
A non sequitur? Perhaps. A vulgar thing to mention given the life and death stakes? That too. But what an insight into a mind. If it were film dialogue, we’d salute the writing: the respect for the “show, don’t tell” rule of characterisation.
Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, is, to a degree that even his closest observers struggle to fathom, transactional. And not in a shrewd way. He inhabits a world before David Ricardo, if not before Adam Smith, in which wealth is understood as a cake that nations compete for a cut of. More for thee means less for me.