Spectator Editorial

President Donald Trump will enter an election year with the threat of impeachment still hanging over him. Yet in most respects his administration is in a far better position than his critics could have imagined when he took office nearly three years ago. Economic growth, while in retreat in recent months, remains ahead of that of other developed countries. Stock markets, which Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said might ‘never recover’ from Trump’s election, are at near-record highs. Where Trump’s opponents feared that his bellicose language would spark a nuclear conflict in North Korea, he defused the situation. His approach to foreign policy may be incoherent, but it hasn’t yet proven to be disastrous.

That the so-called Extinction Rebellion decided to spray Wall Street’s ‘Charging Bull’ statue with fake blood says it all. The protest group, which originated in Britain but whose protests have spread to New York, Washington and Chicago, is fundamentally an anti-capitalist movement. It is merely the latest incarnation of the antiglobalization and Occupy movements. While those groups gained little traction with the general public, Extinction Rebellion has discovered that by mixing up its demands with concern for the environment, it can win support — or at least a passing kind of support — from a much wider band of the population.