America Last. The Economist hates you – and Donald Trump.

By Bruce Bawer

I don’t give a lot of thought to the Economist, the weekly British-American news-magazine, except when I’m at an airport. At airports the damn thing is ubiquitous. It’s prominently displayed on racks at every bookstore, every newspaper stand, every 7-Eleven. The very sight sets my teeth on edge. Other major publications may tick me off, but the Economist is in a category all its own. First, virtually alone among leading contemporary periodicals, it omits all bylines. Second, its contents are all written in the same impersonal house style, in a mid–Atlantic English that’s rather closer to British than to American. These two attributes combine to convey a maddeningly impersonal and faintly Oxbridgean authoritativeness, with every article coming off like an ex cathedra pronouncement.

Ideologically, the Economist is consistent. It cares about two things: open borders and free trade. Hence it hates Donald Trump, who’s into secure borders and fair trade. A January 9 article under the heading “Deportation fixation” made one thing clear: the folks at the Economist are far angrier about Trump’s determination to deport criminal illegals than about the fact that the Biden White House systematically imported them, housed them, fed them, and placed their well-being above that of American citizens.

And since Trump’s inaugural, the Economist has repeatedly scolded him and his supporters. On January 21, for example, a piece at its website urged readers to take their cues about Trump not from the people of China, India, and Brazil – who like him – but from veteran U.S. diplomats who are quitting now that Trump’s in charge. “Trump loyalists,” the Economist predicted, “will cheer such exits, for they scorn the State Department as a treasonous, left-wing, anti-American ‘deep state.’” Correctamundo. Three cheers for all those resignations. (Note, by the way, the scare quotes around “deep state.”) For the Economist, of course, State Department veterans are by definition fonts of wisdom and virtue. Ha! I’ve met these people. Most are fools who’ve shaped policy for decades with little regard for the wishes of the American people. Hilariously, the Economist urges us not to pigeonhole them as leftists since they can simultaneously admire Kissinger’s “interests-led approach to foreign policy” and Carter’s emphasis on “human rights.” Can the Economist be unaware that MAGA voters tend to deplore both Kissinger and Carter – and for good reasons? The same article faulted Trump for failing to front-burner the campaigns against Ebola and AIDS in Africa – but had nothing to say about Trump’s readiness to help newly homeless Americans in Maui, L.A., and western North Carolina whom the Biden White House ignored while sending billions to Ukraine.

Also on January 21, the Economist posted a piece scoffing at Trump’s characterization of the influx of illegal immigrants at the southern border as an “invasion” – and yes, that word, too, was put in mocking scare quotes. It can’t be an invasion, wrote the Economist, because “encounters at the border are the lowest they have been in four years.” Yes, in Biden’s closing days the invasion was curbed somewhat – but this came after, yes, four years of refusal by Biden’s puppeteers to resist a massive influx of criminal foreigners. Again, the Economist evinced no concern about Americans – even as it deplored the “inconvenience” done to immigrants, legal or illegal, by Trump’s new policies. These policies, the Economist contended, “will sound eerily familiar to those who remember the travel ban Mr. Trump implemented on mostly Muslim-majority countries.” Yes, a ban on travel from countries that produce America-hating terrorists.

In a January 23 article, “Donald Trump is targeting Mexico like no other country,” the Economist continued to slam Trump for designating drug cartels as terrorist groups and for controlling the border. The former move, you see, “creates new risks for businesses operating in Mexico and migrants passing through it, since most make payments to the gangs for security or transport, even if unwittingly.” What about the millions of Americans at risk of fentanyl poisoning? As for border controls, they pose “difficulties” to legal migrants. What about the four years of difficulties – and worse – posed to Americans by the millions of illegals allowed into the country, flown to various cities, set up in luxury hotels, and showered with taxpayer funds?

Thanks to Trump’s actions, we read, Mexican border cities like Tijuana are now filled with “stranded migrants and Mexican deportees” who are “fodder for criminal gangs.” To repeat: what about innocent Americans who, in their own neighborhoods far from Mexico, have also been fodder for those gangs? Throughout this piece, by the way, the diction was classic Economist: while Trump was possessed by “an impatience to pummel Mexico,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum offered a “measured response” to his aggressiveness, and her government hoped that “reason” would prevail. In short, Sheinbaum, a Communist who’s cozy with the cartels, was depicted as the mature and responsible one. (This article appeared, by the way, before Sheinbaum gave in to Trump’s pressure and promised to send troops to the border.)

Another January 23 piece was an all-out anti-Trump rant: “His second inauguration took place in the Capitol’s Rotunda, the same spot where four years earlier his supporters had punched police officers in the face. The power he used to pardon the Capitol rioters on January 20th was originally designed to bring the nation together: to pardon political opponents, not the president’s supporters (or members of the outgoing president’s family). But that was the convention, not the law, and with Mr. Trump in power, conventions are over.” I assume the parenthetical bit about pardoning relatives was added by an editor to cover Biden’s scandalous last-minute pardons – which, needless to say, put in the shade Trump’s clemency for innocent citizens who’ve been locked up for years for strolling unarmed around the Capitol.

On February 3 came a jeremiad on “Trump’s tariff turbulence,” with the Economist accusing Trump, that “agent of chaos,” of taking North America “to the precipice of a trade war” by using “extreme threats to wrest concessions out of others,” an approach that the Economist described as “a dangerous game” that could result in “corrosive uncertainty for the global economy.” As ever, all that mattered to the Economist was a robust and predictable global economy, even if that robustness and predictability came at the expense of ordinary Americans. The article argued that tariffs on, say, U.S. carmakers with factories in Canada and Mexico “would do serious harm to American manufacturing” – yes, to the companies, if they continue to insist on making cars abroad. The once-affluent Rust Belt folks who were hit hard by massive job exports weren’t even on the Economist’s radar.

One more. On February 4, the Economist mocked MAGA people for seeing “the globalised, America-led world order” of the postwar era as “a racket,” for feeling that Trump’s predecessors had “allowed feckless allies and trade partners to free-ride on American security and steal American jobs,” and for cheering Trump as a “champion” under whom “America will use its strength without embarrassment to secure its interests.” Be warned, argued the Economist: America’s allies will play ball with Trump for only so long. Why? Because they believe in “globalisation.” Because Trump is threatening a Europe “whose strength lies in unity and in rules” – yes, in unity under the thumb of Brussels, and in rules dictated from Brussels. The Economist went on to take the EU’s side against Trump (and Musk) on online censorship – in other words, the hell with the First Amendment, and up with “the European way of life” (as if Brussels–directed censorship were synonymous with “the European way of life”!).

Enough. Enough of lame arguments by an overrated rag whose editors, when confronted by the election of the most popular president in generations – a president who’s actually taking lightning-fast action to fulfill his promises – can only recoil in horror. You’d think that editors who purportedly care about the world’s socioeconomic health would welcome the transition in Washington, D.C., from a regime run by incompetent left-wing radicals to an ebulliently patriotic and pro-business White House awash in energy, competence, and transparency. But no. These are, alas, people who probably still fantasize that Jeb Bush was elected in 2016. To peruse their publication during these magnificent early days of the second Trump presidency is to be accorded a chilling glimpse into the minds of lockstep elites who fully embrace the globalist agenda – and who couldn’t be more breathtakingly indifferent to the welfare of ordinary Americans.

First published in Front Page Magazine