In fact he has already done so. Mr Trump has thrown a few gauntlets at the feet of corporate executives, and won. When General Motors announces a plan to invest $1bn in US jobs, as it did in the days before the inauguration, the sentiment can only rise among swing voters that Mr Trump must be right.

Ditto when the US’s European allies begin reprioritising budgets to bring defence expenditures to 2 per cent of GDP. In the wake of Mr Trump’s election, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, promised to raise budgets. Formerly truculent Lithuania promised to bring its defence expenditures up to the Nato-standard 2 per cent of GDP by 2018, two years earlier than promised.