At a in dinner in Silicon Valley in 2011, President Barack Obama is reported to have asked Steve Jobs what it would take for Apple to employ Americans in America to make iPhones. With characteristic candour, Mr Jobs replied: “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”

In that one comment he was making three points that President Donald Trump might consider as he wends his curious way between deregulation and protectionism, between slashing taxes to liberate business and a heavy-handed industrial policy.

The first point was that politicians had to stop kidding themselves about bringing manufacturing jobs back to America. Some may return, but never on the scale of the post-second world war years. Brains and busywork have replaced brawn. The vision of the American worker has gone from the great, sinewy He-Men of Thomas Hart Benton’s murals, heaving rocks and pounding metal, to Google programmers and the office-park slackers of Workaholics.