NOT untypically, Donald Trump found himself in trouble yesterday. The US President, on a five-day tour of Asia, was in Japan to talk with its Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. For a photocall, the two men fed the koi carp at Tokyo’s Akasaka palace. Images showed Trump sprinkling a couple of spoonfuls for the fish before seeming to lose patience and emptying the rest of his box into the pond in a oner.

The brattish manbaby would, wouldn’t he? No respect for other cultures. No awareness of the damage he does to America’s reputation. The Independent’s headline was furious: “Donald Trump tramples over fish-feeding ritual by chucking entire box into Tokyo palace koi carp pond – the US president bulldozed through the symbolic act… while… Shinzo Abe looks on awkwardly.” “Trump shows host Shinzo Abe how to feed fish,” sneered the South China Morning Post. “Trump feeds fish, winds up pouring entire box of food into koi pond,” said CNN. Twitter went ballistic, as Twitter does.

Now, loathe as I am to stick up for Mr Trump, who is indeed a brattish manbaby with no respect for other cultures and who is doing tremendous damage to America’s reputation, that wasn’t actually what happened. It was Mr Abe who first dumped his box of fish food into the pond – Mr Trump merely followed his host’s lead, as, I suspect, most of us would. So this was a case of what the President likes to call “fake news”.

This sparks a few thoughts. The first is that Mr Trump is quite enough of a wrecking ball without the rest of us accusing him of things he hasn’t done. The second is that this incident displays a worrying mainstream willingness to sink to the level of those shamelessly fact-free media outlets that have sprung up on the fringes of left and right in recent years. The third is that an understanding of nuance, a willingness to look at both sides of every argument, and a rigorous commitment to truth are essential in healthy societies, yet are being too willingly sacrificed by too many of us who should know better. This is perhaps understandable as we fight back against what is in effect a global culture war on liberalism – the first casualty of war is truth, and all that – but it doesn’t make it excusable, or wise.

Mr Trump is an extreme example of someone who rarely deserves the benefit of the doubt, who almost always lives down to expectations, and who therefore tests our principled adherence to central Western values. But it’s not just Mr Trump, is it? In this age of rage, we pronounce guilt without requiring evidence, our assumptions and prejudices race ahead of the debate, we refuse to allow that the other side might occasionally have a point, and we rarely separate the man or woman from the ball – we take both ball and person out in one scything, Souness-like lunge. Any newspaper columnist will tell you a loosely-worded headline is enough to spark an onslaught of social media attacks on both your argument and parentage, and that we have become a bit weary of typing the response: “you haven’t actually read the piece, have you?”.

When it comes to unpopularity, the ideological equivalent of Donald Trump is capitalism. The political and economic generator that powered the West to its long global dominance (and that is now powering the Chinese challenge to that hegemony) is in the stocks, being pelted with rotten fruit and veg and worse, cat-called and derided, abandoned by many who once claimed to be its friend. Every bit of news about bumper executive pay, or impressive company profits, or machinations on the financial markets, is immediately weaponised by capitalism’s enemies, its inherent wrongness taken as read by many who would not regard themselves as politically extreme. This, too, is understandable: a decade on, the legacy of the financial crash continues to bite; the sins of the City feel unaddressed and unpaid for; the wealth gap remains stratospheric and seems impossible to reduce.

The emergence of the “Paradise Papers” at the weekend is the latest stinking cabbage to smash capitalism full in the face. The leak of 13.4 million files revealing the offshore tax activities of the world’s super-rich looks merely to confirm suspicions that the system is designed to maximise the wealth of those with the most, who set the rules and then game them. There is of course plenty in the papers to turn the stomach, and the climate into which they have arrived is almost perfectly toxic: a world run by shark-eyed men who have taken all the money and goosed their secretaries as they did so.

But without dismissing the most heinous financial offences, there are shades of grey, and we should not ignore them. The Queen, who is the first monarch in history to pay taxes voluntarily, is criticised because the Duchy of Lancaster, which manages her private estate, invested around £10m offshore, using funds in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. This is doubtless not a great look, and will surely be rectified, but only an idiot or someone with an ulterior motive would claim the Queen deliberately set out to defraud the Exchequer – step forward Jeremy Corbyn, a lifelong republican, who yesterday made it clear he thinks she should publicly apologise. There are others, particularly those who live in corrupt countries, who use offshore to protect their wealth from criminal attacks and unstable governments. In the past few years there has been a global push for transparency, making it much harder to use offshore to hide ill-gotten gains or avoid taxes.

For all its flaws, capitalism remains the best system available to us. Unemployment is at its lowest level since 1975. Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, said at the weekend that were it not for the uncertainties surrounding Brexit, the UK economy would be “booming”, which would go some way to addressing the squeeze on incomes. Billions have been lifted from poverty in recent decades thanks to globalisation and free markets.

Great reforms are certainly needed to tackle imbalances, close loopholes and restore public trust, but the idea that a sweeping programme of nationalisation, major tax hikes and an overweening state will improve our lot is for the birds. The election of Mr Trump doesn’t mean America, the source of so much global good, should be abolished, Likewise, we should attempt to fix capitalism, not kill it.