by David Frum
Through the 2016 campaign, Trump had condoned political violence by his supporters against protesters in their midst: “You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”44
Back then, however, the cause was purely personal: his own election, unconnected to any larger movement in American society or culture. As Trump’s personal popularity sagged, he sought larger and bigger forces to sustain him. Speaking to police officers in Long Island, Trump endorsed intentional police brutality against members of Salvadoran gangs, whom he condemned as “animals.”
They kidnap. They extort. They rape and they rob. They stomp on their victims. They beat them with clubs, they slash them with machetes, and they stab them with knives. They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields. They’re animals.45
When dealing with such subhumans, the police should dispense with legal niceties, urged the president.
When you see . . . these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough, and I said, “Please don’t be too nice.” Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over, like, don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody, don’t hit their head, I said, “You can take the hand away, OK?”46
Those remarks drew what was described as “wild applause” from the police attending.47 And even though the president’s words were promptly repudiated by senior police leaders across the nation, those who shared a national origin or a skin tone or a last name with the people Trump regarded as “animals” must wonder: Has the president of the United States authorized such actions against me as well?
The American economic system might feel “rigged” against Trump supporters. But the American political system of 2016 had in important ways been rigged in Trump’s favor. Yet as Trump and his supporters looked to the future, how secure could they feel? Their hold on the electorate was weak. Foreign governments’ hold over them was possibly very strong. Maybe the answer—the only answer—was not to rig less, but to rig much more.
Chapter 8
America Alone
“America First doesn’t mean America alone.” Gary Cohn and H. R. McMaster, President Trump’s highest-ranking economic and national security aides, offered that assurance in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal at the end of May 2017.1 They were too sanguine. Month by month through the Trump presidency, the United States found itself more isolated from its former friends and allies.
Through the spring and summer of 2017, President Trump escalated his rhetoric against North Korea. The escalation culminated in a bloodcurdling interview with Reuters on April 27. “There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.”2 “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen,” he told television cameras in the Cabinet Room on August 9.3 “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” Trump told the United Nations General Assembly on September 19.4
Yet even as he pushed toward conflict, Trump himself was gratuitously threatening and insulting the single country whose cooperation would seem most obviously necessary to any tough policy on North Korea: South Korea. It would be South Korea that would do most of the fighting, most of the dying, most of the suffering, and most of the paying in the “major, major conflict” Trump spoke of so lightly. And yet in the very same Reuters interview in which Trump menaced North Korea, he embarked on an angry rampage against the South.
He announced intentions to cancel the US–South Korea Free Trade Agreement. “It’s unacceptable. It’s a horrible deal made by Hillary. It’s a horrible deal. And we’re going to renegotiate that deal, or terminate it.” He demanded an additional $1 billion payment from South Korea for a missile defense deployment already negotiated, reneging on a deal stipulating that the United States would provide the weapon system if South Korea provided the land.
I said, “Why are we paying? Why are we paying a billion dollars? We’re protecting. Why are we paying a billion dollars?” So I informed South Korea it would be appropriate if they paid. Nobody’s going to do that. Why are we paying a billion dollars? It’s a billion-dollar system. It’s phenomenal. It’s the most incredible equipment you’ve ever seen—shoots missiles right out of the sky. And it protects them and I want to protect them. We’re going to protect them. But they should pay for that, and they understand that.
It should surprise nobody that neither of these complaints had much truth to it. South Korea is threatened less by North Korean missiles than by the thousands of North Korean artillery tubes aimed at Seoul. Military experts believe the North could reduce the South’s capital to rubble within twenty-four hours. The Terminal High-Altitude Aerial Defense (THAAD) system over which Trump haggled in public with South Korea is positioned south of Seoul, primarily to protect US bases in the Korean Peninsula. Hillary Clinton had little to do with the US–South Korea Free Trade Agreement. A framework inherited from the George W. Bush administration was revised in 2009 and 2010 by President Obama’s trade negotiators to provide more protection for the US automobile industry against Korean imports.
What happened next should also surprise nobody: the South Korean presidential election ten days after the Reuters interview was decisively won by the more US-skeptical candidate—who promptly suspended deployment of the THAAD system for which Trump had tried to shake his country down.
Only two weeks before, the Trump administration had stumbled into a farcical embarrassment. Interviewed on Fox Business on April 12, 2017, Trump had announced that he was sending “an armada, very powerful” into Korean waters to warn the North against making trouble. Six days later, the US Navy posted online a photograph of the fleet in question—the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson and four other warships—3,500 miles away and heading in the opposite direction: southwestward through the Sunda Strait into the Indian Ocean. The most conservative and America friendly of the three Korean presidential candidates, Hong Joon-pyo, ventilated the fiercest anger against his false-tongued ally: “What Mr. Trump said was very important for the national security of South Korea. If that was a lie, then during Trump’s term, South Korea will not trust whatever Trump says.”5 Trump had already irritated Koreans by credulously repeating to the Wall Street Journal the chauvinist claim by China’s president that “Korea actually used to be a part of China.”6 For reasons nobody in Korea could discern—and nobody in the United States either—President Trump seemed intent on belittling, deceiving, and making public fools of them. But if they could not guess his motives, they could still resent his treatment. At the end of President Obama’s term, according to the Pew survey, 88 percent of South Koreans expressed confidence that the US president would do the right thing in world affairs. In June 2017, only 17 percent of South Koreans expressed such confidence in President Trump.7
South Korea reacted more angrily than many other allied countries, but not radically so. Among citizens of other Asia-Pacific allies, 78 percent of Japanese had expressed confidence in Obama; only 24 percent in Trump. Eighty-four percent of Australians trusted Obama; only 29 percent Trump. (That latter number might have been even worse for Trump if the poll had been conducted after the August 3, 2017, leak of a January telephone transcript in which Trump told Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull that he found it more “pleasant” to talk to Vladimir Putin than to the leader of America’s truest and most militarily capable Asia-Pacific ally.8)
Only in the Philippines did a majority, 69 percent, trust Trump—and even there, a higher percentage (94 percent) had trusted Obama.
America’s southern neighbors have long mistrusted the power of the United States. “Poor Mexico! So far from God, so close to the United States,” goes the saying us
ually attributed to the Mexican ruler Porfirio Díaz. In 2013, 38 percent of adult Mexicans described US power as a potential threat to their country; in the first year of the Trump presidency, that number vaulted to 61 percent.9
The European numbers looked even more dismal. In a span of months, trust in the US president to do the right thing dropped by forty-three points in Italy, fifty-seven points in the United Kingdom, seventy points in France, and seventy-five points in Germany.
The Trump-Germany relationship started bad, and got worse. November 9 is the most portentous date in the German calendar: the day the kaiser abdicated in 1918, of Kristallnacht in 1938, and of the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989. On that morning in 2016, the German government awoke to the news that its American partners and protectors had elected to the presidency an authoritarian nationalist of an all-too-familiar stamp. German chancellor Angela Merkel released as faint and hedged a message of congratulation to President-Elect Donald Trump as one ally has perhaps ever offered another:
Germany and America are bound by common values—democracy, freedom, as well as respect for the rule of law and the dignity of each and every person, regardless of their origin, skin color, creed, gender, sexual orientation, or political views. It is based on these values that I wish to offer close cooperation, both with me personally and between our countries’ governments.10
Note two things about this message: its offer of cooperation is conditional, and Germany will be the judge of whether the conditions have been met.
America’s allies around the world always have preferences in US elections. In 2004, Germany’s Gerhard Schröder and France’s Jacques Chirac did not conceal their hope that George W. Bush would lose to John F. Kerry. In 2012, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu visibly yearned to see the back of Barack Obama. Still, once it’s all over, allies disappointed in the result swallow their chagrin and get down to business.
The year 2016 was different.
Donald Trump made clear from the very start that there was no doing business with the vaunted dealmaker. He demanded everything; he offered nothing. “Trump was upset at the notion that allies’ interests should be taken into account.”11 So Tracy Wilkinson and Brian Bennett reported in the Los Angeles Times in July 2017 about Trump’s review of the Iran nuclear deal. The phrase could be applied to almost any foreign policy matter. Foreign leaders quickly perceived that Trump could easily be manipulated, but never reasoned with.
On June 5, 2017, four American Arab allies—Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—abruptly cut diplomatic ties with a fifth, Qatar. The Saudi bloc accused Qatar of support for terrorism. They suspended Qatar’s overflight rights and restricted trade and travel. Iranian president Hassan Rouhani seized the opportunity to wedge apart the pro-American Gulf states, saying, “Iran’s airspace, sea, and ground transport links will always be open to Qatar, our brotherly and neighbor country.”12 Qatar’s regional ally Turkey reinforced its troop presence in the peninsular emirate.
US intelligence services soon confirmed that Qatar had been the victim of a disinformation campaign by the United Arab Emirates. Karen DeYoung and Ellen Nakashima reported in the Washington Post on July 16, 2017:
The United Arab Emirates orchestrated the hacking of Qatari government news and social media sites in order to post incendiary false quotes attributed to Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, in late May that sparked the ongoing upheaval between Qatar and its neighbors, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
Officials became aware last week that newly analyzed information gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed that on May 23, senior members of the UAE government discussed the plan and its implementation. The officials said it remains unclear whether the UAE carried out the hacks itself or contracted to have them done.13
Given Qatar’s importance to Western regional strategy—it houses the largest American base in the Gulf, from which the Pentagon flies anti-ISIS air strikes—the Qatar matter called for utmost delicacy. Only . . . his head turned by Saudi flattery and gifts, President Trump had already taken a vehement public stand against Qatar.
“During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar—look!” he tweeted at 8:06 a.m. on June 6, 2017. At 9:36 Trump posted, “So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding . . .” adding at 9:44, “. . . extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!”
As Marc Champion and Marek Strzelecki together reported for Bloomberg News on July 19:
United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash confirmed this week that Trump’s “very, very successful” trip to the Gulf in May had helped trigger the decision by his country—together with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Bahrain—to launch a political and economic assault on Qatar.14
President Trump may well not have known Qatar’s importance to America’s regional military strategy. He surely did know that Qatar’s national airline had once been a tenant in New York’s Trump Tower, and that it had let the lease lapse in 2014. Worse, Qatar had unwisely held its December 6, 2016, national day celebration in Washington in the National Portrait Gallery. By contrast, Qatar’s rival Bahrain had correctly sited its December 7, 2016, national day celebration in Trump’s Washington, DC, hotel. Lobbyists for Saudi Arabia had spent $270,000 in the hotel between October 2016 and March 2017.15 Whatever the motive, the result badly damaged the US strategic position—and intensified the world’s distrust of America’s undisciplined and self-dealing president.
The increasingly authoritarian leaders of Poland likewise exploited Trump’s inattention and indifference. In chapter 7, I described Trump’s strange indulgence of that government’s crackdown on press freedoms during his visit to Warsaw. After Trump departed, the governing party seems to have interpreted his praise for Poland as “safe, strong, and free,” as permission for another outrage, this time against Poland’s courts.16 The government crammed through two houses of parliament a bill summarily retiring the entire Polish Supreme Court and empowering the governing party’s justice minister to name all their successors. Only by mobilizing demonstrations larger than anything since the end of communist rule in 1989 did the liberal opposition compel Poland’s president to veto his own party’s legislation.
The Trump presidency empowered dictators worldwide, by dimming American ideals and by hobbling American power. In the first six months of 2017, the government of Vietnam arrested fifteen people for antistate activities, more than in any year since 2011. Matthew Tostevin reported for Reuters:
Every activist and analyst that Reuters interviewed mentioned a perceived shift in U.S. priorities under Trump as a new factor in reducing pressure on Vietnam’s government.
Not only was Washington paying less attention to the region or to human rights, but Trump gave Vietnam less reason to show willingness to address human rights issues when he dropped the [Trans Pacific Partnership] trade deal, in the name of an “America First” policy.17
No foreign leader manipulated Trump more adeptly than Vladimir Putin. “Why should I tell Putin what to do?” Trump had demanded at a July 27, 2016, press conference.18 Yet it often seemed that Putin had found a way to tell Trump what to do.
Trump’s deference to Putin reverberated through the western alliance. Countries that relied on the United States to protect them from Russia worried that they could rely on America no longer. The leaders of the European allies knew early about Donald Trump’s long and disreputable financial connections to Russia. The British had direct access to the US collection of Russians cackling and chortling over their successful penetration of the American election system. The French and Germans and Poles had sources of their own. All could recognize in Donald Trump something much graver than a merely difficult partner. Trump seemed intent on a diplomatic revolution. At the co
re of this revolution: a presidentially led assault on the cohesion of the European Union.
George W. Bush observed in 2003, “Since the end of World War II, the United States has strongly supported European unity as the best path to European peace and prosperity.”19 That was a precisely accurate statement. From Truman through Obama, America’s European policy has been strikingly consistent: the United States has supported a democratic and united Europe joined to Canada and the United States by NATO.
“We recognize we will benefit more from a strong and equal partner than from a weak one.”20 Those words happen to have been pronounced by Bill Clinton. They could as easily have appeared in a speech by any of his predecessors or successors. Until Trump. Trump has more than once dismissed NATO as “obsolete.” In an interview at the time of the Republican convention, he repeatedly and forcefully expressed uncertainty about whether, as president, he would honor America’s NATO obligations to small countries threatened by Russia.21 He cheered Britain’s exit from the European Union. Trump and his chief campaign strategist, Steve Bannon, made common cause with populist nationalists working to end the European Union outright. President-Elect Trump received Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party, before he met British Prime Minister Theresa May. Before Bannon joined the Trump campaign, he promoted the Dutch politician Geert Wilders and France’s Marine Le Pen on his Breitbart.com website. Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, claimed to have been granted a call with President-Elect Trump in November before the president of France.
As president, Trump sharpened his hostility to the European allies. Reuters reported in February on an encounter with Steve Bannon that persuaded Peter Wittig, Germany’s ambassador to the United States, to prepare for a policy of “hostility towards the EU.”22 Ambassador Wittig proved prescient.