by Mark Austin
TRUMPTOWN
NO ONE SAW it coming. No one. No one, that is, except a rock band called Rage Against The Machine. In 2000, while shooting a video on Wall Street, they forced the New York Stock Exchange to close early. At one point in the finished video, you see an onlooker holding up a sign proclaiming ‘Donald J. Trump for President’. Protest and prescience… quite some performance. In truth, it probably had more to do with the director of the video, Michael Moore.
‘I think it was either Michael Moore’s idea or one of his staffers,’ Rage guitarist Tom Morello told a New York newspaper. ‘It wasn’t a warning, it was just meant to be a joke – pure humour. But it turned out to be Nostradamus-like.’
If it was Moore, a well-known leftwing filmmaker and activist, then hats off to him. But even he can’t have meant it seriously. Not sixteen years before the event. Much later he did predict that Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And he went on the following year to foresee his eventual victory. In a now-celebrated blog he said: ‘This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full-time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, ’cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: “PRESIDENT TRUMP.”’
And, of course, that is exactly what the world is saying: President Trump. And the world is getting used to it. President Trump… it trips off the tongue like you never thought it would.
Michael Moore – whose political bias against Trump is self-evident – may choke when he says those words, but he saw it on the horizon, he saw what was happening in America and elsewhere; he saw the new politics that was unfolding.
Most of the rest of us didn’t. Certainly I didn’t, and neither did others supposedly more in tune than me with what is happening here in the US. Not the media – at least, not the increasingly smug, complacent, centre-left-leaning, liberal progressive, mainstream media – who failed to appreciate what was happening outside their immediate metropolitan elite circles. Not the politicians, and not even the pollsters, whose job it is to know these things.
To all of them, the political events of 2016 came as a terrible shock. Brexit, Trump and the rise of the populist far right in continental Europe were unforeseen, inexplicable and alien. To them, it was as if the world had lost its senses, as if the natural order of things was thrown into tumult, as if prejudice and ignorance was running amok. It was unsettling and it challenged assumptions.
The game had changed. Out was the old politics of left and right. In was a new politics, more complex and more assertive. It was the politics of revolt.
Trump has an innate ability to identify an opportunity and exploit it. He spoke to, persuaded and eventually dazzled parts of America that felt the country was no longer theirs, and who were crying out for someone to speak up on their behalf. Trump was that man. For all his foibles, weaknesses and character flaws, he was the one politician who seemed to care – and he played the part brilliantly.
His timing was ingenious. America was ready for him, and he was ready for America. He had also become a big name. It helped that he had starred in a primetime reality show, The Apprentice, for fourteen seasons, and had given hundreds of interviews. CNN worked out that he had spent more time in front of a camera than even the Hollywood movie actor Ronald Reagan.
So, Trump mastered the media, then manipulated it for his own purposes and ultimately turned it into enemy number one. It was all very clever, insightful and perfectly legitimate as a political calculation, and highlights the great strength of Donald Trump.
Less legitimate – in fact, downright cynical – was his courting of a subset of American voters who remain consumed by racial prejudice. These are not only white supremacists, but also a substantial block of the white working class who fear immigration and harbour resentment against the black and Latin American minorities in America.
How did he do it? Well, partly by questioning the birthplace of America’s first black president, Barack Obama. ‘I’m starting to think that he was not born here,’ he said. There was not a shred of evidence to support Trump’s claims, but it gained traction with a racist minority that he decided were his potential voters. It was deeply cynical, hugely offensive to many, but also highly effective.
And just as effective was his promise to build the wall along the border with Mexico. He played on the fears of many white working people about the growth of immigration. Across the Midwest rust belt of America, in towns where steel and coal jobs were being decimated and livelihoods ruined, he spread the message that immigrants were the problem: You don’t have your jobs because of immigrants. It wasn’t true. Their jobs were gone. No one had them. But again it resonated, it hit home.
Even the Access Hollywood tape – in which he can be heard boasting about how he treats women, and how when you’re a powerful celebrity you can do anything, even ‘grab ’em by the pussy’ – even that didn’t stall his progress to the White House. It was extraordinary.
It was also, of course, as much a vote against Hillary Clinton as it was for Donald Trump. While Trump courted the white working class, Hillary Clinton ignored it. Part of the blame, perhaps, lies indirectly with her husband Bill. The immensely popular former president expanded the appeal of the Democratic Party, and it became the party of choice for the professional classes of America.
Lawyers, teachers and the educated classes began embracing the party of Bill Clinton in large numbers. The Democrats, for so long the natural home for blue-collar workers across America, had changed. Many in the working classes saw this transformation and resented it. It also didn’t help that while Trump made several visits to the Midwest of the US, Hillary made only a few.
For all these reasons, the greatest political earthquake in the history of modern America was triggered.
At the election in 2016, Trump won 63 million votes, and tens of millions of voters continue to support him. No one believed it until it happened. He stunned America, the world – and, by his own admission to colleagues, himself.
Yes, Trump is in the White House. It’s for real. And it’s the single most extraordinary political story of my lifetime. So when the opportunity came to spend a year covering this phenomenon called the ‘Trump presidency’ for Sky News, I leapt at the chance and hotfooted it to Washington DC, where this bizarre, thrilling, crazy, intoxicating, unedifying, depressing, unpredictable drama is being played out on a daily basis.
Every day, almost every hour, seems to bring another remarkable twist or turn in the Trump story. It is a story like no other, and it raises all sorts of questions about how to report it.
Just as there are no rules for President Donald Trump – or no rules that we recognize – so the rules have changed when it comes to covering him. On my several visits to Washington pre-Trump, it always surprised me how deferential journalists were towards presidents, and senior politicians in general. But particularly presidents. There has long been a reverence among reporters for the office of the president, which has always translated to whichever individual happens to be occupying the White House. It is just the way it is. It is a marked contrast to Britain, where, if anything, the general attitude of the press towards politicians, even prime ministers, is one of scepticism, suspicion, sometimes ridicule and often outright contempt.
In America, those who go into politics are genuinely seen as serving the American people and serving the country. In Britain, they are often seen as serving themselves, and in it for the publicity and the expenses. Broadly speaking, Britain is way too disdainful; and America has been way too respectful.
Not anymore. With Trump has come an erosion of the media’s respect for the presidency. In fact, following his sustained attack on many of the country’s mainstream news outlets and his tedious ‘fake news’ retort to anything he disagrees with, it is not so much an erosion as a complete disintegration of respect for the president. It makes for an uncomfortable and often unpleasant relationship. It is tense, demeaning and unedifying. And it is ultimate
ly bad for democracy, and for holding the government to account.
On arriving in Washington DC, in September 2017, I had a problem: how to cover this extraordinary story and this unusual, unpredictable and nonconformist president.
I had noticed the reporting of many mainstream TV correspondents was tinged with a kind of haughty disdain for Trump, which at times turned to outright contempt. Certainly, CNN and MSNBC are openly and unapologetically critical of Trump. They really do have nothing good to say about him. I am stunned by some of the coverage from previously largely impartial media outlets.
There is no question that Trump – with his weird combover, orange complexion, habitual tweeting, glib pronouncements, and strange ways – cuts a vaguely comedic figure as president. But he is also occupying the office of the most powerful leader in the world. Everything he says and does is significant, has consequences and shouldn’t be trivialized or dismissed.
As I flew across the pond, I also thought that he deserved to be treated with the same seriousness and respect as previous presidents. He had won an election, after all. The people of America had decided that Donald J. Trump was the man to represent and lead them around the world, and that was important. Free elections sometimes throw up random and awkward results, but that is the nature of democracy – and the job of a journalist, or at least a correspondent working for an impartial British television news channel, should be to report in good faith and without bias what the president does and says, what it may mean, and what the consequences are likely to be.
Anyway, who’s to say this was an ‘awkward’ or ‘random’ result? As I arrived in Washington, some journalists and columnists were already reporting the Trump presidency as some sort of political ‘freak show’. It is much easier to mock this president than to take him seriously, but trying to be fair is the challenge you have to set yourself every day. My view was that if enough Americans had deemed him a suitable candidate for the White House, why should I sneer?
In London, before flying out, I’d asked John Ryley, the boss of Sky News, how he thought I should go about reporting this strange phenomenon. ‘You must report it as it deserves to be reported,’ he said. ‘And try not to lose the sense of impartiality.’ He said this as if he knew it might be difficult.
So I pitched up in DC with the firm intent to give President Trump the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to find out about his followers and what motivates and drives their support for him, and I wanted to ensure I gave their views a real airing. In short, I wanted to cover President Trump as I would any other American president.
It soon became obvious that this would be impossible. The sheer unrelenting deluge of news from the Trump White House was overwhelming. Almost every week brought a new drama that would provoke a media frenzy for seventy-two hours or so, until, as sure as night follows day, it would be usurped by the next one. And it would be Trump’s reaction to the media reaction to the initial drama that would keep the story rolling frenetically along.
Covering this White House is unremitting, and a bit like trying to drink from a fire hose. You can’t really do it, and no one turns the fire hose off, so in the end you just stand there and get drenched. Trump is a day-to-day, moment-to-moment presence in your working life, and one’s reporting of him becomes instinctive and emotionally driven in a way that I am not sure is terribly useful to the public.
‘You know Trump is a pathological liar,’ a senior correspondent with a top US broadcaster said to me within a few days of my arrival in Washington. ‘He tells untruths and seldom gets called out for it.’
I disagree with him. I think Trump tells lies but he does generally get caught out and challenged. The fact checking site, PolitiFact, has never been busier… Early in the presidency it deemed that just 5 per cent of Trump’s statements were true and 26 per cent were mostly true. But a huge 69 per cent were found to be basically porky pies – the worst rating for a president. And most papers or political magazines have tried to chronicle Trumps fibs at one time or another. The Washington Post decided that Trump made 492 false or misleading claims in his first 100 days. Politico’s Maria Konnikova made the point that all presidents lie but that Trump ‘is in a different category. The sheer frequency, spontaneity and seeming irrelevance of his lies have no precedent.’
She argues that Nixon, Reagan and Clinton were economical with the truth or lied to protect their own reputations, but ‘Trump seems to lie for the pure joy of it’.
It began on day one, with his claims of the largest inauguration crowd ever. It set a pattern. He also claimed Hillary Clinton had five million illegal voters and that he had the longest list of congressional achievements since Roosevelt, even before his tax bill was passed. It was preposterous.
Elizabeth Drew, a political journalist and author who has covered six presidents, told me: ‘Trump lies far more than any president ever. He lies all the time, every day. You’ve seen the statistics, they’re stunning.’
The New York Times columnist, Charles M. Blow, went further: ‘Trump’s incessant lying is obscene. It is a collapse in morality; it is an ethical assault.’
I know what he means. The danger is that, eventually, constant lying will batter a nation and its people into submission. It becomes a kind of distorted reality, and in the end people are too exhausted to question or fight back.
Watching him up close in Washington and around the country, I am not at all sure that Donald Trump is wilfully dishonest. It seems to me that he sometimes says the first thing that comes into his head to defend his position. I am certainly not saying that Trump has even a token obedience to the truth, but sometimes he just repeats claims he’s heard that suit his arguments, and other times I think he just lazily throws out figures or what he believes are facts.
The one thing about Trump is that he hates being wrong – he can’t be wrong – so he has a habit of trying to persuade his audiences that he’s not wrong. And sometimes that involves some creative thinking.
What he unequivocally does do, it seems to me, is sow confusion at every turn. I was sat in my Washington apartment one evening when a news alert sounded on my mobile. It was nothing major, but it was to become hugely illustrative of the way the Trump presidency was playing out.
The alert said: ‘Democrat leaders say deal agreed with Trump on Dreamers, tied to border security and excluding the wall.’ In short, it was about a group of several hundred thousand immigrants who had come to America illegally with their parents and who had no official papers. President Obama had afforded these so-called Dreamers some protection, but Donald Trump, playing to his core support on immigration, wanted to remove that protection. So, it was a good story if Mr Trump had changed his mind, an even better one if he was also giving up his plans to build that big wall all along the Mexican border.
The following morning, Donald Trump tweeted: ‘No deal was made last night on DACA. Massive border security would have to be agreed to in exchange for consent’.
Then this: ‘The WALL …will be built’.
The clear suggestion of the tweets was that the wall was part of the deal over protection of the immigrants’ status. But a few hours later, he arrived in Florida on a visit and told reporter that the wall would be built but would come later.
By now, everyone having to report on this was scratching their heads. And then this presidential tweet pinged onto journalist’s iPhones: ‘Does anybody really want to throw out good educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military? Really!’
So a man whose campaign promise had been to build a wall as soon as he came to power, and to end the protection for the Dreamers, was now less than committed to both plans. Or at least he seemed to be. No one quite knew.
I was asked to go on air and talk to Kay Burley in London about the story. ‘Give me a few minutes,’ I said. We phoned the White House for clarity. We didn’t get it. ‘The president’s words speak for themselves,’ I was told. And that, loosely translated, means they didn’t kn
ow. I am not even sure if Trump himself knew. Or whether the White House knew whether he knew…
I went on national television and tried to explain. I don’t think I got away with it.
But Trump does get away with it. The very fact that he’s in the White House is evidence of that. He’s living proof that politicians can get away with telling voters just about anything that sounds good, no matter how unlikely or implausible it is. After all, Trump promised to cut taxes, and to his credit, he delivered; but he also promised to increase spending on infrastructure. He promised to provide healthcare to all Americans and pay off the national debt. He promised to build a wall at Mexico’s expense. He promised all these things, and paid no price for the obvious inconsistency of the promises.
Now, show me a politician who doesn’t spray around empty promises at election time and I’ll show you a pig soaring through the sky. But the Donald took this to a new level of disingenuousness. He just said things that he thought would appeal to millions of voters, fed up with the political elite and the establishment, and the people, or at least many of them, lapped it up.
But delivering on those promises is another matter altogether. It is notoriously difficult for any American president to do half the stuff they’ve pledged to do during a campaign. President Obama won the White House, but fought a constant battle with both Houses of Congress, often dominated by his political opponents. He struggled.
Now, President Trump has all the advantages of a Republican president working with a Republican-controlled Congress, so it should be easier. But not so. Such is the extraordinary nature of Trump’s promises that when they collide with political realities they sometimes crash and burn.
But, here’s the thing about Donald Trump. However many problems or obstacles he encounters in delivering on his pledges, however many unfulfilled promises or uncovered lies, his core support seems to be unwavering. And that is largely because they believe he is really trying to deliver on his campaign pledges. And they also believe him when he says others are to blame when he can’t deliver. It’s the fault of the Democrats or the establishment or the system. Anyone and anything, but not Trump. Not at all.