by Mark Austin
And there is something about the way Trump relates to and connects with his supporters, something in his language and tone, that means he is able to carry it off. It is a skill that is instinctive and natural to him. It cannot be taught, and I am not sure I have seen a politician anywhere in the world who carries it off with quite the same success.
Within weeks of arriving in Washington, I realized he was an extraordinary political animal who operates like no other politician. He is a bruiser, a narcissist and an instinctive purveyor of untruths, but he is also a clever political operator. Elizabeth Drew – who knows a thing or two about presidents – believes Trump is ‘shrewd but not wise’.
He knows what will appeal to his core vote and he is unafraid to pander to it, even if it means alienating supposed allies. And he has no hesitation in jeopardizing America’s special relationship with the UK if it means he can score a hit with his supporters.
Shortly after I arrived for my assignment, I was awoken early by a call from London telling me there had been a terror attack on a tube train in Parsons Green, in south-west London. Only scant details were known. ‘What’s it got to do with me?’ I asked rather petulantly.
What it had to do with me was that Donald Trump was already commenting about the attack on Twitter, his favoured form of communication. His first offering was this: ‘Another attack in London by a loser terrorist. These are sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard. Must be proactive!’
How on earth did he know the perpetrators were known to the police? How did he even know who they were? It had only just happened.
And a moment later this: ‘Loser terrorists must be dealt with in a much tougher manner.’
And then, tellingly, Trump added that his own proposed ban on visitors to the US from predominantly Muslim countries should be ‘far larger, tougher and more specific’.
So there he is, spouting forth about an attack in Britain, and at the same time promoting his own controversial measures and policies – even if it meant, at the same time, annoying the authorities in Britain. In Trump’s world, that’s fine.
Now if Trump really did know the intelligence about who the attackers were, it was a grotesque breach of protocol that undermines the relationship between the US and the UK. If he didn’t, if he was just guessing – or worse, just talking tough to appeal to his voters – then that is equally unacceptable. I know for a fact that senior figures at Scotland Yard and within MI5 were furious at the unwarranted and unwelcome intervention.
But, the point is, Trump doesn’t care. It suited him domestically to appear tough on terrorism. He’d upset Republicans by apparently reaching out to Democrats on the Dreamer issue and here was the opportunity to rebalance things and mollify his political base.
He’d done exactly the same thing earlier that year. In June, he had criticized London’s mayor Sadiq Khan over the city’s response to another terrorist attack. Again it was on Twitter, and again an unguarded post caused no end of diplomatic trouble.
How Donald Trump got his ‘intelligence’ information so soon after the Parsons Green bombing is also instructive of the modus operandi of Donald Trump.
Shortly before his initial fusillade of tweets that September morning, a security analyst, Jim Hanson, had appeared on Fox News, the right-wing TV station in the US that Trump watches habitually in the morning. Hanson had said: ‘My fear again is that we’re going to find out this is someone who is known to the police.’
A website for Mr Hanson’s firm, Security Studies Group, says it focuses on ‘defending the value of American power against the true threats we face’, and talks about a Washington elite that has been ‘unable or unwilling to address and communicate the most basic requirements of American nationhood’. So, in other words, Mr Hanson is a ‘Make America Great Again’ Trump supporter.
The most likely scenario is that the president was watching his mate on Fox, took what he said at face value, because why wouldn’t he, and then fired off his tweets. The White House did not deny he had been watching Fox. Jim Hanson or MI6? I know which I would trust.
It was ten hours before Trump tweeted what he should have tweeted in the first place: ‘Our hearts & prayers go out to the people of London’.
The whole thing summed up the Trump way of doing things. The picture is of a president who makes instinctive policy decisions on the hoof, depending on the political weather at that particular time. In my first few weeks in Washington, as hard as I tried, it was difficult to detect any consistent political philosophy underpinning the Trump presidency.
It was rather a never-ending series of adjustments or recalculations designed to satisfy or enrage whoever he felt needed satisfying or enraging. Trump is a tactician rather than a strategist. He is a dealmaker, he is transactional, and like all politicians he keeps a close eye on the opinion polls. The Trump strategy is that there is no strategy.
Elizabeth Drew put it to me like this: ‘Trump makes a lot of noise and dominates the scene through sheer force of personality and lack of inhibition, feeling no need to observe the norms, which can take him into risky territory… The sheer dazzlingness of his performance makes us forget what it’s about.’ She calls him the ‘somewhat corpulent Flying Wallenda of politics’. And she is not alone in expressing alarm at the lasting damage he may be doing to American political culture and institutions including the Republican Party.
What many people also worry about is what he is doing to America’s standing in the world. Whoever the president was, whoever was leading the country – whether Republican or Democrat – there has long been an acceptance, in the West certainly, that, despite all the flaws, America is, broadly speaking, a force for good. Not simply a heavily armed policeman patrolling the globe, restraining, tackling or extinguishing threats to peace and stability; but a beacon of freedom and liberty and democracy, a country upholding an enlightened world order.
But Donald Trump seems dismissive of the notion that America should stand up for anything but itself. The ‘America First’ philosophy is popular in many parts of the country, but my concern is that it turns the country in on itself rather than embracing the interconnectivity of this world.
‘America First does not mean America alone’ is an oft-repeated mantra of the Trump administration. And yet, slowly but surely, the United States is becoming more isolated from its traditional allies. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement is a case in point. Trump was so set on scrapping the deal – and some believe it was simply because it was Obama’s signature achievement – that he had no qualms about upsetting every single Western European ally.
I witnessed the most extraordinary diplomatic love-in between Trump and French president Emmanuel Macron in Washington. It was a spring romance to lift the heart. But – and here’s the point – it did not even survive the month of May. Trump’s decision on Iran did for that. Une affaire provisoire. And Trump – who apparently knows a thing or two about affairs – didn’t care. The only really special relationship seems to be between Trump and his core supporters.
Correction: he also cares about his relationship with Israel. His decision – long considered but never implemented by previous presidents – to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was again done in the face of huge opposition from European allies. But it played well with many Jewish voters, and, particularly, with a few very wealthy Jewish donors. The fact it was also followed by bloodshed and dozens of deaths among protesting Palestinians didn’t seem to matter. He sent his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to Israel for the occasion. It was also Kushner’s job to resuscitate a peace process the move to Jerusalem had effectively killed off.
Successive American presidents of either party have always advocated that a democratic and unified Europe was in the best interests of the United States. But Donald Trump seems to think otherwise. He fetes nationalists set on dismantling the European Union, for instance. He pointedly met Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK
Independence Party, before he met Prime Minister Theresa May. He cheered Brexit, and taunted Germany over their trade imbalance with the US.
Further, he called NATO ‘obsolete’ and complained about American obligations to an organization whose members were not all paying their way. It actually worked. Trump’s threat to leave brought an immediate dividend of about $30 billion in extra revenue.
To stand alone, strong but isolated, above all others but also apart? Is that really the way forward? Trump maybe thinks so. It reminds me of a saying that has always stuck with me: ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’
Trump is often teased for his apparent respect for authoritarian leaders like Russia’s President Putin. It was a predilection that manifested itself in the strangest of ways as he began the second year of his presidency.
He ordered the Pentagon to come up with options for a grand military parade through Washington DC. He had admired the pageantry of the Bastille Day parade on a visit to Paris, and wanted to ‘outdo’ the French with a display of American military might.
This from a president who had appointed several serving or former generals to key positions in his administration, and who had made many heavily political speeches and announcements in front of military audiences.
It was another break with an established norm: that the military’s separation from partisan politics was to be respected by the executive. This was Trump politicizing the military, turning it into a political prop for him to use to satisfy his base and also to send out a warning to his political enemies. It was as if he were saying, ‘I have supreme power because I own the military.’ It was the stuff of autocratic regimes, and it unsettled many in both the military and politics.
It may simply be that Donald Trump saw a military parade as an extension of his tactic of using patriotism, and the flag as a core issue that played well for him. But it leads the military into difficult waters. At best, it makes life awkward for the generals; at worst, it tarnishes the military’s integrity and compromises its independence.
As one Iraq veteran put it: ‘Our service members have better things to do than march in Washington, at a time when we remain committed in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.’
It is sometimes difficult to know quite how the rest of the world views Trump, although there was a telling moment after one of his first major overseas trips. I was sitting in the Sky News office in DC one lunchtime, when the White House suddenly announced an address by the president that afternoon. Trump had just returned from a two-week, five-country, three-summit trip to Asia, and had received, at best, lukewarm reviews in the mainstream media. The New York Times – or the ‘Failing New York Times’ in Trump-speak – had described him as a ‘bewildering figure to countries that had already viewed [him] with anxiety’, and they questioned his achievements on the tour.
Trump was clearly furious. First, he posted a series of angry tweets calling the NYT ‘naive’, ‘dumb’ and ‘failing’, and then he called an astonishing press conference. It amounted to a thirty-minute paean to himself. It was self-indulgent, self-justifying and self-congratulatory: ‘They treated me personally with warmth, hospitality and respect… real respect.’ He said he was leading the ‘Great American Comeback’ and insisted America’s standing in the world had never been greater.
There was no question Trump had been welcomed warmly. There were red carpets, state banquets, ceremonial welcomes and fawning speeches. The New York Times said President Trump made the mistake of mistaking flattery, which was doled out in spades, for respect. It was enough for Donald Trump to be able to say ‘they loved me’; ergo, it was a triumph. But the truth of the trip was there was little of substance to report and little to shout about. The whole performance was extraordinary… and definitely not normal.
Trump came to power partly on a promise to change things and ‘drain the swamp’ of Washington politics. It was a noble intention, but he filled his cabinet with zillionaires and a few have been embroiled in allegations of spending public money in wasteful ways. Just the sort of behaviour he professed to want to eradicate.
Washington needs to change, but in attempting to do so Trump is also trampling on some of the accepted norms in American public life. And the erosion of customs and traditions is worrying many Americans. Centuries to forge; months to dismantle; years to rebuild? That is how they fear it could be.
While I was in DC I was asked many times why I didn’t forget about Trump and report more on other stuff going on around America. And it’s true, it was very easy just to concentrate on the incessant news emerging from the White House, to the exclusion of other important issues.
But my feeling was that to stop reporting all the Trump stuff, the day-to-day craziness of the presidency, would be to accept that it was becoming routine and normal. I felt strongly we shouldn’t do that. The last thing America and the West needs during the Trump presidency is a lazy, compliant, accepting media. Holding power to account is always the responsibility of a free press.
In a way, the Trump White House has become a sort of cult of personality rather than a regular presidency. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that. In fact, his speeches can be riveting. He breaks away from the script with ad-libbed passages delivered in a language his supporters understand and relate to. It is hugely effective on occasions, it is not easy to do, and it’s brave. Trump does not get enough credit for his speeches.
But just as it was Trump’s character and personality that won him the office and served him well during the campaign, so it was to become less helpful to him once he was actually governing. Many of his problems stem from his character, particularly his impulsiveness.
His firing of the FBI director James Comey may have satisfied his Apprentice-style love of summarily dispatching people from his presence. But it was to cause him no end of trouble. Comey was leading a criminal investigation into whether Mr Trump’s top advisers colluded with the Russian government to try to steer the outcome of the 2016 election.
It was bizarre timing, and raised the immediate spectre of political interference by a sitting president into an investigation by the main law enforcement agency. It was a rash move that was to have far-reaching consequences. It immediately led to Democratic calls for a special counsel to lead the Russian inquiry. And it was that investigation, led by Robert Mueller, that was to haunt Trump for months.
The inquiry became an obsession with the media, it arguably took attention away from alleged wrongdoing by the Clinton campaign involving a secret dossier on Trump and the Russians, and it drove the president to distraction. At every press conference he would scream, ‘No collusion,’ and repeat it several times. It was a PR disaster of the president’s own making.
He also became convinced of political bias among top FBI and Department of Justice officials – some of whom he had appointed. He waged war against them, believing they deliberately precipitated the investigation into collusion with Russia by somehow joining forces with a British former MI6 officer in the pay of his enemy Hillary Clinton, who produced a secret dossier.
He even insisted that a classified memo, produced by the Republican leader of the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee, be released without redactions, a move that infuriated his own intelligence chiefs.
Democratic leaders believed that Trump would use the memo – which was not all it seemed – as reason to fire Robert Mueller. That would have been political suicide for Trump, and he probably knew it. He desisted, or at least he had at the time of writing. But he was determined, at the very least, to undermine the investigation into his Russia links. It seemed to become his mission in life.
And the extent of Trump’s links to Russia is the great mystery of his presidency. It is difficult to work out. There has been a good deal of speculation that his real estate empire had taken large amounts of money from oligarchs linked to the Kremlin; there were unsubstantiated rumours that he had engaged in sexual shenanigans with hookers while h
e was in Moscow running the Miss Universe contest; and there were unconfirmed claims that Russian intelligence had compromising material.
His reaction to the Special Counsel’s indictments against thirteen Russian individuals for meddling in the 2016 elections was strange. He didn’t respond to Russia’s assault on America’s democracy at all. He was muted and quiescent in a way that was truly bizarre. And it was seized upon by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who couldn’t come up with a reason for Trump’s reticence:
… whatever it is, Trump is either trying so hard to hide it or is so naïve about Russia that he is ready to not only resist mounting a proper defense of our democracy, he’s actually ready to undermine some of our most important institutions, the FBI and the Justice Department, to keep his compromised status hidden.
That must not be tolerated. This is code red. The biggest threat to the integrity of our democracy today is in the Oval Office.
What also became clear to me, after a year of covering this president, is that there are in fact many Donald Trumps. There is Trump the dealmaker; there is Trump the base seducer, who indulges his core support at every opportunity; there is Trump the flip-flopper, the guy who listens to the last person to talk to him; and there’s Trump the gunslinger, who fires off insults and abuse to anyone who offends him.
In January 2018, the many Trumps all started fighting each other and there was no clear winner. They basically started brawling on the Oval Office carpet while, outside, the government was grinding to a halt. Congress was at loggerheads over the funding bill, and at midnight on Friday 19 January, the government shut down.
The date is significant because the following day marked a year since he was sworn into office. On that anniversary, the government was shut down, there were women’s marches in cities across America, and the Trumps were beating themselves up in the White House. It was not how it was meant to be.