Don’t
treat Donald Trump as if he’s a normal president. He’s not
Jonathan Freedland
Saturday 14 January
2017 07.00 GMT
From
the US Congress to Theresa May, everyone needs to understand that
when the next president takes office the usual rules will no longer
apply
There is one week to
go and all is confusion. Next Friday Donald Trump will take the oath
of office and be sworn in as president of the United States. But
still no one has the first clue how to handle what’s coming.
Politicians, journalists and diplomats, in the US and around the
world, are searching for guidance, desperately flicking through the
pages of the rulebook, a manual full of past precedents and norms
that they have spent their careers mastering – but that Trump
burned and shredded months ago.
In normal times,
even those few parts of this week’s “dirty dossier” affair that
are firmly established would be enough to undo an incoming president.
Put aside the lurid details of what went on in Moscow hotel rooms.
Assume they’re untrue. Focus instead on the fact that the US
Department of Justice sought and eventually gained secret court
warrants to investigate two Russian banks and their links with a
series of Trump associates.
Remember how much
damage it did to Hillary Clinton for the FBI to be looking (again) at
her use of a private email server. Regardless of what they found –
nothing, as it happens – the mere fact that she was under
investigation wounded her badly, perhaps even denying her the
presidency. Yet now we know that federal investigators were keen to
probe Team Trump not over its email habits, but something much more
serious: possible links with a hostile foreign power.
We’ve learned too
that the dossier included a claim of secret meetings between Trump
aides and Russian officials. Now, that claim has not been proved and
could of course turn out to be, as Trump insists, “garbage”. But
it comes from a document deemed sufficiently credible by US
intelligence agencies that they briefed both President Obama and
Trump on its contents.
In the same vein,
and in an astonishing development, the Israeli press has reported
that its country’s intelligence officials have been advised by
their US counterparts not to share intel with the Trump
administration, lest that information find its way to Moscow, and
from there to Tehran. In effect those US spooks have said that their
own incoming president cannot be trusted with secrets, because
Vladimir Putin has “leverages of pressure” over him.
In normal
circumstances just the fact of these investigations would be enough
to hobble a president. But nothing about these circumstances is
normal. Indeed, the lesson of the past year is that what would
destroy a normal politician often leaves barely a scratch on Trump.
Sometimes it even makes him stronger.
Israel has
reportedly been advised by US intelligence not to share intel with
the Trump administration
In this particular
case, there is no guarantee, in a clash between the intelligence
agencies and media, on the one hand, and Putin on the other, that
Trump’s supporters wouldn’t side with Putin. After all, a poll
last month showed Republicans with a favourable view of the Russian
leader outnumbered those who approved of Obama by 37% to 17%.
If Trump turns his
full rage on the spooks – and he has barely got started –
reminding Americans of the debacle of the Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction that never were, conveniently omitting to mention the
pressure the Bush administration put on the spies to produce the
answers it wanted to hear – who’s to say that’s a battle he
won’t win?
The price will be an
American public who won’t believe the intelligence services even
when they warn of genuine dangers to national security – but Trump
won’t care about that. He does not mind trampling over the
republic’s key institutions, as long as it helps him.
Trump attacks media
and intelligence community in first press conference as
president-elect
The mistake is to
project on to Trump the standards that would normally apply. Take
this week’s parallel drama, as several of his nominees came before
the senate to have their appointments confirmed. They all offered
sweet words of reassurance: the would-be attorney general insisting
he was no racist; the prospective secretary of state avowing that he
was no patsy to Putin. Official Washington seized on these morsels of
comfort, especially when Trump tweeted an apparent admission that his
senior team were at odds with him on several core issues: “I want
them to be themselves and express their own thoughts, not mine!”
But what if such
licensed independence is all for show? Maybe Trump has no plan to use
these cabinet members for anything but window dressing. On foreign
policy, Rex Tillerson could turn out to be a glorified ambassador,
says Robin Niblett, the director of Chatham House. Real
decision-making power might reside with Trump, son-in-law Jared
Kushner, Breitbart founder Steve Bannon, and firebreathing national
security adviser Mike Flynn. That would fit Trump’s style, says
Niblett, with “Power concentrated ever closer around the chief
executive.”
Or maybe Washington
was simply looking through the old lens? Surely it is just as
possible that Trump’s team gave his nominees permission to say
whatever they had to say to get confirmed, true or false. For Trump,
consistency and truth are for losers. Much simpler to lie, if that’s
what gets results. So Tillerson didn’t need to get tangled up in a
long debate over US policy on Russia: he just had to say that he and
Trump had never even discussed it, implausible as that might sound.
Job done.
For critics, this
poses a conundrum. Too often they deal with Trump as if he is a
normal politician, constrained by the usual conventions, including
embarrassment at being caught in a lie. But Trump is not a normal
politician. He has no shame. While most politicians blush if exposed
as inconsistent, let alone dishonest, Trump is unembarrassable. Even
Nixon tried to squirm and wriggle his way into a sentence that could
be parsed as truth. Trump, hailed as the God Emperor by his
supporters, simply attacks whichever little boy dares say he’s
wearing no clothes – before going on to accuse the child of being a
“failing pile of garbage”.
There is no
precedent to guide the media or policymakers, because there has been
no US president remotely comparable to Trump. Sticking to the old
rulebook, now charred and in tatters, will be a grave mistake.
Nowhere more so than Britain.
London’s default
setting since 1945 has been to be as close to Washington as humanly
possible. That’s what the manual, handed to every diplomat and
every new occupant of No 10, demands. Sure enough, Theresa May is
following it – dispatching her joint chiefs of staff, rather than
the UK ambassador, to Trump Tower to beg for an early meeting between
the two leaders, amid all the familiarly needy, unrequited talk of a
“special relationship”.
This is certainly
what you’d expect of a British prime minister if a normal American
president were about to take over on 20 January. But May has not
sufficiently absorbed that Trump is an aberration, and therefore the
usual rules should not automatically apply. (Angela Merkel has been
much more wary.)
Theresa May is
repeating the same mistake so fatefully made by Tony Blair in 2001
Instead, May is
repeating the same mistake so fatefully made by Tony Blair in 2001.
He thought he should be as close to George W Bush as he’d been to
Bill Clinton, failing to appreciate that the two men were entirely
different, that Bush was surrounded by ideological obsessives who
were bent on war with Iraq from the very start. May is being
similarly undiscriminating. In her post-Brexit longing for friends
and trading partners, she is getting ready to cosy up to a man who
makes Bush look like Abraham Lincoln. It may prove to be her
costliest error.
But you can see why
it’s happened. She and her officials know no other way to operate.
Along with everyone else, they keep clinging to the hope that Trump
is about to transform himself into a politician they can recognise
and understand.
But he hasn’t and
he won’t. They, and we, need to stop deluding ourselves – and
work out how to deal with Trump just the way he is.
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