Jeff Sessions Will Continue to be a Thorn in Trump’s Side—Whatever the President Tweets

Prospect, July 28, 2017

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first hand a smartphone. Yes, Donald Trump has been at the Twitter again.

“A.G.” is Trump’s Attorney General, former Alabama senator Jeff Sessions. The “Special Council [sic]” is better known as Bob Mueller, the former FBI director who has been appointed by Sessions’ deputy, Rod Rosenstein, as Special Counsel to investigate alleged links between the Trump campaign and, in essence, the Kremlin. The appointment was Rosenstein’s decision, rather than Sessions’, because the latter had recused himself from having any involvement with the Russian investigation after it emerged that he had not told the Senate about two almost certainly innocuous meetings with Russia’s ambassador, the remarkably ubiquitous Sergey Kislyak.

On July 24, Trump posted again:

And on July 25:

Then, less than ten minutes later:

Awkwardly, it was Trump who had first taken this “VERY” weak position last November. Magnanimous in the immediate afterglow of victory, the then President-elect told the New York Times that he didn’t want to pursue an investigation against Clinton, although, The Donald being The Donald, he left himself wriggle room, saying “we’ll have people that do things”—as the Times put it, “without elaborating.”

Half a year later, Trump is maintaining that his “beleaguered A.G”, has not been doing enough… things.

The approaching tread of a special counsel will do that to a president. Mueller has assembled a formidable legal team. Some of its members have previously given money to the Democrats. That’s also true of a number of Trump’s family and staff, but it’s clearly added to the alarm Team Trump now feels. Always punch back: White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway is now talking about “Mr. Mueller and his band of Democratic donors”.

It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but it’s still telling that Mueller has recruited many more lawyers for his team than Trump has found for the Department of Justice (just one of the parts of this government where the administration has struggled to hire the people it needs). Mueller also has all the funding he needs and, critically, can poke into just about anything that interests him—a feature that few presidents, let alone this one, would relish.

As is so often the case, the problems Trump currently faces owe more to his paranoia, braggadocio and clumsiness than any known wrongdoing. He has done more than many to fuel the frenzy over Russia that has gripped Washington since he took office. That said, National Review’s Andy McCarthy, a distinguished former prosecutor and a “reluctant” Trump voter, has made the case that, as a matter of law, Sessions had no reason to recuse himself to the extent that he did, at the time he did, or, indeed, at all. Maybe so—but as a matter of politics, he had little choice.

That is a subtlety too far for Trump. He complained last week that Sessions should never have recused himself, but that, if he was going to, he should have said so before he took the job and Trump would then “have picked somebody else”. But Sessions assumed office on February 9th and only recused himself on March 2nd, the day after the Washington Post revealed that he had met with the Russian ambassador.

Trump is on firmer ground when he connects Sessions’ recusal to the appointment of a special counsel —with little notice given to the White House—by Rosenstein, an appointment with which Trump disagrees (“I have done nothing wrong. A special counsel should never have been appointed in this case”) and which, as McCarthy has noted, came with a twist. Citing applicable regulations, McCarthy contends that, in the case of a potential conflict of interest within the Department of Justice over an investigation, a special counsel can be only appointed when that investigation is a criminal investigation, “Crimes,” writes McCarthy “have knowable parameters.” That limits the degree to which the special counsel can go nosing around. Yet, rightly or wrongly, in this instance the starting point was not a criminal but a counter-intelligence investigation. Such investigations, observes McCarthy, are designed “to collect information, and from an investigator’s point of view, you can never have enough information”.

Shortly after selecting Mueller, Rosenstein briefed the Senate. Afterwards, its leading Democrat was reported by the Washington Post as saying that if one thing was clear from that session it was that “Mueller has broad and wide-ranging authority to follow the facts wherever they go. That gives me confidence and should give the American people some confidence.” The Donald may not feel quite the same way. When Trump described Sessions as “beleaguered”, he was quite possibly just projecting.

Nevertheless, the attorney general can be under no doubt that he is under attack from his boss. And the blows keep falling, via Twitter, in interviews or even in the course of a press conference with the Lebanese prime minister. The list of offences grows: The recusal, the failure to investigate “Crooked Hillary”, not taking tougher action over “the leaks from intelligence services.” On Wednesday, in a pair of tweets sent by the president while Sessions was actually attending a meeting elsewhere in the White House, he was accused of failing to replace “Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Comey friend who was in charge of Clinton investigation but got big dollars ($700,000) for his wife’s political run from Hillary Clinton and her representatives,” a claim, incidentally if unsurprisingly, that stretches the facts a little further than they should go.

Sessions is on the outs, but he is not (as I write) yet out. For all the “firings” that marked his long stint at NBC’s The Apprentice, The Donald doesn’t like giving people the sack. He is “very disappointed” with his attorney general, he says, “but we will see what happens. Time will tell. Time will tell.” It will—but in the meantime, it’s hard to tell what’s going through Trump’s mind. If he’s just venting over an ever-more-menacing investigation, this has, even by The Donald’s standards, been a costly tantrum. He has humiliated and angered Sessions, who, by becoming the first senator to endorse candidate Trump, went out on a limb for him last year. The way he’s being bullied now is a lesson to Trump loyalists that, with the Donald, loyalty only flows one way.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans have rallied round Sessions—someone who was, until recently, one of their own. Like their GOP counterparts in the House, they must have already been concerned over how much of a liability Trump, and his approval rating of only 36 per cent, might be in next year’s midterms. They will be even more worried now. The more they fret, the less clout Trump will have on Capitol Hill—and the more his agenda will fray. It will not have escaped their attention, either, that brutalizing Sessions risks angering the significant part of the Republican voter base that appreciates his leading role in driving through tough policies on immigration. Sections of the rightwingmedia are already firing warning shots.

For now, Sessions shows no sign of resigning, and even if he did, Trump’s problems would not go away. After the way he has treated the current incumbent, recruiting a successor will be difficult. Even if the president finds the sufficiently pliable candidate he evidently would prefer, securing his or her confirmation by the Senate will take some doing—although a recess appointment might be a way to circumvent this, if only temporarily. For now, the only person with the power to remove Mueller is Rosenstein, an independent-minded sort who has also come under fire from Trump. He’s unlikely to want to help out.

What’s left for Trump are three main options, none of them much fun. He can live with the status quo, and accept that Mueller’s probing will lead where it will lead. He can try to persuade Rosenstein to refine the scope of the special counsel’s investigation, something that Rosenstein could do but at the cost of setting off a political uproar (and imagine if Mueller resigned in protest). Most dangerously of all, Trump could arrange his own version of Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era Saturday Night Massacre by firing Sessions, Rosenstein and—because he would then probably have the power to do so—Mueller. This may be one option if he calculates that, so long as there is no smoking gun and the Senate and House are controlled by what is at least nominally “his” party, he could dodge impeachment proceedings—if not lesser inquisitions.

And, of course, the president will continue to try to change the subject, whether by renewing the focus on Clinton scandals, or, say, stirring up the culture wars.

Donald Trump: always crashing in the same car

Prospect, October 20, 2016

Trump Tower, New York City, September 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

Hillary and Donald didn’t shake hands. And nor did Melania and Bill. Expectations of a mudfight had been whipped up by Team Trump’s decision to bring along a number of guests designed to spook Team Clinton. These included four mothers of people killed by illegal aliens, the former fiancée (from the 1990s) of the US ambassador butchered in Libya, the (allegedly estranged) mother of another of the Benghazi victims, the wholly estranged half-brother of the current president of the United States, and a former TV reporter from Arkansas who has emerged in recent days to assert that she was sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton in the 1980s. Adding to the goodwill in the air, Trump had suggested last weekend that the two candidates should submit to a drug test beforehand. Hillary, he maintained, had been “all pumped up” at the beginning of the previous debate, but had appeared curiously drained by the end of it (“She could barely reach her car”).

But (slightly) less mud flew than anticipated last night and it was The Donald who did not seem quite himself. And this was not just because he came across as somewhat more prepared than usual. Uncharacteristically sotto, he gave an impression of being gently sedated, or at least of having listened to his more sensible advisers, except, of course, when he didn’t. He made the moderator (Fox News’ Chris Wallace, unquestionably the most accomplished performer of the evening) look like an accomplice by thanking him for asking Clinton a tough question. He probably irritated yet more of the female voters he desperately needs—against all the odds—to win over by referring to his opponent as “such a nasty woman.” He won’t have made a lot of new friends with his remark that there were “some bad hombres” among the illegal alien population. Mathematically (“some”) that must, I suppose, be an accurate enough observation, but, in just the latest of countless own goals, Trump managed to phrase it in a way that hinted at a racial animus not only disturbing to Latinos (like just about every minority group a largely lost constituency by now) but to many whites too. On some calculations, Trump will need the support of nearly two-thirds of white voters to win (compared with Romney’s 59 per cent in 2012). Good luck with that.

And then there was the way he dealt with questioning over his willingness to accept the result in November. Lest we forget, he has been complaining that the election is being rigged. After some toing and froing with Trump on this topic, Wallace asked this:

“There is a tradition in this country—in fact, one of the prides of this country—is the peaceful transition of power and that no matter how hard-fought a campaign…that at [its] end… the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying that you’re necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and that the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?”

Trump: “What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense. OK?”

That answer (“horrifying”, declared Clinton) became the talking point of the night among the commentariat, and, I suspect, not just among the commentariat. It was, to put it mildly, a remarkable thing for a major party nominee to say ahead of the election. Voting fraud is not exactly unknown in the US, and some grumbling by the unsuccessful candidate—even after a presidential vote— about dodgy doings at the polls, sometimes legitimately (Nixon in 1960), sometimes rather less so (Kerry and those Ohio voting machines in 2004) is another American tradition, but a formal challenge by the loser to the result is not: The Florida debacle in 2000 was a genuinely exceptional state of affairs.

Clinton: “You know, President Obama said the other day when you’re whining before the game is even finished…”

Looked at one way, Trump’s allegation that the election might be rigged (a term he has defined in different ways: it has, for example, included his argument that media bias has distorted the process) against him fits neatly into his outsider narrative and adds to his outsider appeal. Looked at another way, it will have reinforced the impression of many Americans that (as Clinton was not slow to argue) Trump is “not up to doing the job.” It also sounded like the prexcuse of a man who cannot cope with defeat. As Clinton jeered, “There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged.”

Trump couldn’t contain himself: “Should have gotten it!”

“Always crashing in the same car,” as someone once sang.

To be fair, Trump acquitted himself better in this debate than in the first two—low bar—but he did little to avert what looks like a clobbering next month. According to a CNN/ORC poll, 52 per cent of viewers thought that Clinton prevailed, as opposed to the 39 per cent who judged Trump the victor. It says something for the debating skills of a man who prides himself on his ability to close a deal that that was his highest score so far. The best that he can hope for is that his performance will not have cost him too many votes. Best guess: It didn’t. Between them, both Trump and Clinton said enough last night on a wide range of issues including immigration, gun rights, trade, terrorism and abortion to assure Trump’s core supporters that they were in the right place. His problem is that those core supporters are not numerous enough to propel him to the White House.

To attract additional voters last night, Trump needed either to clean up his own image or to make more of a mess of Hillary’s. He didn’t try too hard at the former. Judging by the laughter that greeted his claim that “nobody has more respect for women,” that was, in all probability, wise. Instead he concentrated on trying to drag Clinton down, something that would be very much easier were he not Trump. He attacked the Clinton Foundation (“a criminal enterprise”). She countered with the Trump Foundation (“bought a six-foot portrait of Donald”). He raised sleaze. She talked about his taxes. He complained about the foreign policy fiascoes of recent years. She brought up Putin. He threw in Bill Clinton. She threw back Donald Trump. Yes, Trump landed some blows (those errant emails, allegedly evidence of dirty tricks) but not enough, judging by that poll, to make much of a difference.

And so today Trump tweeted this: “Why didn’t Hillary Clinton announce that she was inappropriately given the debate questions—she secretly used them! Crooked Hillary.”

Always crashing in the same car.

Trump has maxed out—but he will plug on nonetheless

Prospect, October 10, 2016

New York City, September 2016 ©  Andrew Stuttaford

The most significant words in last night’s US presidential debate came right towards the end, and they will have ended any hopes in what passes for the Republican leadership that Donald Trump might somehow magically, marvellously just go away.

The two candidates were asked to pick out something that they respected about the other. Hillary Clinton replied that the talents of Trump’s “incredibly able and devoted” children “[say] a lot about Donald” (implication: there was nothing she respected about The Donald himself). Trump framed his response as a compliment to Clinton, but, as usual, he was really talking about himself:

“I will say this about Hillary… she does fight hard and she doesn’t quit and she doesn’t give up and I consider that to be a very good trait.”

It was never likely that Trump, a man unable to contemplate losing at anything, would stand down and it was never certain what would happen if he did, but with that observation he made it clear that, despite the worst week or so that any Republican or Democratic nominee for the presidency has ever endured, The Donald will plug on.

Following as it did a press conference (of sorts) that Trump had arranged for a number of women who had allegedly been seriously wronged by one Clinton or the other, expectations were that the debate would be a roughhouse. And, from the moment that the two contestants declined to shake hands at the bout’s beginning, expectations were not disappointed. The commentariat, a prim lot in America, were duly appalled. I, on the other hand, enjoyed it immensely. Titus Andronicus beats Hamlet any day.

Neither candidate made any attempt to conceal their mutual disdain, but in case any viewers hadn’t got the message, Trump described Clinton as incompetent, the devil, married to a bad man, in hock to special interests and as someone with “tremendous hate in her heart,” someone—his inner authoritarian never far away—he appeared to believe should be jailed over those errant emails. And, oh yes, Clinton is a liar.

For her part, Clinton hit out at the contempt Trump has shown for women “and the very brutal kinds of comments he has made about not just women, but all Americans, all kinds of Americans.” The Donald, she said, is not fit to be president (except, we were left to assume, in the eyes of Vladimir Putin). Not only that, he was responsible for an increase in bullying in schools (“teachers and parents are calling it the Trump Effect”), a hard to verify accusation that will resonate most helpfully—and at several levels—with the distaff side of the electorate. And, oh yes, Donald is a liar.

Even the duo’s behaviour on stage showed the depth of their loathing. His jaw busily doing the Mussolini, Trump prowled around, sometimes looming up behind his opponent in a vaguely menacing manner that, along with an occasionally badgering style, won’t have done him many favours with female voters, especially with his videotaped talk (exaggerated “locker-room” bragging or otherwise) of grabbing women “by the p***y” undoubtedly still fresh on their minds. Meanwhile as The Donald spoke, the look on Clinton’s face shifted between anger, unconvincing impassivity, icy amusement and the condescension that explains why so many Americans find it impossible to warm to her. To lose to Hillary will take some doing, but in selecting Donald Trump as their champion, Republican primary voters appear to have found the right man for the job.

Last night did nothing to change that fact. Prior to the first debate on 26th September, Trump was enjoying an unexpected surge, and the first “what ifs” could be heard in the land. Then came the second self-destructive half of the first debate and, after that, a few days dominated by Miss Universe kamikaze. Clinton pulled back into a comfortable lead and that was according to polls taken before the release of one of the most politically destructive tapes since Richard Nixon’s effort way back when, a tape that was, interestingly, no less destructive for being all too predictable. Last night Clinton described the Trump campaign as “exploding.” That was a stretch, but not by too much.

Trump needed to reverse that slump, but failed. To be fair, when it came to the substance of the debate, such as it was (not much), he did better than anticipated, admittedly a low bar after the debacle first time round. The advantage of mounting an outsider challenge is that little is expected in the way of detailed policy. And indeed when it came to proposing an alternative to, say, Obamacare or the fight against ISIS, very little was all that Trump had to offer. But that won’t matter, at least to his supporters. What they want most now is an echo and an amplifier of their (not always unjustified) resentment and in Trump that is what they’ve got.

However incongruous it may be coming from the man in the penthouse apartment, Trump knows how to play the outsider very well:

“[Hillary] used the power of her office to make a lot of money… [W]hy aren’t you putting money into your own campaign? Just curious.”

Just curious. Just brilliant.

Then, of course, there are those emails. Using a private server in the way that Secretary Clinton did was irresponsible—and possibly sinister—enough, but the signs of a cover-up may prove more damaging, and, in an anti-establishment year (Trump took care to throw in a few references to Bernie Sanders), the suggestion that Clinton benefited from favourable treatment is political poison:

“33,000 e-mails deleted and now she’s saying there wasn’t anything wrong. And more importantly, that was after getting a subpoena. That wasn’t before. That was after. She got it from the United States Congress, and I will be honest. I am so disappointed in congressmen, including Republicans, for allowing this to happen. Our Justice Department where her husband goes on to the back of an airplane for 39 minutes, talks to the Attorney General days before a ruling has to be made on her case… if a member of the private sector did that, they’d be in jail. Let alone, after getting a subpoena from the United States Congress.”

It’s right to feel queasy about the seeming relish with which Trump, a vindictive man and, as I mentioned earlier, someone with obvious authoritarian tendencies, talks about Hillary in jail, but it’s also understandable why so many Americans might be angered by the notion (albeit still disputed) that this ultimate insider has benefited from far more favourable treatment from the authorities than they could ever hope for.

But Trump’s problem is that he has already riled up just about anyone he can. In delivering his best lines last night he was singing to a choir too small to take him to victory, and he didn’t make it any larger. According to a CNN poll, 57 per cent of viewers thought that Hillary won the debate. With November drawing close, the election remains hers to lose.

Turning Trump

Prospect, May 23, 2016

New York City, June 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

In July last year, former Texas governor Rick Perry, then running for the Republican presidential nomination, took aim at Donald Trump, then—as now—amazing just about everyone (full disclosure: including me) by how well he was doing.

Trump, warned Perry, offered “a barking carnival act…a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued.” Trump’s candidacy was, he added, a “cancer on conservatism.”

That was then. Last week Perry said that he would be prepared to serve as vice-tumour. If Trump needed somebody with his experience then Perry would not say, “Aw shucks sir, I’m gonna go fishing.” No sir, he would do his duty by his country.

Leading figures in the Republican Party are coming round to the political reality that Trump’s success represents. For some that’s a matter of personal ambition (absolute power may corrupt absolutely, but the whiff of power does a pretty good job too). For others it’s the product of hard-eyed, if bleak, calculation. They are unlikely—despite recent polling suggesting a swing in Trump’s direction—to think that the Donald can win the presidency (or to agree with what he stands for), but they may well have concluded that losing as a relatively united party would be less harmful than any of the alternatives.

Ordinary Republican voters are finding it easier to rally behind Trump. Those who, just a month or two ago, were telling pollsters they would not vote for him in November are falling into line. And fewer are holding their noses as they do so. In April, Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling showed that around 40 per cent of GOP voters regarded Trump negatively. That’s now dropped to 25 per cent. Politics are tribal. With the primary fight over, most will unite behind their leader despite earlier misgivings.

It helps that Hillary Clinton, the presumed chieftain of the other tribe, has been a bogeywoman to the Right for decades (and she’s not too popular with anyone else: her unfavourables—astoundingly high for a candidate in her position—are only exceeded, if by a narrowing margin, by Trump’s). It helps too that Clinton’s standing with the wider electorate is being hurt by the brawl with Bernie Sanders. In some recent polls, Trump has pulled ahead of Clinton. I doubt that lead will endure once the Democrats reunite, but to the degree that it does, it will induce even more Republicans into the Trump camp. After all, if he has a chance….

There’s something else. Trump’s mood music (it would be an exaggeration to describe his programme as much more than that) sounds sweeter to many Republicans than their leadership might like. Tough on immigration: Check. Tough on trade: Check. Rejecting Bush-style interventionism abroad: Check. Preserving Medicare (health care for the over-65s) and Social Security (pensions): Check. Trump’s voters may revere Reagan the man, but they are unconvinced by Reagan the mantra. Trump achieved lift-off with the help of a white working class that believes, not without reason, that it has been “left behind” (the parallels with today’s UKIP are obvious), struggling to prosper in a rapidly transforming America in which it no longer feels at home. It has had quite enough creative destruction, thank you very much.

But in an age of insecurity it is not only blue collars that are being felt. Trump’s campaign may owe its launch to working class Republicans, but it was boosted into orbit by supporters from far beyond the Appalachian hollows and Rustbelt towns of reassuring caricature. The collateral damage of globalization and automation is spreading ever higher up the social scale. Trump’s coalition of the anxious is considerably broader than the GOP’s high-ups seem willing to acknowledge, and, tellingly, was not soothed away by the social conservatism peddled by the Donald’s rivals. To say Trump makes an unexpected standard-bearer for a party that includes a prominent (if often misunderstood) religious right is an understatement, but that’s what he will be. Priorities change.

To be sure, Trump threw the Reaganite wing of the party a bone in the form of a supply-side-on-steroids tax plan of such absurdity that the kindest way to look at it is as a statement of intent (welcome enough from someone who has supported higher taxation in the past) that he won’t increase taxes. In another conciliatory gesture, Trump has released a list of potential Supreme Court nominees designed to appeal to the Right. If he were to abide by this promise, wrote Jim Geraghty of the conservative, Trumpsceptic National Review (of which I am a contributing editor), “justices like these would make autocracy, a likely nuclear exchange, the collapse of the dollar and the dissolution of NATO easier to bear.”

Jim was not, I think, being entirely serious, but, there’s no mistaking his underlying concern that Trump simply cannot be trusted with the presidency. To the extent that Trump has an ideology (he has changed his party affiliation five times since 1987), it’s best described as a mutation of early Twentieth Century American Progressivism—something that’s a long way from contemporary GOP orthodoxy—but ultimately Trump is about Trump. Being Trump has enabled him to get to where he is now, but being Trump will ensure that, however horrified Republican voters might be at the prospect of another Clinton presidency, there will be a number of them who will not vote for their party’s candidate.

Some will worry that a Trump victory in November would be even worse for the future of the GOP than defeat. For others, the fears may run deeper still. A month or so back, a Midwestern Republican told me that Trump would, for the most part, be a better president than Clinton. But the worst of Trump could, he fretted, be far worse than the worst of Hillary: “He could blow the country up.” That was not a risk he would take. He hasn’t changed his mind since.

That’s just one voter, but I suspect he’s not alone.

What did “Super Tuesday” tell us about the Presidential election?

Prospect, March 2, 2016

New York City, March 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way. Hillary Clinton had a good night, stumbling in places where she was expected to stumble: Colorado, and also Vermont, where Sanders is the junior senator. But benefiting from solid African-American support in the south and snatching a significant victory over Sanders in Massachusetts, just across the Vermont border. Senator Sanders is not going to give up his quest any time soon, but, in the absence of an indictment arising out of Clinton’s email adventures, Hillary looks well set to take the Democratic nomination in due course. That there has been any doubt about that, and that America’s Corbyn was the source of that doubt, says something about the unsettled mood of the American electorate.

And that brings me to the Republicans. There was no fresh earthquake, but the aftershocks of what had already hit the GOP were only marginally less devastating. Trump romped home in a series of victories that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago. But the Republican establishment can take a few crumbs of comfort from the fact that The Donald’s triumph was not quite as complete as some were beginning to anticipate. Averaged across the twelve states, percentage-wise he scored in the mid-thirties. Impressive, but far below the 49 percent he took in a recent CNN poll of Republican voters. His delegate haul—less than half those up for grabs on Tuesday—fell short too: Trump’s path to the magic 1,237 (the number of delegates required to secure the nomination) is not clear yet.

Building on earlier success in Iowa, Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, prevailed in his state, in Oklahoma next door and Alaska. Cruz is a hardliner, clever, abrasive and don’t-you-forget-it devout. He has craftily reinvented himself as an outsider despite Princeton, Harvard, an impressive legal career, a seat in the senate and a wife who works at Goldman Sachs. But he is only the junior outsider, outranked in the wilderness by a billionaire, and, currently running second to Trump in the delegate count, he may end up the insider candidate who leads the last stand against Trump—who runs him closest at the end.

But most of the Republican establishment would rather work with the more emollient Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida and and the Republican most likely to beat Hillary. Once again, Rubio failed to live up to his advance billing, but he managed to win in Minnesota and—an achievement these days—ran Trump close in Virginia. Overall, however, he was outscored on Tuesday by Cruz and a loss to Trump in the Florida primary on 15th March would be a blow from which he would probably not recover. But for now he’s very much in the race. His problem is that so is Cruz.

If we ignore (as we should) retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, plugging on despite poor results for self-promotional reasons of his own, that leaves Ohio governor John Kasich, now positioning himself as a moderate of sorts and (although he denies it) as someone’s vice presidential pick. His results did not amount to a great deal, but he only fell a few percentage points behind Trump in Vermont and he came close to respectability in Massachusetts. That was enough. He’s not pulling out yet.

So what’s next? Trump, who has long since transcended what were thought to be the rules of the American political game, will sweep on through outrage and gaffes, the strong favourite to win the GOP nomination and the strong favourite to lose against Hillary. Republicans who oppose Trump are focusing on his failure (to date) to win over more than half of their voters. Their best hope is that the non-Trump forces can coalesce behind one credible champion—Rubio, preferably, or Cruz—in sufficient numbers to put to a stop to a momentum driven by forces much greater than any of the candidates in this race. Failing that, they have to pray that, between them, Rubio, Cruz, Kasich and the good doctor can amass sufficient delegates to take the fight against Trump all the way to the Republican convention in July. Yes, these are long shots, very long shots.

Meanwhile, Hillary is measuring the drapes for the White House.

Will we lose America if we vote for Brexit?

Prospect, February 17, 2016

The news that Barack Obama is, in the words of the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Corker, planning “a big, public reach-out” to persuade British voters to remain in the EU should not come as a great surprise. Obama has made his thoughts clear on this topic for a while now, and so have his surrogates, including Michael Froman, America’s most senior trade official. In October last year, Froman somewhat menacingly suggested that the US would not be particularly interested in signing a trade agreement with a post-Brexit Britain.

For his part, Obama was in sync with the long-established, bipartisan Washington line. Henry Kissinger may never have said, in the words famously attributed to him, “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?” but the US has backed deeper European integration since the dawn of the Cold War. It was regarded as a supplement of sorts to NATO as well as a guarantee that Europeans would not again be at each other’s throats. Having, as they saw it, come in to rescue the old world twice in one century, Americans were anxious to avoid a third go-round.

And with British power waning, the US thought that London should throw in its lot with Brussels, not least because the Brits could be useful allies there. Damon Wilson, a former member of George W Bush’s National Security Council, recently fretted that Brexit would deprive the US “of a critical voice in shaping not only EU policy, but the future of Europe.” This viewpoint that may not reflect political reality (no member state is more outvoted in the EU than Britain), but it remains highly influential nonetheless.

However, a few months earlier, Jeb Bush had this to say about Froman’s not so veiled threat: “Great Britain is a sovereign nation, and they must make this decision about their relationship with Europe on their own. The US should not be putting a thumb on the scale and certainly shouldn’t bully an ally.” Marco Rubio, another candidate for Republican presidential nomination, followed suit: “Irrespective of what decision the UK makes… they’ll continue to be certainly our best friend in the world and one of our strongest alliances.”

Donald Trump may be raising the prospect of “revolutions” in Europe, but even in less excitable sections of the American right, sympathies are starting to swing away from the Brussels project. The succession of crises that has shaken the EU has also shaken the perception that it is a stabilising force on the continent—a perception that has always underpinned America’s longstanding enthusiasm for an “ever closer union” it has never quite understood.

And members of America’s conservative pundit class have recently begun to take a more critical look at what the EU stands for. Its supranationalism and suspicion of Anglo-Saxon capitalism don’t play well, and nor do obvious signs of anti-Americanism. For now, the broader Washington consensus on the EU is more or less unchanged, but there will be more sympathy for Brexit on the American right than there would once have been.

Conversely, to a good number of American progressives, including almost certainly Obama, the EU is a glimpse of a better tomorrow, a fine example to their own country, nicer, greener, its supranationalism an advantage. To be sure, Brexit would be unhelpful to America’s broader interests as traditionally defined (reinforced by worries that if a British departure from the EU triggers Scottish independence, the implications for NATO could be grim.) At the same time, there’s an element of moral disapproval too, fuelled by bien-pensant prejudice: walking away from that better tomorrow would be retrograde, reactionary, nationalist.

Then again, the EU’s disasters and triumphs, let alone the twists and turns of the Brexit saga pass most Americans by. And it’s hard to think that US business is much more concerned by a British rejection of “ever closer union.” Yes, there’s widespread appreciation for the single market, but the disapproving comments of some American multinationals and Wall Street power players about Brexit can largely be disregarded as political moves designed to curry favour in London, Brussels and Berlin. For the most part, American companies can be expected to take a pragmatic view. The problem for them is less Brexit than the uncertainty over what it will look like. British voters may feel the same way.

Oregon occupation: a resistance against tyranny?

Prospect, January 14, 2016

If you want to understand the drama now unfolding in Oregon, checking out a photograph of Duane Ehmer riding his horse Hellboy across the high desert is not a bad place to start. Striving for the iconic, the Stars and Stripes in his hand, the Stars and Stripes on his jacket, the Stars and Stripes on his saddle blanket, he makes a pathetic, bathetic, cockeyed, grand—take your pick—spectacle, a performance for others, living out a dream for himself: Clint, Custer, the cavalryman at the crest of the hill, a Remington made flesh.

The stand-off at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge began when a group of people, some armed, occupied the refuge’s headquarters (no staff were present at the time) as a protest, they said, against the federal government’s harsh treatment of two local ranchers, 73-year old Dwight Hammond and his son Steven.

The Hammonds were in a fix. Two fires they had set on their ranch—the first in 2001 supposedly routine maintenance (although the prosecution argued it was designed to cover up poaching on government property), the second in 2006, a defensive ‘backfire’—had spread onto neighbouring federal land. The damage was minimal, but the Hammonds hadn’t notified the Bureau of Land Management—the US government body responsible for administering more than 250 million acres of public land—before lighting either. That was unwise, and, in the case of the 2006 fire, quite possibly dangerous.

Father and son were sued in a civil case (they ended up paying the government $400,000). They were also prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned, but for very small fractions of the minimum five years mandated by the law. The trial judge ruled that a five-year term would be “grossly disproportionate”; it would constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” and, as such, be unconstitutional. The government appealed the sentence, outraged, perhaps, that these miscreants had got off too lightly. Then again, the Hammonds and the BLM, a sometimes overbearing body often resented by ranchers, had been feuding over grazing rights—and much more beside—for years. Uncle Sam may have simply taken the opportunity to deal with the Hammonds once for all.

But “grossly disproportionate” is routine when it comes to the application of America’s notorious minimum sentencing guidelines. After the appellate court considered the precedents that make the cruel all too usual, the Hammonds were resentenced to five years apiece, with credit for time served (both had already completed their original sentences). The two returned to prison this month.

The Hammonds’ plight attracted the attention of Ammon Bundy, one of the fourteen children of Cliven Bundy, the anti-government militant who had been at the center of the armed stand-off at his Nevada ranch in 2014 that (eventually) arose out of his longstanding refusal to recognize the authority of the BLM (and pay his grazing fees). The nut hadn’t fallen far from the tree: the younger Bundy arrived in Oregon to help, he claimed, the Hammonds out. The talk was of peaceful protest, but with ‘militiamen’ beginning to show up on the scene, the Hammonds, recognizing, I suspect, trouble when they saw it, said that they weren’t interested.

No matter: Bundy and his team took over the refuge buildings on 2nd January and, as at the time of writing, there they remain, backed up by a fluctuating number of supporters, some appreciated by Bundy, some not. Many are associated with the ‘militias’ and other ‘patriot’ groups operating on the wilder, poorer, whitest fringes of the American right, frequently lost to paranoia, conspiracy theory, and apocalyptic expectations of various kinds. If there’s one thing that unites them it’s their alienation from an America that is, in their view, no longer the republic of its founders and, as a result, of questionable legitimacy or none.

So far, the authorities have handled the stand-off with care, clearly hoping that the occupiers will drift away. It may be over twenty years since the deadly sieges at Waco and Ruby Ridge, but there’s evidently little appetite on the part of law enforcement to risk a repetition of two tragedies made much worse by heavy-handed tactics, with hideous consequences then—and later: the Oklahoma City bombers were pushed further down the path to mass murder by those earlier deaths in Texas and Idaho.

For their part, the men with guns in a remote corner of Oregon may be acting out a script, however idiotic, of heroic last ditch resistance against the tyranny that has usurped their America, but, up until now, there have been relatively few signs that they want to take their own private Alamo much further than they already have: On the contrary, in fact.

But the Hammonds will stay in jail, and the BLM will stay in charge. This stand-off will do little or nothing to speed up the retreat from mandatory minimum sentencing which is belatedly—and gradually—underway. As for triggering any changes in the complex and politically fraught issue that haunts this confrontation—the way that the Feds manage and mismanage millions of acres (including about half of Oregon and, incidentally, more than a third of California) that would often be better in local, state or private hands—well, that’s not going to happen.

Donald Trump's Genius

Prospect, December 20, 2015

Greenwich Village, NYC, February 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

At a lunchtime meeting in Manhattan a month or so ago, a prominent member of America’s conservative commentariat—it wouldn’t be fair to name him—was invited to give his predictions for the 2016 election. He laughed and said that, as he had been forecasting the imminent bursting of the Trump bubble for months, he might not be the best person to ask.

But no one, not even, I suspect, the Donald, had expected that his campaign would do as well as it has. Within days of announcing his bid for the Republican nomination back in June, Trump was running at 11 per cent, sharing the top ranking with two senators. And that was just the beginning.

At the time of that lunch meeting, Trump was leading in the polls, followed by Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon, in second place and Carly Fiorina, a businesswoman, in third. What these three had in common was that they had never held elective office, which, our speaker suggested, showed that Republicans were very unhappy with the politicians they had. And so they were. And so they are.

Trump’s genius lay in spotting one of the issues that made Republicans unhappiest—immigration—and making it his own. The reluctance of the Republican establishment to respond to the anxiety on the right—and not just the right—on this topic had opened up a gap in American politics. And in politics, if there’s a gap that is big enough, and promising enough, someone will come along to fill it. Trump, never previously known as an immigration hawk, swooped on the issue that, more than any other, has made his campaign what it is, basing a good portion of it on something that is easy to understand, if difficult to build: a wall along the southern border of the United States. Message sent. Message received. According to an August survey by Rasmussen Reports (admittedly a Republican-leaning polling group) some 70 per cent of likely Republican voters supported Trump’s wall, as, incidentally, did 51 per cent of all likely voters.

The Republican establishment only has itself to blame. It ignored the warning signals sent by the collapse of George W Bush’s proposed immigration legislation in 2007 (it was scuppered by a revolt on the right) and by the failure of an immigration reform plan cobbled together by a bipartisan “Gang of Eight” senators in 2013.

Reasonable people can disagree over immigration, but it says something that none of the career politicians running for the Republican nomination had the sort of track record that immigration hardliners were looking for. Some of the candidates for the Republican nomination have since developed a tougher stance on immigration, not least Marco Rubio, the young senator from Florida, but they were never going to be enough to please a constituency riled by Trump and inclined to distrust anyone who is, like Rubio, from within the Beltway. The fact that Trump has taken more moderate positions on this question in the past hasn’t mattered. Outsiders get a pass, it seems.

Viewed in this context, proposing a “total and complete” and whatever else you might think about it, clearly unworkable ban on Muslims entering the US “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on” was good, if brass-knuckled, politics. It linked the immigration controversy to security concerns sharpened by the Paris killings and a pervasive sense of a government that is not up to the job. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 59 per cent of Republicans (and 36 per cent of Americans) would support such a ban.

So what now? With (considerable) effort Trump can be found a place within the existing American political taxonomy. In his own way, he’s very New York, so much so that it has been claimed that he would do better to run against Gotham’s unpopular mayor, Bill de Blasio. Stretch a bit—no a lot—and Trump can be seen as an uncontrolled, un-PC and rather less intelligent version of former mayor Bloomberg, another authoritarian billionaire with just a hint (in Trump’s case in his pre-presidential political musings) of an early 20th Century Progressive about him.  Quite a few Republicans have complained that Trump is not really a Republican, and not without reason. But then again nor was Bloomberg, yet he won his first two mayoral elections under that label.

Yes, Trump is, as the late Lord Charteris would have put it, “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar”, a hard-edged huckster with more than a suspicion of the bully and the charlatan about him. But his brash, opulent and narcissistic excess, sprinkled with the stardust of show business, and the gold dust of however many billions he has (characteristically, it’s disputed) plays in America in a way still unthinkable in Britain.

If I had to guess (and a guess is all it is, believe me), Trump has reached some sort of peak in the polls: When the serious business of the primaries begins, his appeal will start to fade. What I don’t have to guess is that Hillary is already very pleased indeed.