Midterm madness — or Trump’s last stand?

standpoint, October 29, 2018 (November Issue)

La Guardia Airport, New York City, May 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

There are journalistic assignments that should be refused, not as a matter of principle but out of basic common sense. Making predictions about American politics in the age of Trump is one of them. That Donald Trump won the Republican nomination was surprising. That he ended up in the White House was — well, a strong enough what-the-hell adjective does not exist (I did not expect Trump to prevail and nor, quite possibly, did he). However, the chequered nature of that win, a two per cent loss in the popular vote (the widest margin of “defeat” for a victorious candidate since 1876) but a passable, if far from overwhelming, majority in the only vote that counts — the Electoral College — was a necessary reminder that federalism matters more and elite opinion less than is sometimes assumed.

Remembering that is a good beginning to understanding why, despite Trump ratcheting up a record of gaffes, blunders and peculiarity unthinkable in any other president, earlier talk of a Democratic “wave” in the   midterm elections on November 6 has evaporated.

While that might merit a celebratory presidential Diet Coke, the Republicans still face a tricky day on the sixth. Despite a healthy economy (GDP grew at an annualised 4.2 per cent in the second quarter, the unemployment rate dropped to 3.7 per cent in September and in the same month consumer confidence reached an 18-year high), almost all the “generic” polling has the generic Democrat comfortably ahead of the generic Republican. Even without Trump in the Oval Office this was coming. An incumbent president’s party almost always struggles in the midterms. Like a British by-election, except for far higher stakes (all the seats in the House of Representatives will be up for grabs, as will 35 Senate seats and numerous state-level offices), midterms are often used by the voters who show up (turnout is typically around 40 per cent, compared with 60 per cent in a presidential election year) to shake a fist at those in charge.

There are incumbent presidents, and then there is Donald J. Trump, whose approval rating has been dismal for most of his time in office. As I write (late October) it is ticking up and now stands somewhere in the mid-40s, weak for a strong economy and at a roughly similar level to Barack Obama’s polling eight years ago. But that was in the aftermath of the financial crisis and shortly before game-changing midterms in which the Democrats suffered a loss of more than 60 seats and control of the House, as well as a brutal reduction in their Senate majority. The Republicans’ chances will be hurt by too much Trump in some areas — upscale suburbs and their remaining redoubts on the east and west coasts in particular — but they could, in a paradox that may mean trouble for them beyond 2018, be hurt by not enough Trump elsewhere, specifically in the rust belt, where voters who moved from Obama (or no vote) to Trump made enough of a difference in their states to tip the 2016 election the GOP’s way.

The Great Revolt  by journalist Salena Zito and Republican strategist Brad Todd may be something of a rose-tinted (although fascinating) study of some of those who switched sides, but the results cited in the book are what they are. Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, a traditionally coal-mining area, gave Obama (also its choice in 2008) a 5-percentage point edge in 2012, but went to Trump by 20 points four years later. Tiny Lake County, Michigan is the poorest county in that state. It preferred Obama in 2008 and 2012 (on the latter occasion by five points), but handed Trump a 23-point lead in 2016. There were plenty more swings like that, and they were enough — just — to deliver Pennsylvania (by a little over 40,000 votes) and Michigan (by a little under 12,000 votes) to Trump in 2016.

At their heart, those swings to Trump were a protest by embattled “left-behinds” trying to preserve what was left of their status in a rapidly changing nation led by a political and media class that insulted, demeaned and demonised them. The pushback was not confined to the rust belt. The New York Times’s Nate Cohn noted last year, “Almost one in four of President Obama’s 2012 white working-class supporters defected from the Democrats in 2016, either supporting Mr Trump or voting for a third-party candidate.” These voters saw themselves at the wrong end of globalisation (they were), on the wrong side of the many-layered social, cultural and economic revolution being pushed by America’s coastal elites (they are), and they really, really did not like Hillary Clinton (who in turn dubbed them “deplorable”). But however much they had fallen out with the Democrats, they suspected that the Republicans were just a different side of a corrupt Washington establishment with no interest in their plight. To them, Trump was an outsider, a disruptor. Billionaire or not, he appeared to sympathise and they heard his dog-whistle too. They handed him a mandate to try something different (and they were prepared to lend some votes to those riding on his coattails as well).

Those new voters ought to be pleased enough with their choice. No small part of Trump’s appeal was his pledge to fix the bad trade deals that had supposedly cost so many American jobs. Since taking office, he has revised the free trade agreement with South Korea, and secured Canada and Mexico’s agreement to replace Nafta with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), in each case in ways designed to boost American manufacturing employment. As it is, some 400,000 new manufacturing jobs were created in the first 21 months of the Trump administration, far ahead of the pace in the last Obama years. Trump has also taken the tariff fight to the EU (for now there is a ceasefire), and, much more significantly, China. And when it comes to the red, white and blue, these voters should appreciate the difference between an Obama too ready to apologise for his country and a Trump rarely prepared to apologise for anything. Trump’s tough stance on immigration will not hurt him with this constituency either.

For all that, the polls suggest that quite a few rust belt bolters will return to the Democratic fold. Unions, determined to bring their numbers back in line, have stepped up their campaigning. Much of the economic recovery is still passing the left-behind by. Trump may be on the stump, but he is not on the ballot. Voting for just another Republican stiff does not deliver that same insurgent thrill.

Trump is a one-off. He was able to break through because he had the bucks, dreary competition and a powerful place in popular culture. However, he could not have managed it without an audience ready for the message that, thanks to the internet, he was able to communicate directly — with sly skill and without the intermediation of America’s nauseatingly pharisaical media. Say what you will about former Trump consigliere Steve Bannon, he grasped that the “three-legged stool” — strong defence, social conservatism and free market economics — that Ronald Reagan saw as essential for a GOP victory, was broken.

Republicans will not go as far down the populist and nationalist route as Bannon (who was also keen to defy the GOP’s tax taboo by raising taxes on the very richest) would advocate, but as former Trump speechwriter and transition adviser Frank Buckley pointed out his recent book, The Republican Workers Party, most Americans skew further to the left economically than many Republicans realised. Buckley maintains there is a “sweet spot” for the candidate “who won’t touch Social Security and who promises to nominate a judge in the mould of [the late conservative Supreme Court Justice] Antonin Scalia. Donald Trump, in other words”. Trade apart, the more “leftist” side to Trump (which has, to be fair, always been there) has not been, to put it mildly, very visible since he took office. However, regardless of the direction in which Trump may turn in the next two years, the best shot at a successful GOP future lies not with a Reagan 2.0, but in a formula that blends patriotic populism with, economically and socially, a robust American variant of Christian Democracy. It will not be a smooth ride.

Republican failure to repeat Trump’s rust belt miracle will not mean a Democratic landslide: Trump’s appeal to blue-collar whites has not disappeared, and his wider base within the GOP has remained remarkably resilient through the tweetstorms. While Trump’s approval ratings are low, and have always been low, they come with a very sturdy floor, albeit one that rests, to make a nonsense of architectural metaphors, on just one column — Republican voters. America’s political divisions have sharpened. The once respectable degree of approval a president could expect from supporters of the other party has been shrinking since the Eisenhower era. According to Gallup, both Ike and JFK enjoyed approval ratings from across the aisle averaging a little under 50 per cent. Bill Clinton, by contrast, could (the Pew Research Center found) only manage 27 per cent, a figure of which Obama (14 per cent) could only dream. Trump? Seven per cent.

Republicans, however, have stood by their man. On average, 84 per cent of them approve of the job Trump is doing, a rating roughly in line with that received by earlier presidents from their own team. Even if we ignore the effect of a strong economy (and we should not), and even if we ignore the way that America’s growing political polarisation is pushing Republicans to downplay or turn a blind eye to their leader’s obvious flaws (we should not), this is less surprising than it may seem. Stylistically Trump may have next to nothing in common with previous Republican presidents (or presidents full stop), but this former Democrat’s administration has broken with his (current) party’s orthodoxy by less than some imagined.

This year saw a massive tax cut (that it ignored the concerns of budget hawks was not, sadly, anything new). There has been significant regulatory rollback, both by repealing existing regulations and, no less importantly, by not introducing new ones. According to calculations by the Brookings Institution, 69 “major rules” (as defined by the Office of Management and Budget) were introduced in the first year of the Obama administration, but only 30 in Trump’s initial 12 months, a slowdown that should continue regardless of the midterm results. Sometimes it takes a crony capitalist to understand the value of getting government out of the way.

Then there are the courts. With the law increasingly politicised, the appointment of judges — as the fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court demonstrates — has become an increasingly bitter battlefield. Trump has placed two conservative judges onto the Supreme Court, offering Republicans the prospect of the clear right-of-centre tilt that they have been awaiting for years. He has also pushed through a record number of appointments further down the judicial pecking order. Neither achievement would have been possible without GOP control of the Senate. The Kavanaugh collision will have reminded any GOP voters who needed reminding that there is a lot at stake on November 6.

While Trump’s views on trade make some Republicans wince, there has been little (overall — as always with this president there have been some alarming moments) in his broader foreign policy to disturb them. Abandoning both the neocons’ expensive (in many senses) universalism and the ostentatious humility and “leading from behind” of the Obama years, in favour of a colder “Jacksonian” calculation of the national interest, has played well with the GOP’s rank-and-file. Trump has eased off his nuttier talk about Nato, and he appears to have bullied some of the Atlantic Alliance’s deadbeats into agreeing to cough up a bit more. Meanwhile, the US is boosting its own military budget, much of it with an eye on deterring China and, yes, Russia. For all Trump’s unsettling, even flirtatious attitudes to some of the world’s hard men, an America that is “great again” is not going to be pushed around, a theme that rarely plays poorly on the right.

When it comes to policy, the greatest difference between the Trump administration and its GOP predecessors may be over immigration. Divisions within the Congressional Republican party over this topic have meant that the only route to tighter control has been through administrative action. Bureaucracies — consider the Home Office — are not known for their light touch. The harshest aspects of the administration’s approach (most notably the deservedly notorious and highly unpopular “family separation” policy at the border) — have proved highly contentious. But the Democrats’ increasingly sharp shift on immigration (as in so many other matters, ever further to the left) has meant that those favouring a tougher approach to immigration — and that is most rank and file Republicans, even before a several-thousand-strong “caravan” of migrants started to move north from Central America in mid-October — have nowhere else to turn.

But will they turn out to vote? Traditionally Republicans have been more willing to make their way to midterm voting stations than have their opponents. For a while, it had looked as if this would not be the case in 2018. Enraged by Trump, Democrats have been turning out in more force than usual for “off-year” (elections held in an odd-numbered year) and “special” (by) elections. In themselves the results, whether slimmer victory margins or outright losses, particularly at the state level, do not make pleasant reading for the Republicans, but the pickup in Democratic turnout may be a dark omen, made darker still by signs that fewer Republicans were bothering to vote.

It may be, however, that the brawl over the Kavanaugh nomination — a brawl so nasty that, even despite America’s short attention span, it is unlikely to have been forgotten by election day — has brightened the picture for the GOP. Although the Kavanaugh drama widened a huge gender gap even further in the Democrats’ direction (according to a mid-October NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll of likely voters, women favoured the Democrats by a 57-32 margin, while the GOP’s lead with men was 52-38), it seemed to have energised some previously somnolent Republicans.

A mid-October CBS survey of “battleground states” revealed a jump in the number of Republicans who were “very enthusiastic” about voting to 62 per cent (compared to 51 per cent the month before). This trend was backed by a poll revealing that roughly equal numbers (80 per cent or so) of Republicans and Democrats considered that the midterms were “very important”. In earlier surveys this year, considerably more Democrats than Republicans had felt that way. The National Republican Congressional Committee reported that low-dollar giving, a characteristic sign of grassroots enthusiasm, has also perked up. It may be telling that, in eight key states, early voting (something permitted to varying degrees in 38 states and the District of Columbia) appeared to show the Republicans ahead in seven.

The bad news for the GOP is that six out of ten Democrats were already enthused about voting (more evidence that the Republicans will not see any turnout advantage this time round). Democratic fundraising, including those weathervane low-donations, has also been running strongly all year — and still is. In the third quarter, Democrats raised more than three times as much (in total) for their campaigns in the 30 “toss-up” states than Republicans could drum up, something that could easily tip a number of those seats the Democrats’ way, and is clearly a concern for the White House.

The even worse news for the party of Trump? It looks from a CNN poll, released on October 10, as if women will turn out to vote in just as large numbers as men. That is not normally the case. It is no coincidence that there has been a surge in the number of women running for office this year, a surge, for the most part, accounted for by, you guessed it, Democrats. Then again, 53 per cent of white women — including 45 per cent of white women with college degrees — voted for Trump in 2016, suggesting that some of the gender gap may be exaggerated. Perhaps there is a reason to believe (largely) anecdotal evidence that the onslaught on Kavanaugh may have persuaded some Republican women to (once again) overcome their doubts about the pussy-grabber and stick with their party.

Latinos may also fail the Democrats. They constitute just under 13 per cent of the electorate, and heavily favour the Democrats (a widely-quoted national exit poll showing that 29 per cent of Hispanics opted for Trump in 2016 looks to have been a substantial overestimate that — familiar story — failed to reflect regional disparities). It is striking then that, despite (if that’s the right word — feelings on this issue are more nuanced than often assumed) all the controversies over immigration, a late September poll showed that 41 per cent of Latinos “approved” of Trump’s job performance (and that was not so much of an outlier as might be thought). That does not necessarily mean that they will vote for him, but it may make them less determined to come out to vote against him. With Latino turnout customarily low (27 per cent in the 2014 midterms), that matters. One of the explanations for that reluctance to vote, incidentally, is that over 40 per cent of eligible Latino voters are under 35, an age range in which far fewer Americans of any kind are interested in voting. The data miners at FiveThirtyEight, a website known for its polling analysis, have found signs, including relatively high turnout by younger voters in 2017’s off-year elections, that hint that in 2018 this will be different.

So what is going to happen? In the absence of — and with this president this is a big “absence” — some new scandal catching fire (currently the New York Times is doing its best to create some kindling out of the Trump family’s tax “planning”), an unusually unfortunate tweet, a major development in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation or, to steal Harold Macmillan’s useful word, “events” (I am writing this a few hours after news broke that pipe bombs had been sent to some leading Democrats), there’s a chance that Republicans may actually increase their 51-49 Senate majority. They start with a strong defensive position. Only 9 of the 35 contested seats are currently in GOP hands. Moreover, thanks to Vice President Pence having a casting vote, they only need to hang on to 50 seats to keep control.

What’s more, Democratic hopes that a would-be Obama 2.0, Robert “Beto” O’Rourke, a likeable and extraordinarily well-funded Irish-American congressman from El Paso with a handy Latino nickname, might defeat Texas’s Rafael “Ted” Cruz, a pantomime villain Latino senator with a handy Anglo middle name, look likely to be disappointed. So does Phil Bredesen, Taylor Swift’s pick to upset the Republicans in Tennessee. The GOP is still on the defensive in Nevada and, particularly, Arizona, but there are signs that the tide is turning its way in both states. Republicans, meanwhile, are greedily eyeing a handful of possible gains too, including Florida, Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota, the latter two both states where the Kavanaugh wars may have helped the GOP.

It looks, however, as if Republicans will lose the House. The scale of defeat will probably be modest (perhaps very modest), a good way short of those more than 60 seats lost by the Democrats in 2010, not least because any sort of landslide would need Democrats to win a lot of Republican or Republican-leaning seats, not easy at the best of times, and these are not the best of times.

But any Democratic majority, however slim, will be enough to enable the party to launch the investigations that it hopes will enmesh and eventually strangle Trump. To win control of the House the Democrats will need 218 seats. They currently have a little under 200. If they reach the magic 218, the rules of the game will change in a way that is likely to influence politics more than policy. Democrats will have proper cards of their own — rather than those that chance or the cackhandedness of the president sling their way — to play. And, in the shape of investigations (directly or indirectly) of the president launched by congressional committees they would then control, they will play them aggressively.

Quite what these investigations will turn up is anyone’s guess, as is the way in which Trump, not always at his best under pressure, will react to their mere existence, let alone to any adverse conclusions they may draw. Meanwhile Mueller’s probe drags menacingly on. He has already gathered an impressive collection of scalps, and there will be more. Whether, by encouraging a Democratic House to try its luck with impeachment, one might eventually come with orange hair may define the next two years.

In the unlikely event that the Republicans lose the Senate as well as the House, their leaders’ most likely response will be to try to distance the GOP from the president who led them to disaster. That will be no easy task with so many of the party faithful on the Trump train. And it was not just the GOPeons. A good number of the GOP elite also hitched a ride: To take one example among many, just this past summer, former Trump foe, Senator “little Marco” Rubio was proclaiming the need for “a new nationalism”. “Make America Great Again” had, I suppose, been taken.

And if Republicans hold both Senate and House, the film director Rob Reiner, one of the most vocal of Hollywood’s maddened liberal herd, has tweeted a warning of what to expect: “A fascist autocracy.”

Oh.

A Huckster at the Mic

Mark Jacobson - Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the fall of Trust in America

The Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2018

‘Nonsense,” said the Talmudic scholar Saul Lieberman, referring to the Kabbalah long before its celebrity moment, “is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship.” In the intriguing if uneven “Pale Horse Rider,” writer and journalist Mark Jacobson takes a primarily biographical approach to the strange, sad tale of the turn-of-the-millennium conspiracy theorist Milton William “Bill” Cooper (1943-2001). In doing so, he has missed an opportunity to take a deeper look at how, what and why we believe.

Cooper’s best-known work, “Behold a Pale Horse” (1991), is a dense, meandering and bewildering compendium of conspiracy theories. These include the allegation that JFK was murdered by his driver, the discovery of a plan to blow up Jupiter and the revelation of a treaty between Ike and space aliens. Yet there is also the suggestion that “the whole alien scenario is the greatest hoax in history,” a trick to frighten the “sheeple” (a favorite Cooper term) into submission to a “one-world government” controlled by . . . the Illuminati. Choose your own truth. After all, Cooper himself concedes that “one or more conclusions may be wrong.” This Bedlam medley has sold almost 300,000 copies. Why?

Readers wanting to find out are mainly left to navigate their own way through the fever swamps: Mr. Jacobson describes more than he explains, a flaw mitigated by his sharp eye and keen ear. Scattered through his account are stepping-stones to a partial understanding of Cooper’s appeal. A rapper from the Wu-Tang Clan tells Mr. Jacobson that “everybody gets f— [but] William Cooper tells you who’s f— you,” a near-perfect, if NSFW, summary of conspiracism’s attraction to the powerless or paranoid. It offers a structure for rage, an excuse for failure, a flattering fantasy of being in the know.

Mr. Jacobson dubs Cooper a “P.T. Barnum of dread.” (“The Hour of the Time,” his long-running shortwave-radio show, opened with wailing sirens, a sinister distorted voice, barking dogs, shrieking people and the sound of “tramping . . . feet, growing louder, closing in.”) But Cooper was a huckster who took more than a swig of his own Kool-Aid. The origins of his dreamscape—born at the intersection of creativity and psychiatric disorder, and reinforced by post-Vietnam, post-Watergate disillusionment and the need to make a buck—are easier to understand than its evolution. A saga in perpetual flux (Knights Templar! Freemasons! The aliens really were a hoax!), its backstory stretched across millennia.

Cooper was obsessed with the New World Order and the actions of jackbooted government enforcers against the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and white separatist Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. He became a part of the “patriot” fringe (Timothy McVeigh was an admirer). But, while his views often inspired theirs (the Clinton administration labeled him America’s “most dangerous” radio host), they did not always coincide. Cooper’s following among some African-Americans, a community targeted in conspiracies he claimed to have uncovered, does not fit the militia mold. On the other hand, Cooper reproduced the notorious anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” within “Behold a Pale Horse.” The deception, he maintained, was not that the “Protocols” were a fake, but something else: The plotters were not Jews, but Illuminati. Oh.

Conspiracism seeps through many cultures, nations and eras. It isn’t uniquely American, but it can take distinctively American forms. For example, Americans’ traditional distrust of government can mutate from a sign of rude civic health into a pathology. Cooper, as Mr. Jacobson relates it, tapped into a feeling of alienation fueled (often) by mourning for a vanished, if frequently imagined, past—white picket fences and all that—which he turned into a very American narrative about the betrayal of the promise of liberty contained in the Constitution, a sacred text now disdained.

Mr. Jacobson is not entirely unsympathetic to his subject’s point of view, commenting that there’s “no arguing [Cooper’s] basic insight: that something wasn’t right, that there was something you couldn’t quite put your finger on except . . . that you were a little less free than . . . yesterday.” That’s an extremely generous interpretation of Cooper’s “insight.” In any case, it’s no secret that we live in an ever more controlled, ever more controlling society.

Mr. Jacobson accepts that Cooper said “some of the nuttiest things” yet asserts that what counted was “the journey, the relentless search for truths.” But that was not what Cooper sought. He replaced truths he didn’t like with stories that he did. In June 2001 Cooper discussed threats made against the U.S. by Osama bin Laden. There would indeed, predicted Cooper, be a “major attack.” Bin Laden would be blamed, but “don’t you even believe it.” Within hours of the 9/11 attacks, Cooper was telling listeners that the two jets could not have felled the Twin Towers any more than a truck filled with fertilizer could have brought down Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah building. He was the first Truther.

Mr. Jacobson attributes the spread of the Truther virus to the need for “explanation . . . [and] something that made sense”—as if, according to its brutal logic, the 9/11 massacre did not. Yet those words work well as a general description of conspiracism’s allure: Unwilling to face life’s arbitrariness, we make connections where none exist.

Cooper ended his days “a madman,” writes Mr. Jacobson, “holed up in his [Arizona] hilltop home.” There was a federal warrant out for his arrest (for tax evasion and bank fraud) but after an altercation with a neighbor, local police took action. An attempted arrest in November 2001 ended with a scramble in the dark. Cooper shot first, leaving a cop paralyzed. A deputy returned fire, handing Cooper a death he had forecast on air—gunned down on his doorstep in the middle of the night, a Truther martyr, some argued.

The most in-depth coverage of Cooper’s death, notes Mr. Jacobson, may have come from “a then relatively unknown twenty-seven-year-old shortwave broadcaster from Austin, Texas: Alex Jones.”

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.

Underrated: Mike Pence

Standpoint, April 1, 2017

If the stories are accurate, Donald Trump had last-minute doubts about Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana and the person he’d just chosen as his running mate. If so, those doubts said more about Trump than Pence. The Donald would probably have preferred someone from his comfort zone: maybe Newt Gingrich, an eccentric whose glory days were decades ago, or New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a star eclipsed by scandal. He knew them reasonably well and, more importantly, understood that their last best hope of political advancement rested with him. They would know their place.

But Pence looked dangerously like his own man, an outsider foisted on Trump to reassure traditional Republicans and to bring decorum and a credible political track record to a ticket desperately short of both. To be sure, Pence faced a tough re-election fight for the governorship (which in the end he would have probably won), but he had also served six terms in Congress and had been mentioned as a potential presidential candidate for years. He had no need to jump aboard a Trump train only uncertainly connected to the rails. Worse, Pence had endorsed Ted Cruz and reportedly loathed The Donald. The Indiana governor denied that he felt that way, but it was hard to imagine a meeting of minds between a self-described “Christian . . . conservative and . . . Republican, in that order” and a chancer of no fixed party married to Ivana, Marla and Melania, in that order.

The Pence pick was enthusiastically received by GOP loyalists, and, however appalled they were by his hardline social — and not just social — conservativism, even the party’s opponents seemed somewhat soothed by the thought that, in the not-going-to-happen event of a Trump win, at least one pro would be in the new president’s vicinity. If there was a consensus, it was that Pence was a touch dull. There were mutterings too that he was not the brightest. Some of the latter can be put down to the lazy assumptions often made about religious types from flyover country, but, yes, Pence was a C student at high school and, yes, getting into law school had been something of a struggle. The vice president was not, one former associate told me, someone to get too deeply into policy details, but this former talk radio host was “good at messaging”.

That has not always been as true as it might have been. After his second (unsuccessful) attempt to make it into Congress, Pence apologised for running a campaign so negative that it backfired (that was then). A quarter of a century later, there was that looming re-election fight for the governorship. It looked trickier than it should have been, thanks partly to a battle over legislation designed to protect “religious freedom” (but seen by its critics as allowing discrimination against gays). Pence had annoyed both sides, initially by signing the law, then by agreeing to water it down.

That was unusual: Pence’s determination to stick to his principles, even if it meant defying a Republican president, had served him well in Washington after he won election to Congress in 2000. Grasping all the “legs” — fiscal, social and hawkish — of what Ronald Reagan famously described as conservatism’s “three-legged stool”, it wasn’t too long before he was on his way up.  The hardening attitudes on the Right that accompanied the financial crisis (Pence voted against the TARP bailout) and Obama’s election did him no harm either. He became a Tea Party favourite, largely without alienating more mainstream colleagues — no mean achievement. Chatter about a bid for the White House grew louder, but Pence opted to take aim first at the governor’s mansion, a shrewd choice for an ambitious legislator looking for the executive experience that could, if the opportunity arose, bolster a run for the presidency.

Four years later, an unexpected and rather different opportunity presented itself. Pence — more flexible than his reputation suggested — took it. There are dignified rationalisations, of course (patriotic duty, saw something good in Trump) for that decision, but it looks a lot like a brilliant contrarian bet. It would have been made easier to take by the prospect of that re-election fight at home and the thought that, if Trump lost, there was always 2020 and, in the interim, lucrative gigs on the conservative media and lecture circuit — a stint as a Palin, but with gravitas and a future.

Now Pence is a heartbeat, a scandal, or even a tweet away from the presidency. Quite how power is distributed in the Trump administration is opaque, but Pence is clearly much more than a state funerals’ veep, cold-shouldered onto the sidelines. He is out and about too, an ambassador for the administration: to Congress say, or attending the Munich Security Conference in February. He is professional, respectable, calming — no Spiro Agnew he, and, for that matter, no Trump either — and yet, a wise fellow, demonstratively loyal to his boss.

And if in the depths of the night, thoughts that are not quite so loyal come into this still sometimes underrated man’s head, I’m sure they are banished without more ado.

Trump Is No Loser, But Government Will Be Harder

You know the shot: “We finally really did it,” Charlton Heston contemplating the ruins of the Statue of Liberty. Well, the Statue and what she symbolises will survive the Trump presidency but that scene from Planet of the Apes leapt into my mind as I sat in a Manhattan restaurant on election night with a crowd of startled Republicans, some pleased, some not, watching another compelling drama lurch to a conclusion that most of those there, including me, had not anticipated.

So, what had “we” done? Well, by voting for Trump, or hazy Gary Johnson, the Libertarian (as I did), or crazy Jill Stein (the Green) or, in many cases, by not voting at all, Americans had rejected Hillary Clinton, the direction the country was going, or both. But it was not that much of an endorsement of The Donald. Trump has his fans, to be sure, but, even allowing for the polarisation that such figures generate, he proved to be a most unpopular populist, the most unpopular major party presidential candidate in American electoral history. He was, however, the handiest brick to throw through the establishment’s window.

What we can now expect, absent some last astounding scandal, is that Donald Trump, bully, braggart, billionaire (presumed), and defendant (currently) in some 75 lawsuits, will soon take up residence in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the first president never to have held earlier elective office or served in the military. But that won’t stop him benefiting from the way that the legislative branch — and this is a bipartisan offence — has acquiesced for some time now in the transfer of power to the executive.

Barack Obama: “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation . . . I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.”

Trump will also have Congress — and a Supreme Court nomination — in his pocket.

Working out what Trump will do with the power heading his way is not made easier by his pronouncements over the years.  The Donald is always sure, but in sometimes inconsistent ways. In 1999 he was sure about a one-time “net worth” tax on the very rich to wipe out the national debt. He was also sure that the Republicans were “just too crazy right” for him to remain in the party. He was “very pro-choice” then; now he is “very, very proud to say that [he is] pro-life”.

Looked at kindly, this shows a willingness to change his mind; looked at less benignly, it shows a willingness to play to whoever is in the room, but running through it all is his conviction that he has the answers.  “Nobody knows the system better than me,” Trump told the Republican convention, “which is why I alone can fix it.” I alone: what’s right is what Trump says it is — I, I, I.

Party affiliation provides less of a clue than it might. Trump, a former member of the Democratic, Reform and Independence parties, enjoys an equivocal relationship with a GOP that he has hijacked, or at the very least exploited, taking advantage of its resources, its people and its brand when it suited him, bypassing them when it did not, helped by his money, social media, the power of celebrity — and the fact that his revolt against the GOP’s establishment actually increased his appeal to many Republican voters.

In an attempt to reconcile these contradictions he hired Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, as his chief of staff on the same day as he picked Steve Bannon as chief strategist and senior adviser. Chalk meet cheese:  Priebus is establishment, Bannon is a bomb-thrower (there are harsher words), the executive chairman of the hard-right, sometimes dog-whistling Breitbart News and the former CEO of the Trump campaign. Bannon’s appointment announced that the revolution continues; choosing Preibus was a signal that members of the old regime were welcome to help ensure that it would be professionally run and, whisper it discreetly, be less of a breach with the past than some feared. As the old saying goes, people are policy. And, as I write these words, the news flashes across the screen that former Goldman Sachs partner Steven Mnuchin “has been recommended by Donald Trump’s transition team to serve as Treasury Secretary”.

Whether such recruits will be able to steady the controls on the Trump train must, however, remain an open question for now, dependent on who else is along for the ride, and who, beyond his immediate family, Trump will listen to. The operation of his fractious and chaotic campaign is not an encouraging precedent.

And how, once in the Oval Office, will Trump run his team?  One guess — the reassuring guess — is that he will set a general course and then delegate much of the day-to-day business to, maybe, his Vice-President, Mike Pence, a former congressman and current governor of Indiana, and, therefore, someone with both legislative and executive experience and good connections in Washington. He is someone who could, presumably, work well with Priebus.

Backing that up is the idea that The Donald is the dog that caught the car. In all probability, Trump never thought he’d be the Republican nominee (and nor, it’s credibly suggested, did he want to be). He almost certainly never thought that he’d end up in the White House, a job that promises the pomp he relishes, but circumstances that are a lot less fun than the billionaire frolics he has enjoyed for decades.

“If Donald,” wrote Colin Powell (no fan) last June, “were to somehow win, by the end of the first week in office he’d be saying ‘What the hell did I get myself into?’” On the other hand, Trump has sold himself — and quite genuinely sees himself — as the master of the deal. Thus he claims to favour free or, more accurately, freer trade, but not “stupid trade”, and stupid trade is, he jeered in 2015, the result of deals negotiated by “political hacks and diplomats”. The US has, he reckons, “the greatest negotiators in the world, but we don’t use them”. Something tells me that he considers Donald J. Trump to be one of those world-beaters, and that, when it comes to rewriting America’s trade deals, he plans on being very much involved. He has boasted of hiring the best and then letting them get on with it, “but I always watch over them”.

To be fair, this is what many Trump voters want him to do. The Donald has, for decades, marketed himself with remarkable success and occasional accuracy as mogul and wheeler-dealer. He has been hired as a businessman, to do for his country what politicians could not.

Trump the dealmaker will see politics as transactional and turn his talents to diplomacy, trying to rework Nato, say, or America’s poisonous relationship with Putin (“I think I’d be able to get along with him”) or with China, the last a relationship where trade disputes and great power rivalry could intersect in dangerous ways.

The greatest negotiators in the world are going to be busy, and if they apply the brinkmanship, bad faith and histrionics that typically come with big-ticket real estate transactions, the world will be in for sleepless nights, nights made more fraught still by Trump’s long-held belief that negotiation is a zero-sum game. There are only winners and losers, and Donald Trump is not a loser. 

But, for all this uncertainty, there are themes certain to be reflected in the policies that will be pursued by a Trump administration. Pre-eminent among them is his suspicion — shared by many Americans — that the US is being ripped off by its partners, whether in trade or in defence. As far back as 1987, Trump spent nearly $100,000 on full-page newspaper ads in which he maintained that Japan (then regarded as America’s main economic challenger) was free-riding off America’s willingness to pick up the tab for the country’s defence. He argued for a different approach: “Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend our allies . . . ‘Tax’ these wealthy nations, not America . . . Let America’s economy grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defence of their freedom. Let’s not let our great country be laughed at any more.” 

Nearly 30 years later, Trump was making a similar case to the New York Times (and not only the New York Times), except that the list of freeloaders now included most of Nato, run on a basis that he described as “unfair”, an adjective that, with its synonyms, has long been a bad, bad word in the Trump lexicon. In keeping with The Donald’s paranoid style, it hints at hostile conspiracy. Remember all that talk of a “rigged” election? But back to Nato: the US, Trump complained, was paying a “disproportionate share” of the freight.

He has a point. Currently America pays a little over 20 per cent of Nato’s direct costs, a number which is adjusted regularly and based on a percentage of its share of the alliance’s collective GNP. That seems reasonable enough (and, as these things go, the number is not huge), but the real problem concerns something far larger. The US effectively accounts for more than 70 per cent of all defence spending by Nato members. Some of that mismatch reflects the global reach of American power, not all of which is of much benefit to other Nato states either directly or indirectly, but even so.

More damaging still is the fact that so few Nato states meet the organisation’s decade-old commitment to spending at least 2 per cent of GDP on defence, a commitment only satisfied by five out of the Nato 28, something that also led Barack Obama to talk of “free-riders”, and he was far from the first American president to grumble. The US shells out some 3.6 per cent, mighty Greece comes next with 2.4 per cent and the only other countries to hit the target are the UK, Estonia and Poland.  France comes close with 1.8 per cent, and the other Baltic States are, wisely, scrambling to catch up. The rest of Nato falls far short: Angela Merkel may be being hailed by some as the leader of the free world in the wake of Trump’s triumph, but her country only spends 1.2 per cent. Others are even stingier: Canada, home of Justin Trudeau, hero of Davos, coughs up just 0.99 per cent.

Trump has hinted that Nato countries that don’t pay their way might not be able to count on the US coming to their aid as required by the mutual defence obligations that underpin the alliance. He has since backtracked somewhat, and the optimistic take is that those remarks were simply an example of Trump the negotiator at work, putting pressure on partners in breach of their part of a deal. Maybe, but Trump is playing a dangerous game. Deterrence must be credible. Any suggestion that America would not protect a vulnerable Nato ally increases the chance that Putin might be tempted to try his luck. This only underlines the importance of Trump’s security and diplomatic hires. For Trump to pick hawks, like, say, John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN, or former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, would send one message; recruiting former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (who has described Estonia as “a place in the suburbs of St Petersburg”) quite another.

But Russia’s leader is more cautious than often understood. Much has, rightly, been made both of Trump’s need to win and — how shall I put this — poor anger management skills. Putin is unlikely to want to provoke The Donald, and, contrary to the fears of some critics, he can only go so far in wooing him. Yes, both men have strong authoritarian streaks (under Trump, America will be grateful for the checks and balances still built into its system), both see themselves as tough guys and both reject the attempt to create a supranationalist world order — in Putin’s case, by word and deed; in Trump’s, so far, only by word. “Americanism”, he has declared, “not globalism, will be our credo.” But these similarities will not be enough to transform Trump into Putin’s patsy. Trump evidently (and not unreasonably) doubts that Russia poses an existential threat to the US — he seems ready to co-operate with Moscow in Syria — but if Putin pushes Trump in ways that Trump thinks matter, Trump will push back.

But what Trump thinks matters will differ from what the US has thought mattered in the past. There is some point, he has said, beyond which America “cannot be the policeman of the world”, a line that resonates with those communities, many of them in regions that voted for Trump, who have lost so many of their own in wars where the US was doing just that. 

One corollary of Trump’s more modest view of America’s role is that US allies will — if they are serious about it — have to assume more responsibility for their own defence than in the past. Another is the implicit recognition that the global political system is multi-polar, something that Putin has long claimed and the Chinese have not even had to bother mentioning. That, in turn, may well imply a return to realpolitik that is closer to Nixon/Kissinger than Reagan’s loftier vision, let alone George H.W. Bush’s nutty “new world order”. The debate — and the pushing — will not be over the existence of spheres of interest, but over the location of their boundaries, something that may have grim implications for borderlands such as Ukraine.

Trump insists he is not an isolationist, and I don’t think that he is. He is planning a major increase in defence spending. Where he sees threats, whether it’s the Iran deal or IS, he does not wish them away. That said, he does not appear to have learned enough from seeing what Obama’s leading from behind has led to. When the US withdraws, the vacuum can be filled in dangerous ways. Trump is correct that America’s allies ought to pay more for their own defence, but an overly forceful insistence on this will lead to a fraying of both the transatlantic alliance and America’s partnerships in Asia. The consequences are hard to predict, but will inevitably involve a dilution of America’s ability to control what happens next.  That’s unlikely to end happily.

These consequences will be worsened by the new administration’s policies on trade and the environment, which, whatever their merits, will be seen as further evidence that the US is going its own way. And in Europe, at least, the more hard-edged side of Trump’s domestic agenda, not to speak of the spectacle of, to some, an ugly American beyond all caricature taking up residence in the White House, will do even more to stoke up the anti-Americanism forever soiling the continent’s intellectual and political life.

That won’t deter Trump. The president-elect has already appointed Myron Ebell, a leading climate change sceptic from the Competitive Enterprise Institute think tank, to oversee his environmental transition team. Reversing Obama’s climate change regulation, much of which he introduced by executive order (and what was brought to life by the pen can be killed by the pen) while initiating America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord (legally, a more complex process) are obviously, so to speak, in the pipeline. It’ll mean  yet more international opprobrium, so add it to the pile. Domestically it will enrage those who are already enraged by the prospect of a Trump presidency, but it will reassure many of his supporters — who are in for quite a few let-downs in the years to come — and, as a gesture of support to Team Trump’s symbolically important coal miners, will go down well with the Donald’s crucial blue-collar supporters. 

When in 2012 Trump tweeted that global warming was, in essence, a hoax (he later said that he was joking), he blamed the Chinese: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” Conspiracies, always conspiracies, trade, always trade: when, 30 years ago, Trump was attacking the way the US paid so much towards the defence of its allies in the Far East, much of his focus was on the way that the money saved had helped build up economies that, he implied, had got too strong for America’s good. Asked in 2016 by the New York Times for his view on previous presidents, he replied that one he “really liked” was Ronald Reagan but  he had “never felt on trade we did great” in the Reagan era. 

Reagan was neither a purist nor naive (he believed in trade that was free and fair). He was not above pushing “voluntary” restraint on importers and imposing tariffs when he felt had to, but protectionism, he argued, was “almost always self-destructive”. He proposed a free trade pact with Mexico  in 1980, a forerunner of sorts for the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) passed a decade and a half later. Trump recently described Nafta as “the worst trade deal maybe ever signed  anywhere”. He had opposed it even before it was approved, reportedly on the grounds that US negotiators had cut a bad deal. What Trump actually meant was that he could have handled everything so much better. 

Trump has been harping on about trade for a long time and often in a way that, reflecting his zero-sum approach to negotiation, focuses on the failure to cut a better deal. This approach slips easily into a preference for mercantilism over free trade, a choice that fits neatly under the umbrella of America First, and helped deliver the voters who had found themselves on the wrong side of globalisation, voters, particularly in the Midwest, who took Trump over the top on election day.

Trump’s victory will finish off the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the EU, a deal already struggling even to be stillborn. The Trans-Pacific Partnership seems set for the knacker’s yard too. No new free-trade deals can be expected soon — even, I suspect with Brexit Britain. Reversing those large agreements that are already in place will be more difficult, however. Trump’s talk of imposing a 45 per cent tariff on Chinese imports if the People’s Republic doesn’t ease up on subsidies and other practices he views as unfair, would lead to higher prices in America and, eventually, slower growth, something he must understand. That 45 per cent should be seen as an opening bid in a long negotiation.

Similarly, Trump’s threat to pull the US out of Nafta (a move a president could make on his own) and impose a 35 per cent tariff on some Mexican imports risks major disruption to the supply chains of American companies, and could trigger a trade war, higher prices in the US, and, if the Mexican economy falters, a fresh surge of illegal immigration into a certain country to the north with an as yet unbuilt wall. Once again, sabre-rattling today is likely to be no more than the beginning of a negotiation that may be noisy, but will change relatively little.

But trying to rein in globalisation is to fight a war that is largely lost and, so far as the workplace is concerned, increasingly irrelevant. US manufacturing output stands at an all-time high, but manufacturing employment has declined to levels last seen in the late 1940s. Quite a number of Trump’s “forgotten men and women” (a phrase with Depression era echoes) lost good jobs and good pay, not to the Chinese, but to automation — to the robots. Many, many others will suffer the same fate, and no politician, left or right, establishment or populist, really knows what to do about it. This time round, Trump benefited from these fresh additions to the ranks of the early 21st-century’s left-behinds, but if he cannot come to their rescue (he can’t) they will look for help elsewhere, quite possibly to a Democratic party shifting rapidly to the Left.

Meanwhile, Trump’s answer to the economy’s woes is to propose what chancellors of the exchequer once called a dash for growth, combining Reagan-style tax-cutting and deregulation with a $1 trillion infrastructure package, much of which would be financed by the private sector, incentivised in turn by tax credits. As with a great deal of Trump’s programme the details are vague, but it’s a reminder that, even if Trump is again a Republican, he is attached to no one wing of the party. If tax-cutting and deregulation is Reaganesque, upgrading the country’s dilapidated infrastructure harks back to Eisenhower, architect, among other grands projets, of the Interstate Highway System and, as National Review’s Reihan Salam has argued, to Nixon, who (unlike Eisenhower) posed as an opponent of the elite, but, like the general, saw a role for big government. Similarly, Trump will defend the big entitlement programmes — from Social Security (pensions), to Medicare (health care for the elderly) to, perhaps with some tweaks, Medicaid (healthcare for the poor). He knows what his voters want, which is why he is already signalling that his repeal of Obamacare may not be quite as comprehensive as he has promised in the past. The way that Obamacare is structured may be unloved, and the way that it functions is flawed (sharp increases in Obamacare premiums probably played a part in Clinton’s defeat), but chipping away at its benefits will be a hard sell, unless the GOP can find a more credible replacement than it has managed to so far.  

How will all this be paid for? Trump is hoping for a supply-side miracle, with another boost coming, fingers crossed, from the repatriation of corporate funds stashed overseas after the sharp cuts in America’s corporate tax rate (on some measures amongst the highest in the world) that he has in mind. On the other hand, the GOP’s green eyeshade wing, headed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, will be less than convinced by Trump’s maths and with worries over the federal government’s nearly $20 trillion debt likely to increase as interest rates move up, there will be battles to come, battles that will be a reminder of deeper fractures that Trump has opened up on the right, battles in which Democrats, at least on the infrastructure plan, may find themselves in a very strange place, by Trump’s side.

That won’t be the case on immigration. Even if Trump is already backtracking on that wall of his (some of it will be fence, apparently), a much tougher immigration regime will be put in place. The president-elect has already announced that he would like to see the deportation of 2-3 million illegal aliens with “criminal records”, an exaggerated number, which also makes no distinction between different types of criminal past. Americans are uncomfortable with the thought of mass deportations and they are unlikely to approve of breaking up a family over a minor conviction from decades ago. If Trump’s immigration plans are not to be swept away by a tide of revulsion, he may have to go more carefully than he thinks, and not just in this respect.

Nevertheless, immigration, both in its own right and as a proxy for wider ethnic and demographic unease, goes a long way to explaining why The Donald will be moving into the White House. If the country can finally assert control over its borders (and the wall is not the best way of doing so), it can regularise the position of those illegals who remain (there are currently estimated to be a little over 11 million of them in the US). Then a long-overdue serious debate over immigration can begin.

November’s election result would only have been possible in a troubled, deeply-divided nation. Time will tell whether Trump’s victory is another symptom of what ails the country, or the beginning of a cure. I’m not optimistic. Then again, Newt Gingrich (after a job?) exults that “a Trump administration is going to be among the most extraordinary, creative, inventive, exciting periods in all of American political history.”

It’s going to have to be.

British libel laws: No model for the United States

Daily News, November 3, 2016

Union Station, Washington DC, August 2016 ©  Andrew Stuttaford

Even though Princess Diana is no longer with us, there is still quite a lot that Donald Trump appreciates from across the pond. There's that Scottish golf course of his, there's Brexit, and, judging by a recent interview he gave to Miami's CBS 4, there are England's libel laws.

Trump, claiming to be a "tremendous believer (in) the freedom of the press," is significantly less enthusiastic about the news media's ability, as he sees it, to get away with "terrible, terrible mistakes," mistakes made "on purpose" and intended to "injure people." If he's been wronged, he said, he should be able to sue and so should "anyone else."

In England, maintained Trump, "they have a system where you can actually sue if someone says something wrong." And: "You have a good chance of winning. And deals are made and apologies are made," deals (with Trump it's always deals) and apologies that the U.S. media do not have to make.

I'm British-born and usually pretty chuffed when I hear my native land praised for the way that it manages its affairs, but this time not so much. To be clear about one thing first: Trump is not really talking about "anyone" being able to win damages for defamation by the media. What's bugging him is that in America it's very difficult for a "public figure" (and, trust me, Donald Trump counts as a public figure) to do so.

Under U.S. law and well-established precedent affirmed by the Supreme Court, where public figures are concerned, it's not enough to show carelessness, inaccuracy and damage.

Public figures also have to prove that "actual malice" was involved. That means that the statement was either published by someone who knew it was false or, assuming it turned out to be false, didn't care one way or the other. That can be tough to prove.

Over in England, public figures have it quite a bit easier, although not quite as much easier as Trump, not always known for keeping up with what goes on in the world, may think. In fact, a year or so back, English defamation law, which can be rougher on the press than on those complaining about it, was modified in ways that will make it harder for plaintiffs to use litigation or the threat of litigation to muzzle the media.

Changes included adding the requirement that a statement is not defamatory unless plaintiffs can show "serious harm" (or the danger of serious harm) to their reputations. For businesses, that now means demonstrating that they have suffered, or face the prospect of, "serious financial loss." Additionally, most cases will now be decided by a judge rather than a jury, which ought to reduce costs and, probably, damages.

The press should also benefit from the fact that a still somewhat hazy "public interest" defense has been given statutory force (thereby reinforcing the principle that it's OK to publish something that is — or might reasonably be thought to be — a matter of public interest). But a public interest defense would be far less of an obstacle to litigation by public figures in England than they could, to Trump's obvious irritation, expect to face in the U.S.

Despite these reforms, England's new law retains one key difference with American practice that will appeal to The Donald. In the U.S., it's the plaintiff who has to demonstrate that he or she has been defamed. But in England, it's the defendant who has to prove that what was published isn't defamatory, an obligation that comes with a degree of risk that some editors, journalists and publishers won't relish taking, a risk that helps explain, to take one notorious example, why the sex crimes — crimes that stretched over decades — of the disk jockey Jimmy Savile, a major celebrity in the U.K., went unreported until after his death in 2011.

This chilling effect on what will be published has, as a more recent controversy over a book on Vladimir Putin's finances shows, survived the new law, at least to a certain extent. It's an effect that, I suspect, Trump would be delighted to see spread to the U.S., a country blessed — up to now — with far greater protections for free speech than my homeland.

That mustn't happen. The case can be made that public figures in the U.S. are forced to climb too high a hurdle to defend their reputations, but that is a part of the price that preserving free expression demands.

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.

Race To The White House Through The Looking Glass

Standpoint, October 1, 2016

East Anglia is not, perhaps, an obvious place to assess the American vote this autumn, but back in the UK on a brief trip, I noticed that the small section in a Norwich bookshop dedicated to the US presidential election featured almost nothing on Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump was represented by a series of biographies, exposés, comics and even colouring books. Few, if any, were admiring, but they crowded the Clintonware out. As so often, Hillary had been reduced to a grey blur (to borrow one Menshevik’s unwise description of Stalin), barely visible against the madcap backdrop of Trump’s trickster parade.

An election to decide who becomes the world’s most powerful man (or woman) is inevitably intensely focused on the character of the contenders. Even their running-mates, appointed amid brief, synthetic excitement, are speedily hauled away from the limelight, demoted to surrogates deployed to savage the opposing team in a manner that a presidential candidate cannot, or, more positively, to throw a sprinkling of low-wattage stardust over small crowds in small states.

That’s in a normal year. It’s symbolic of this campaign, dominated by the personality of one man, that few running-mates have been pushed quite so quickly into the background as Trump’s choice, Indiana governor Mike Pence. Adding respectability and good hair to a campaign with little of either, Pence is a stolid reminder that the GOP is traditionally the “daddy party”, a quality that risks being drowned out by the playground taunts of its presidential nominee.

From the tweets of Donald Trump: “@SenJohnMcCain should be defeated in the primaries. Graduated last in his class at Annapolis — dummy!”

For the record, McCain, a bright but truculent student, came not last but 894th out of 899, not quite ignominious enough for The Donald. Reducing the senator still further in the rankings was an example of Trump’s use of “truthful hyperbole,” a clever term (dreamt up by his ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal) for a clever idea. It goes a long way to explaining Trump’s success as a salesman of buildings, of stories, of conspiracies and of himself. What matters is not what is true, but what is remembered, and how.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

Many voters seem less disturbed by Trump’s abusive relationship with fact than they should be. They understand that Trump is true to himself if not to the truth, a proof of his authenticity even when based on lies.

But back to Mike Pence. He has been married for decades to one woman and has a surname with one syllable (something Trump reportedly believes “conveys strength”). Earlier this year, he endorsed Ted Cruz and had been said to “loathe” Trump. Trump’s Hoosier is, it turns out, not only respectable, but flexible, helpful given his role as a kind of “ambassador” to sceptical elements in the Republican establishment.

The Pence pick was muttered rather than proclaimed. He was introduced from a podium on which the Trump name was present, but the Pence name was not. The same could, for the most part, be said about the speech by Trump that followed, a typically Trump talk about Trump — with added terrorism, law and order, industrial decline, “crooked Hillary”, taxes, over-regulation, the Nafta disaster, that wall, Brexit, the building of a hotel in Washington DC (“under budget and ahead of schedule”), and triumph over the Republican party hierarchy.

From time to time, Trump remembered why he was meant to be there, and dragged his speech “back to Mike Pence” with a shout-out or two to the Indianan’s achievements, before reverting again to Donald J. Trump. 

Pence had been chosen partly for reasons of “party unity”, but The Donald’s signal was clear: this was still his campaign. And so it has proved. The election has been dominated by this most unexpected candidate, a shape-shifting, eccentric reminder of America’s infinite capacity to surprise, a narcissistic, poorly-informed, sometimes tin-eared, sometimes astoundingly intuitive post-political politician, a fantasist, a chancer who looks in the mirror and sees the future. His opponent — dull, exhausted Hillary — has been reduced to a supporting role, with the twist that is she who will limp off with the prize.

Trump’s most interesting observation in that speech was that he was “a messenger”, a humblebrag but accurate enough. His startling ascendancy in the Republican primaries, even if helped by the fact that he was taking on a divided field of rivals far weaker than the GOP leadership has ever been prepared to admit, sent a message about unhappiness on the Right.

The fact that Trump is, as I write, for all his flaws and gaffes, still very much in contention for the top job sends a broader, even gloomier message: America is not at ease with itself, a message echoed by those millions of Democrats who voted for Bernie Sanders, a grouchy Marxist lost in ancient delusion.

But it’s Trump who appears to be the messenger of those who are unhappiest of all. Early analyses of his rise emphasised the support he was winning among the embattled white working class, left behind by globalisation, job-destroying automation and sweeping demographic change (support swollen by the more traditional politics of racial resentment in his Southern and Appalachian redoubts) and reinforced by feelings of voicelessness and the suspicion that the country no longer had much room for them. It’s not only the poorest that feel this way. Read enough elite exultation, particularly in the media, at the prospect of an older, whiter America on its way to the grave, and it’s not hard to understand why some whites fear they are, in the sinister old Soviet phrase, “former people” in the making. 

Trump’s tax-cutting agenda (the numbers don’t add up, but Trump is hardly alone in being guilty of that) will only be of limited appeal to many of these voters. But they do appreciate much of the rest of what their champion has to say, both for its specifics, however implausible, and, no less, for how it feels. “Make America great again” is more than patriotic swagger. It’s a reproach and a promise, a wild, exhilarating swing against contemporary orthodoxy — on immigration, on free trade, on multiculturalism, on bearing too great a burden abroad and on much, much more besides. The Wall Street bashing, however incongruous from a millionaire/billionaire/whatever in his tower, plays well with this crowd too.

Whatever some alarmists might say, this is not fascism (as that term is properly construed) or anything like it. Despite Trump’s fondness for jutting his jaw like Il Duce, his rise is better understood by looking not at the Europe of nearly a century ago but at its current populist surge — of Left, Right and something of both: Syriza, UKIP, the Finns Party and all the rest. It was no coincidence that Nigel Farage shared a platform with Trump in Mississippi in August. Trumpism (yes, it’s a word, even if no one, including Trump, quite knows what it means) is part of a wider revolt against ruling establishments, on either side of the Atlantic, affluent, post-national and condescending, and not as competent as they like to assume.

While the Trump campaign is defined and often overwhelmed by the man at its centre (thus its chaos), the personality cult on which it is, if only partly, built comes with a wink. For all the towers, hotels, casinos, headlines, women and bankruptcies, Trump would not be where he is today without his decade (and more) in reality TV, something that has propelled him to the rostrum while subtly undermining his place there. He takes himself seriously — very seriously — and yet there is more than a trace of self-parody about his performance, which the fans and followers (in Trump’s case, often interchangeable categories) who have watched the evolution of his media image over the years, understand very well. It helps explain why they hold him to a lower standard than they would a more mainstream candidate. As Trump draws closer to the White House, that’s not a comforting thought. There are good reasons to believe that this thin-skinned, occasionally vindictive man might attempt to abuse the powers of the presidency to an even greater extent than some of his predecessors.

But if Trump tried to overreach, he would almost certainly be stopped. Whatever else can be forecast about this election (full disclosure: my predictions have not proved exactly infallible so far), we can be sure Trump is not going to win by a landslide. The electoral twists that might take him to victory would also secure a GOP-controlled Congress, but one where many of the Republicans who sat there disapproved of their man in the White House. Many more would be profoundly worried by what Trumpgate could mean for their political future. The elections that followed Nixon’s disgrace were not kind to his party. Historical memories in America are short, but not that short.

Much of the electorate, including a good percentage of those who had voted, noses held tight, for Trump, would be watchful and on edge, the financial markets — already nervous about what Trumpenomics might mean — would be twitchy, the judiciary would be on its guard and business would be suspicious. The bureaucracy would be uncooperative and, often, outright hostile. America’s defence chiefs would fret about what Trump could mean for the country’s security, their apprehensions fuelled by the useful idiocy of Trump’s footsie with Putin, his undermining of Nato and those fabled tiny fingers coming too close to the nuclear button. As for the media, well, what do you think?

One prominent conservative journalist, no never-Trumper, told me that impeachment proceedings against a President Trump would be a matter not of if, but when. It wouldn’t altogether surprise me. And in that respect, not only Trump’s future conduct, but also his past could possibly make for difficulty. He has, after all, spent years making and losing money in construction and casinos, two businesses not known for their spotless reputation. And he still has to contend with litigation over Trump University, an institution that allegedly preyed on just the sort of regular folks he has pledged to defend. Then there’s the matter of what might be lurking in Trump’s still mysterious tax returns. Meanwhile, doing his bit for the cause, New York’s (Democratic) attorney general has announced an investigation into Trump’s charitable foundation. If there are any skeletons to be dragged out of Trump Cupboard, they will be.

On the other hand, there are legitimate questions about the extent to which the checks and balances (explicit and implicit) built into the American system would act as a brake on President Hillary Clinton, an authoritarian herself and dogged by questions about her integrity that stretch all the way back to her improbably successful cattle futures trading as first lady of Arkansas.

She’s an establishment figure and the establishment would be more inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, not least out of gratitude that it had dodged the Trump fusillade. There’s also a decent chance that the Senate, if not the House, would be under Democratic control in the event of a Clinton win. What’s more, the behaviour of the civil service in recent years suggests it wouldn’t be too keen to push back against misbehaviour by a Democratic president. Writing in USA Today, University of Tennessee law professor and influential blogger Glenn (“Instapundit”) Reynolds argued that “Federal employees overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, donate to Democrats, and, by all appearances, cover for Democrats as a routine part of doing their job.” That’s not so much of an exaggeration as it should be.

As for scrutiny by the media, well, what do you think? Whining by the Washington Post, the paper of Watergate no less, that “the Hillary Clinton email story is out of control” signals what lies ahead.

As a reminder, that story revolves round Clinton’s decision, while Secretary of State, to use a private email server on official business. This was against the rules and had potentially (and quite possibly not just potentially: was the server hacked?) damaging security implications: The FBI grumbled about “extreme carelessness” in the “handling of very sensitive, highly classified information”, but found no criminal intent. Other Clinton critics asked whether she had arranged matters in this way because — this did not take a major imaginative leap — she had something to hide, questions not made any easier to answer by the fact that thousands of “private” emails had been erased. The affair, which has contributed — and continues to contribute — to Clinton’s perceived lack of trustworthiness with voters, rumbles on, but even the Justice Department’s eventual decision not to pursue criminal charges against her has come at a cost: it bolstered the impression that the Clintons are above the law, not a reputation to celebrate in an anti-establishment year.

Nevertheless, for all Clinton’s stumbles, both literal (we’ll come to that) and figurative, barring a major extraneous event (a massive terrorist attack, say, or some suitably embarrassing leaks via interestingly connected hackers) the best bet is, to repeat myself, that, despite some turbulence in the polls, she will be taking the oath of office in January. Trump’s core problem is that there simply are not enough white working-class voters (a group that amounted to some two-thirds of the electorate in 1980, but barely more than a third today), a problem reinforced by the fact that the rhetoric that wins them over to his side alienates their more upmarket counterparts. Mitt Romney won the support of 59 per cent of white voters in 2012, but he still lost the election. Continuing demographic change (whites are forecast to cast around 69 per cent of the votes this year) and Trump’s even greater unpopularity with minorities will mean that he would have to beat Romney’s 59 per cent by some margin to have any realistic chance of victory (on some estimates he would need to reach 65 per cent). That would involve scoring very well indeed with college-educated whites, but an early September poll showed that Clinton was beating Trump among such voters in 31 states.

This was, I suspect, the constituency at which Clinton was aiming when, in during a speech at a fundraiser in Manhattan in early September she divided Trump’s voters into two “baskets” of roughly equal sizes. The first “contained people who feel that government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them . . . They are just desperate for change . . . they don’t buy everything [Trump] says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different.” The second was a “basket of deplorables . . . Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.” They were, she said, “irredeemable”, an unsettling choice of adjective.

Clinton sometimes says what she believes and on this occasion that’s what she did, although in a later sorry-not-sorry comment she conceded that she had dumped too high a percentage of Trump supporters into the deplorables basket. But the message she wanted to deliver will have survived. Voting for Trump was the mark either of a loser or, worse still, of a racist/sexist/homophobe/xenophobe/Islamophobe. By contrast, ran the subtext, a vote for Hillary was proof of being none of those things, an attractive pitch to some suburbanites, not least because of the way it chimes with the misgivings that they already have about those who have jumped onto the Trump train. Clinton’s comment was widely seen as a gaffe — insulting voters is not normally seen as a good idea — and angered many, but it may play well with the decisive few at whom, I reckon, it was really directed.

It was widely assumed that, once Trump won the Republican nomination, he would — to use the fashionable term — pivot. He would, it was thought, reach out to centrists and minorities and, more generally, just make an effort to come across as rather more presidential, all shifts likely to appeal to those college-educated whites. Occasionally that’s what happened, even if some of those pivots have, in the words of Republican Senator Jeff Flake (who has, at the time of writing, refused to endorse Trump) been “360-degree pivots”: “He pivots and then pivots right back.”

Nevertheless, there have been signs of a more sophisticated and even conciliatory approach, especially since Trump’s appointment of Kellyanne Conway, a veteran pollster well-known in Republican circles, as his latest campaign manager. It could be seen in Trump’s nuanced and clever response to Clinton’s baskets. He picked up on its unmistakably authoritarian tone (“She divided people into baskets as though they were objects not human beings”) and the sneer that accompanied it (“You can’t lead this nation if you have such a low opinion for its citizens”), while deftly playing his class card (Hillary “mocks and demeans hard-working Americans” while living a “sequestered life behind gates and walls and guards”), a reflection of his ability to, so to speak, descend from his penthouse. Trump’s wealth is a badge of success, spent without pretension. It’s Clinton’s, a grandee of a governing class that disdains money while somehow managing to amass it, that is resented. Shortly after Clinton’s remarks, Trump announced a, by Republican standards, generous maternity leave plan. Populists of the Right know when to lean left, and when to appeal to women, a constituency that needs some convincing to vote for Trump.

Trump also made a well-received visit to Louisiana, hit by massive flooding and (strangely, given Hurricane Katrina) neglected by Clinton and, initially, President Obama. He flew to meet Mexico’s president and has appeared (it’s complicated) to refine his immigration agenda: more emphasis on enforcement and border security (complete with that wall), less talk of mass deportation of those already in the country, a notion that makes many Americans very uneasy. Trump also showed up in Detroit to visit his “brothers and sisters” in an African-American church, a gesture that will be unlikely to win him many black recruits (most polls show him scoring in the low single digits with black voters, although there have been some intriguing outliers), but may play well with whites understandably turned off by some of the rougher edges of Trump’s rhetoric and, for that matter, support.

Trump will score somewhat better among other minorities (it would be hard to do much worse), but dismal polling, as at the time of writing, among Latinos (19 per cent, according to an early-September poll: Romney managed 27 per cent at the last presidential election) hint at the immensity of the challenge that faces him, a challenge reinforced by the suspicion that prejudice against one is a prejudice against all. Shortly after Trump had — on essentially ethnic grounds — attacked the impartiality of a Mexican-American judge presiding over some of the Trump University litigation, a Chinese-American acquaintance, no leftist, told me that this was the last straw — another vote lost. One April poll found that 40 per cent of registered Asian-American voters would not vote for a candidate “with strongly anti-immigrant views” even if “they agreed with him or her on other issues”.

If this emphasis on ethnicity rather than policy as a basis for voting for one party or another sounds ominous, so it should. Over the last half-century, America has combined acceptance of mass immigration from all over the world with a rejection of its earlier assimilationist approach to new arrivals. The insistence on assimilation had worked very well. It has been replaced with a multiculturalism that works nowhere. The result is Balkanising the nation, changing unum into pluribus, a transformation that, if history is any judge, or the divisive identity politics of the country’s universities any foretaste, leads nowhere that America should want to go.

American attitudes to immigration are complex and conflicted and made more so by the way that, in often unacknowledged ways, they overlap with attitudes to race and, now, multi-culturalism. That said, when Trump looked at the challenge he faced in the primaries, he saw the opportunity presented by the failure of his Republican rivals, for the most part products of a lazily (or in Jeb Bush’s case, enthusiastically) immigration-friendly GOP establishment, to respond to the unease felt by many of their voters over this topic. In his own crude fashion, Trump then made immigration his issue, a brilliant — and calculated — move that took him to the head of the pack. The paradox, however, is that The Donald’s aggressive and often obnoxious stance on this question will buttress the Democrats’ gains from the demographic changes that mass immigration has brought in its wake. As a result, they will be even more determined to persevere with the immigration policies and identity politics that could, in the worst case, eventually culminate in some sort of Yugoslavia.

Turning to the more immediate future, Republicans will be (quietly) hoping that, without Obama at the top of the Democratic ticket, minority turnout will be down. It might, and that would be troubling for Clinton, but the Democrats and the media will hype the dangers of a Republican candidate, who can even now be relied upon to help the hype with suitably incendiary gaffes. His handlers can only do so much. As Trump could discover to his cost, casting a vote against can be almost as good a reason to show up at the polls as a vote for.

Then again, voting against crooked Hillary will be a pleasant task for many on the Right (and for quite a few, far easier than voting for Trump). But Clinton, who was first lady before some of today’s voters were born, has been on the political scene for a long time. Some of the fury she used to attract has subsided. Even the conspiracy theorists have seemed weary (how many murders was it, anyway?), at least until persistent rumours about her health began to gather pace, a worrying development for a candidate for a job on which so much rests on one pair of shoulders.

In early September the National Enquirer, a disreputable if enjoyable supermarket scandal-sheet and one of the few publications to have endorsed Trump, “revealed” that the 68-year-old Hillary, “frail” and “overweight” is “infected with a crippling killer virus, suffers from alcoholism, has been devastated by three strokes and is battling severe mental disorders”, as well as, possibly — Job in a trouser suit — multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy. Were that to be true, it would be testimony to Hillary’s resilience that she was so quickly back on her feet after her fainting episode (first blamed on the heat, then on pneumonia) at New York’s 9/11 memorial, the incident that took speculation about her health away from the checkout lane and into the headlines.

Her return to the campaign trail may have been speeded along by comments by former Ohio governor Ted Strickland (a Democrat now running for the Senate) just two days later. Clinton’s running-mate, Virginia senator Tim Kaine, was, noted Strickland, “a wonderfully prepared person to be . . . the president if that ever became necessary”. Strickland knows what many people know: Senator Kaine, a mainstream Democrat and a former governor of his state, would run better against Trump than Clinton does.

Making matters worse, Clinton’s perceived evasiveness over what was ailing her sharpened questions about her honesty. According to one poll roughly half of all voters believed that she had “given the public false information about her health”. To David Axelrod, a former senior Obama adviser, this was an own goal. “Antibiotics,” he tweeted “can take care of pneumonia. What’s the cure for an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems?” Unnecessary? I wonder.  But voters’ familiarity with the Clinton style has bred complacency: The email mess has hurt Hillary, but it has not proved to be the cancer on her candidacy that it once might have been, and the genuinely disturbing murk that surrounds yet another source of controversy, the Clinton Foundation — a nest of actual and potential conflicts of interest with a stink of pay-to-play about it — has yet to seriously disturb an electorate too jaded to care overmuch.

It’s not all gloom for Trump — far from it. Traditional loyalties, a widening gulf between the parties, the belief that The Donald is the lesser of two evils, and the manner in which the election process has “normalised” the idea of a Trump candidacy have all led to a far larger proportion of Republican-leaning voters rallying behind their party’s nominee than once was thought possible (the same is not true of the divided right-wing commentariat). Even so, in a contest where Trump will need to haul in every voter who could conceivably be his, quite a few will make their excuses and leave.

Some will defect to Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico now running as the Libertarian candidate with another former Republican governor as his running mate. By repositioning the Libertarian party in an unaccustomed role as a “sane” (to use, as Johnson does, that infuriatingly smug term for centrist) alternative to Trump and Clinton, Johnson will take votes (in greater numbers probably than any third party for two decades) from both, perhaps more from Clinton than Trump, but it is unlikely to be so many as to make a difference, although his seeming appeal to young voters may be a sign that Hillary is not doing so well with this key Obama constituency as she should. On a more reassuring note for the Democrats, it doesn’t look as if Clinton need worry greatly about the threat to her left from Jill Stein’s Greens, a party in no hurry to re-label itself as sane.

Put everything together, add in the way that the maths of the electoral college favours the Democrats and then throw in her campaign’s superior organisation, and the odds, despite some wobbles, still favour Clinton, a candidate described by a possibly demob-happy Barack Obama as the “most qualified” candidate ever to run for the presidency — leaving, therefore, predecessors such as Thomas Jefferson (principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Governor of Virginia, ambassador to France and, ahem, Secretary of State) behind in the dust.

The defining achievement of Clinton’s time as First Lady — other than sticking with Bill and polarising the nation — was a failed healthcare reform. Despite courageous efforts to tackle the video game menace, she achieved very little in her eight years as senator, and her time as Secretary of State is remembered mainly for the unsuccessful “reset” with Russia and the slaughter of four Americans in Benghazi, including the US ambassador to Libya. She also, it’s noted on Wikipedia, “greatly expanded the State Department’s use of social media, including Facebook and Twitter”.

There is very little excitement over Clinton’s candidacy. At the end of August Trump was recording extraordinarily high (63 per cent) unfavourables in the polls, but so was Hillary (56 per cent). It took something to pick a candidate who could actually lose to Clinton, but that’s what the GOP’s primary voters did. That said, Trump’s core supporters seem more passionate, more involved, and more likely to vote. In a thought-provoking reprise of the Sanders campaign, he has been attracting impressive amounts of money from an impressive number of small donors, a phenomenon worth watching if it continues. The GOP’s voter registration drive has being going surprisingly well in some key states.

By contrast, efforts to whip up some enthusiasm over the prospect of the election to the presidency of a rich, entitled grande dame as a feminist milestone are falling, like her speeches, just a little bit flat. With her metallic voice and weirdly forced facial expressions, there is something robotic about Clinton. Trump’s wild talk is often alarming, but rarely dull. To watch Hillary is to be left with a vague sense that a mechanic will need to be called in.

To be fair, it’s not easy to generate a lot of excitement when running for what will inevitably be seen as the third term (always a political challenge) of a sitting administration, and, to a degree, of a past one — her husband’s — too. And that’s what she’s doing. Broadly speaking, a Hillary presidency will build on the status quo, with additional shifts to the left on regulation, tax, climate change bossiness, immigration and (albeit in a move likely to find considerable bipartisan support) trade: The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the EU will, to steal a phrase from Obama, go “to the back of the queue”. After Trump and Sanders, the votes for a further extension of free trade are not there. On the other hand, she is likely to be more assertive than Obama — a low bar — internationally, and, unlike what Trump appears to have in mind, no dangerous games will be played with Nato.

Her freedom to act will be constrained if the Republicans manage to hang on to the Congress. At the time of writing, earlier fears that Trump would cost the GOP its majorities appear overdone. The Republicans seem well-placed to hang on to the House and they are still in with a chance of retaining the Senate. But however well or badly they do, the questions posed by the rise of Trump, a candidate who seems set to cost them a presidential election that they should have won, are not going away. Trump himself is a one-off, 70 years old, and, if some recent Senate primaries are any indication, not yet in a position to remake the GOP in his own image. But the changes to which his rise is a response, changes which are only going to accelerate, will have to be confronted by a party that has no clue how to do so.

Seen from 2020, 2016 may look pretty good.

Not Too Tricky To Be Ike's Veep

Irwin F. Gellman: The President and the Apprentice - Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961

Standpoint, March 1, 2016

The thing about “archive rats”, to borrow Stalin’s useful insult, is that they unearth facts that unsettle the authorised version of history. It’s a label that Nixon scholar Irwin Gellman can wear with pride. He has been burrowing in the archives for decades in obvious places (the National Archive, the Nixon Library), overlooked places (the Cabot Lodge papers), and in places (he none too subtly implies) that other historians could not be bothered to inspect — every one of the approximately 845 boxes of the “largest part of the Nixon manuscripts, called the 320 series”. 

The result is The President and the Apprentice, a somewhat obsessive, intriguingly contrarian retelling of the story of Nixon and the Eisenhower presidency. Traditionally, Eisenhower’s time in office has been regarded as a wasted opportunity, only partly redeemed by the supposed disdain he felt for his vice-president, Richard Nixon. More recently, academics have been re-rating Ike (it probably helped that doing so made his Republican successors look bad) but that re-rating has yet to percolate through to a popular consensus still shaped by dim memories of high-school history lessons and, more vividly, media depictions of Eisenhower’s America as a land that progress forgot.

Nixon has also benefited, to a degree, both from the attention of revisionist historians and the passing of the decades since his disgrace. His funeral was attended by President Clinton and all his surviving predecessors (Clinton was representing, he declared, “a grateful nation”). For all that, to most Americans Tricky Dick remains a President Evil, snarling while he plots dark deeds and incriminating tapes whir. He has never been forgiven by liberal opinion-formers for his role in exposing the traitor Alger Hiss (“vindicated” again, I note, in a book published last autumn).  Nor have they forgiven him for his style — or styles, all those “new Nixons” — for his abrasiveness, his awkwardness, his embarrassingly obvious striving and, worst of all, for a series of election victories that announced that America was more like him than them.

Even those historians willing to look beyond the standard caricatures of this complicated man’s complicated career have struggled to put Nixon’s relationship with Eisenhower in a positive light, something that Mr Gellman, previously the author of The Contender, an account of Nixon’s Congressional career, sets out to correct. This is no hagiography; it is a scholarly work, but a combative one too. Reinforced by what he has mined from all those archives, Gellman debunks myths, he challenges the comfortably liberal narrative, and when people have lied he says so. Nixon was brought down by his lies, but to no small extent his reputation has been trashed by the lies of others. To take just one: No, Mr Truman, he didn’t call you a traitor.

While The President and the Apprentice leaves a generally favourable impression of the Eisenhower administration, it is not a broad rethink of this already rethought presidency. It is too narrowly focused on the Nixon vice-presidency for that. But Gellman does attempt to address what has become a central criticism of those years: that Eisenhower did too little too slowly to come to the help of African-Americans, at the wrong end of institutionalised racism across the country and, in the South, victims of something very much worse. Nixon, whatever his private thoughts on racial matters (the much later White House tapes do not make pretty listening in this respect), had no time for Jim Crow, segregation, or the petty (and not so petty) viciousness of the racial discrimination of the era. And nor, despite some attitudes that might dismay in 2016 (as a father, he would not have been too happy to discover who was coming to dinner) did Eisenhower, a man, it must be remembered, brought up in turn of the 20th century Kansas. That said, even allowing for a difficult political environment, the duo’s reluctance to make more use of the bully pulpit in support of civil rights must count against them. And their hopes that changing attitudes and improved African-American access to the voting booth would be enough to do the trick were at best wishful thinking.

True to form, Gellman does not let the Democrats off the hook, highlighting what was once in plain sight, but is now often consigned to the memory hole. Democrats did much to obstruct and (in LBJ’s case, for a characteristically calculated blend of reasons) dilute the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first legislation of its kind since 1875. This was a reflection of the priorities of their southern redoubt, as was the unwillingness of many Democrats (including, Gellman points out, both JFK and LBJ) to offer public support for Eisenhower’s decision to send in the army to enforce the integration of Little Rock Central High School, Arkansas.

To be sure, President Truman ordered the desegregation of the military (although it was the Eisenhower administration that essentially implemented it), but, after reading this book it’s hard to deny that Truman, later an opponent of the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters (organised by “Communists”, apparently), and no stranger to the N-word, has been credited too much, and Eisenhower too little, for what they each did to push the US further down the long march to racial equality, an imbalance that, of course, fits all too neatly into the historical perspective of the American Left.

To FDR’s first Veep, “Cactus Jack” Garner, the vice-presidency was “not worth a bucket of warm piss”, but Gellman makes a strong case that Nixon made far more of this unloved position than might have been expected. He was not any sort of co-executive; the Dick Cheney vice-presidency lay far in the future. But he was valued for his contribution to, and coolly objective analysis of, the frequently rough political scene at home (a melée that the grand old general preferred to be seen to soar above, but understood enough about to know — usually — what he didn’t know) and, as the years passed, also for his thoughts on abroad. Nixon was, so to speak, a youthful understudy whom Ike (conscious of how ill-prepared Truman had been when he took over from FDR) felt a patriotic obligation to train, but he was also a real force within the White House, given real jobs to do.

Not unreasonably, Gellman sees this as proof of the faith that, particularly in the second term, Ike put in Nixon: “The president gave assignments to those he trusted, and he trusted Nixon.” That’s true, but, in the case of Eisenhower, cold behind that five-star beam, that word “trust” should be read as conveying a faith in Nixon’s competence rather than anything with more emotional resonance. Gellman backs up his more upbeat take on the relationship between president and vice-president with a series of letters and obiter dicta from Eisenhower signalling the respect and affection the president had for Nixon. Maybe, but they can also be interpreted as pats on the head for a promising young subordinate by a man who knew how to motivate those under him. And Gellman cannot avoid the reality that Eisenhower let Nixon twist in the wind, not once, but twice. 

The first time was when, during the 1952 election, a scandal blew up over a fund that had been raised by some Californian businessmen to help the far-from-wealthy Nixon with his senatorial expenses, an arrangement that did not deserve to be labelled as corrupt. A larger, possibly more questionable fund that benefited Adlai Stevenson, the liberal icon running against Eisenhower for the presidency, received rather less coverage: how odd! Eisenhower made clear Nixon was on his own, but even when Nixon had vindicated himself with the brilliantly manipulative “Checkers” speech, still hesitated to stand by his man. The second occasion, four years later, was when Eisenhower effectively made Nixon beg for his slot on the re-election ticket, a position that he had clearly earned, a cruel spectacle that the normally indefatigable Gellman finds “baffling”.
And then, four years after that, there was the moment during a press conference when Eisenhower was asked to cite a major contribution that then presidential candidate Nixon had made to his administration. Ike replied that, given a week, he “might think of one”.

Gellman fillets these incidents with his customary diligence, handily demolishing some of the mythology that surrounds them and adding some detail  often omitted from the historical record (for example, Eisenhower promptly apologised for that remark). But, despite Gellman’s best efforts, the sense that something was awry between the two men lingers.

If I had to make a guess (and when it comes to the enigmatic Ike, one can only guess) the key to Eisenhower’s behaviour was partly the sense, not unusual among the great, that no one could be good enough to succeed him. But there was something else at play, and Gellman points to it with his argument that Ike’s leadership style was in peace as it was in war: “he led a team of subordinates, who were expected to go where Ike sent them, be his eyes and ears, provide intelligent and informed advice, deliver his messages, and occasionally become casualties.” They were, therefore, in the end, disposable.

But Nixon hung on.