The presidency is a grind. When Trump, petulant and easily bored, realises, we’d all better watch out

WE are a week into the Donald Trump presidency and it is clear that he is going to behave in office the way he did on the campaign trail. The presidency is very unlikely to tame him. He is simply too old and too set in his ways to do anything differently.

He has also surrounded himself with acolytes who think as he does and are unlikely to challenge him. He will not become more presidential. Instead he will endeavour to implement the campaign promises that got him elected.

That means building his wall, deporting illegal immigrants and, perhaps most crucially of all, instituting an America First policy when it comes to trade and jobs.

Trump has basically engineered a reverse takeover of the Republican Party. The party of free trade is now the party of protectionism. In the 1990s, Republicans were enthusiastic supporters of the North American Free Trade Agreement. They now eagerly support Trump’s efforts to effectively dismantle it.

The same is true of their attitude to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, which Trump has pulled the US out of in his first week in office, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Programme with the EU, which seems likely to go the same way. The reason he has given for such a policy, and indeed the key to his whole world view: jobs.

Lost in the dazzle of Trump’s comments about reintroducing torture, building his wall and the fraud of three million illegally cast ballots – conveniently, the number by which he lost the popular vote – was a number of meetings he had with employers and unions.

While it is perfectly natural for Republican presidents to meet the CEOs of large American firms, it has been unheard of for any Republican president to meet with the unions as Trump did earlier this week, never mind when they are only just in office.

EVER since Ronald Reagan dismissed more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981, relations between unions and Republican presidents have been poisonous. But Trump, ignoring that history, brought the unions into the Oval Office to discuss one thing: how to create more jobs for the working and middle classes of America.

Moreover, union reports of their meeting with Trump were uniformly positive. Trump’s resurrection of the Keystone Pipeline running from Texas right through the heartland of the US to Canada and his promise to fix the country’s crumbling transportation system have the potential to create thousands of jobs. This appeals to ordinary Americans and to union members who have seen their pay and conditions reduced and their very jobs put at risk in recent decades.

Trump’s meeting with various business leaders was also about jobs and how to lessen the burden of job creation and expand the manufacturing base of the US. While this might include bluster about tax hikes on American firms that don’t relocate back to the US, one thing should be clear: Trump generally means what he says.

Living in America during the campaign, it was clear to me that his message was resonating with millions of people who don’t live on the coasts, the socalled flyover states. While it might be ludicrous to think of a billionaire born into massive wealth as speaking for the common man, that is exactly what Trump was able to do.

There hasn’t been a first week like this in modern presidential history since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. Roosevelt’s New Deal was enacted to save US capitalism during the Great Depression and had at its heart the idea that it was the government’s job to do something about creating jobs. Now, some 80 years later, Trump, wearing Republican clothes, is doing something similar.

But Trump isn’t a true Republican. He is an independent populist. This is what got him elected – voters in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were attracted by his promise to bring back jobs to communities ravaged by free trade.

Also lost in the general mania that Trump’s tweets induce in people is that the 63 million who voted for him want him to engage in an ‘America First’ philosophy. This is the same phenomenon that led to Brexit.

The British people, or at least all those who voted to leave the EU, like their American counterparts, want to adopt a Britain First approach. Fed up with supposed Brussels bureaucracy, they feel they are in a better position to manage their own affairs independently.

This, more than anything, explains the Hard Brexit approach Theresa May has espoused in the last two weeks.

She has also been emboldened by President Trump’s victory and his first week in office. But she is making a terrible mistake if she thinks the Anglo-American special relationship has returned to the glory days of Reagan and Thatcher and Blair and Bush.

WHILE Trump might be AngloSaxon in outlook and pro-British in temperament, when it comes to trade, his default position is America First. Mrs May won’t be able to influence him on anything from the wall to ensuring a profitable trade deal. He might well do such a deal, but it will be on the back of what he thinks is best for America. Any thoughts Mrs May and her Whitehall officials have of influencing Trump are mere delusions of grandeur.

But whatever about Britain, things might well be worse for the EU. Ted Malloch, reputed to be Trump’s pick as US ambassador to the EU, made the extraordinary comment last week that in a previous career he had helped to bring down the Soviet Union and that ‘maybe there was another union that needed a little taming’.

For the EU, which had as its original goal the aim of stopping further war between France and Germany, to be compared with the Soviet Union shows just how tone deaf the new administration in Washington actually is.

Now of course there is the possibility that all this jingoistic nationalism emanating from the White House will go awry and Trump will find the Mexicans won’t pay for his wall, the rounding up of illegal immigrants will cause massive disobedience on the streets and the jobs he promised won’t return.

The key to understanding Trump is that combination of megalomania and unbounded optimism that infuses his whole personality. His narcissism is a curious but toxic mix of selfobsession on the one hand and crushing insecurity on the other. It explains both his unshakeable belief that he alone can bring back blue-collar manufacturing jobs to the rustbelt and why he can’t accept he lost the popular vote.

While Trump has had a whirlwind start to his presidency with a raft of announcements and executive orders, the fact remains that government is a slow, tortuous process.

It is when this reality hits home with Trump that the world will need to watch out.