No fire and fury over Trump news
JFK remains one of the most popular and respected US presidents in history. It’s useful then to make some comparisons with two of the most widely reviled: “Tricky Dicky” Richard Nixon and the current incumbent.
Trump was once recorded saying how his TV fame meant he could “grab ***** ” at will. Kennedy was never caught boasting about his sexual conquests on tape but nevertheless was a huge philanderer. When he visited Britain he casually told an astonished prime minister, patrician and avuncular Harold Macmillan: “If I don’t have a woman for three days I get a terrible headache.” Macmillan – who loved Kennedy in a fatherly way – was lost for words. It’s safe to assume the president was not referring to wife Jackie.
Nixon’s infamous Watergate tapes finished off his presidency. But a decade earlier Kennedy was also secretly and illegally recording conversations in the White House. There’s an official photo taken in the Oval Office showing the president conferring with his newly-appointed ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge. You can clearly see a wire running from the underside of the table to the floor and on down to a tape recorder in the basement.
Nixon got found out on the job. Kennedy’s illegal and sleazy behaviour came out years after his assassination. The difference between them and Trump is that Americans who voted for him knew perfectly well beforehand what kind of guy he was. They just didn’t care. That’s why all the hullabaloo over Michael Wolff’s history of Trump’s first year in office, Fire And Fury, won’t make a blind bit of difference to the administration. It’s not fake news: it’s old news.
The President pours Just For Men on his hair and carefully teases it into a weird bouffant. No! You don’t say! He eats cheeseburgers in bed. Really? Donald Trump? Not something he’d do, surely? So out of character. He doesn’t read books and behaves incredibly childishly most of the time, throwing tantrums and demanding praise. Hmm. Hard to imagine that.
He makes rambling, incoherent and self-contradictory speeches. Well, I’ve never heard one!
Tellingly, US opinion polls haven’t moved a millimetre since Fire And Fury came out. That’s because it shows that Americans who voted for Trump got exactly what they wanted: a boastful slob and a big fat wrecking ball to smash the old system to bits. They didn’t want Hilary Clinton because she represented everything they hate about what Washington had become: privilege, entitlement and the unmistakable hauteur of those who believe they were born to power. Trump was a TV reality show host who never really thought he’d win – perversely one of the reasons he did.
God knows what will happen next. I doubt Trump has dementia as has been claimed. He’s just a massively disorganised thinker. That doesn’t make him unfit for office. But I suspect his doom may have been sealed by the doctrine of “set a thief to catch a thief”: the sudden emergence of Oprah Winfrey as his next potential challenger. A conventional politician probably couldn’t touch him. But a TV chat show celebrity?
Now you’re talking.