Trump’s top team braced for firings and hirings
America’s verdict at the polls provides opportunity for president to get rid of moderating influences
DONALD TRUMP is expected to wield the axe in the wake of yesterday’s midterm elections, with figures close to the president predicting that cabinet members will be forced out.
The US president did not reject suggestions he would reshuffle his administration when talking to reporters earlier this week, saying pointedly: “For the most part, I love my cabinet.”
Another shake-up would likely further consolidate power under Mr Trump, removing moderating forces who at times have urged caution over policy, much to the president’s frustration.
It would also once again push up the turnover figures for Mr Trump’s White House, already one of the highest for a modern-day president.
More than 38 million Americans voted early in the election, a huge rise on the 27million who did so in the 2014 midterms.
In Texas, Arizona and Nevada, early ballots alone exceeded the entire 2014 voting totals, showing a country energised by this year’s congressional and statewide elections.
The turnout offers an insight into the mood of the electorate two years after Mr Trump’s shock victory, which put a man with no government or military experience into the White House.
With the election now over, Mr Trump is predicted to make widespread personnel changes. Sebastian Gorka, Mr Trump’s former deputy assistant, predicted one or two cabinet members could go. “Every White House has some changes in year three. This one will be no exception,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
Speaking to reporters on Monday before a final day of campaigning, Mr Trump made little effort to downplay the possibility of a shake-up.
“Administrations make changes usually after midterms and probably we’ll be right in that category. I think it’s very customary,” he said.
Jeff Sessions, the US attorney general who Mr Trump has repeatedly chastised for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, is among those in the most precarious position.
Mr Sessions has become a frequent target for Mr Trump’s tweeted criticism and key Republican senators who had been publicly backing him now seem resigned to his departure.
Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general overseeing the Russia probe, could also be at risk.
He appeared on the edge of leaving
‘Administrations usually make changes after midterms ... I think it’s very customary’
in September before a decision was delayed. Mr Rosenstein faced embarrassing reports that he proposed wearing a wire when meeting the president at the height of the fallout over the sacking of James Comey, then FBI director. He said the comment was a joke.
However, his departure would complicate Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, which has dogged the Trump presidency, as a new overseer would need to be picked.
Mr Mueller has made few public moves in recent weeks as the election came to a head, but his inquiry is expected to re-enter the spotlight before Christmas. He continues to push for an interview with Mr Trump, a row that has played out behind the scenes all year. Other question marks hang over Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary whose failure to drive down immigration has angered Mr Trump, and Jim Mattis, the defence secretary, seen as a moderating force who the president publicly suggested could leave last month.
A new US ambassador to the United Nations is also due to be announced this week after Nikki Haley left the post. Heather Nauert, the top state department spokesman and former Fox News reporter, is the front-runner for the job.
Speaking before the polls opened, Mr Trump suggested he could soften his tone after an election campaign where he deployed heated warnings over the threat posed by illegal immigration. Asked about regrets from his time in office during an ABC7 interview, Mr Trump said: “I would like to have a much softer tone. I feel to a certain extent I have no choice, but maybe I do. Maybe I could have been softer from that standpoint.”
Let’s get the obligatory caveats out of the way from the outset. Donald Trump’s invective about the caravan of central American migrants winding its way through Mexico towards the US border is grotesque. His heady delight in the “beautiful sight” of a delivery of barbed wire to the frontier to keep them out was reminiscent of Robert Duvall’s air cavalry colonel character in Apocalypse Now! – “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
We are supposed to find that chilling and deranged, not the sort of thing the leader of the free world might come up with. Of course, the president was ramping up the rhetoric ahead of the mid-term elections and there is nothing he likes better than taunting his liberal opponents and stoking their outrage.
Yet it is unsettling for everyone, even those prepared occasionally to give Mr Trump the benefit of the doubt. His exploitation for political advantage of the miserable people who have left their homes in central America, fleeing poverty or rampant violent crime, has been appalling.
But other than the egregious language, how does Mr Trump’s policy actually differ either from that of his predecessor or from the approach taken by other developed countries? For all his self-righteousness, Barack Obama’s administration operated the same immigration laws, stopping hundreds of thousands of would-be arrivals at the Mexican border.
Mr Trump just takes that to its logical conclusion by proposing to replace an easily breached fence with a hard-to-cross wall.
How would we react in this country if 5,000 people were heading across France determined to make it to the UK and demand asylum? Would it be any different? Doubtless, the language would be less harsh. The Prime Minister would acknowledge the hardships and difficulties that provoked the migration, but would politely point out that this was really a matter for France not us. If these people wanted asylum, then they should claim it in the first EU country they had visited, probably Italy. But what if they kept going, all the way to the Channel coast and demanded entry into the UK; what then?
It is convenient for us that we have 22 miles of water to act as the equivalent of Donald Trump’s wall. We can make all the right progressive noises without having to confront the reality of refugees actually massing on the border. We can control entry through the tunnel and the ports, even turning back ships if we want.
Once we have left the EU, there will be no requirement to take anyone other than those we choose either for our economic advantage or because they are genuine asylum seekers.
But is that going to wash in a world where millions of people may be on the move? The Honduran caravan has triggered an extraordinary debate in America over the perceived threat to the nation’s cohesion – and this in a country that is founded on immigration. Mr Trump, with a Scottish mother and German grandfather, is testament to this.
American commentators have unearthed the apocalyptic vision of the oddball French writer Jean Raspail, whose 1973 book The Camp of the Saints contemplates the dilemma facing Western nations as a mass of starving boat people from the Third World arrive on the shores of southern Europe. “They were a million poor wretches, overwhelmed with misery, ready to disembark on our shores,” he wrote. “To let them in would destroy us; to reject them would destroy them.” The book has been hailed as prophetic and denounced as racist; the quandary it poses is the stuff of nightmares for progressive European politicians.
We have already seen some of the political consequences that followed Angela Merkel’s ill-judged open-door policy three years ago, not least to her own authority. The rise of populist parties and, arguably, the Brexit vote in Britain, have been a response not so much to the immigration we have had as to a fear of what is to come.
True, we do need some perspective. The great majority of an estimated 14 million displaced people in Africa are either internal migrants or refugees in neighbouring states. But so explosive is population growth in some countries that it will be hard to sustain with existing resources. By 2050, the Middle East and Africa will be home to around 3.4 billion people – more than the populations of China and India combined. It is an unprecedented boom with ramifications yet to be felt.
The UN is trying to address the challenge with a proposed Global Migration Pact due to be adopted at a conference in Morocco next month. The 34-page treaty sets out a common approach and includes 23 objectives to organise the flow of refugees and define their rights more precisely. Participants agree, for example, to limit the pressure on countries with many migrants and to promote the self-reliance of newcomers.
But the deal is already fraying at the edges. The Americans have repudiated it and many eastern European countries, including Poland and Hungary, are refusing to sign. Austria became the latest to renounce the pact this week. Their leaders have been castigated by the EU for doing so but public opinion is on their side. The agreement looks like a dead duck.
President Trump is not prepared to subscribe to the sentiments of Emma Lazarus’s poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty – “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” But is he acting any differently to how a British leader would in the same circumstances? Public opinion in America and Europe will simply not countenance mass immigration, however sorry people might feel for the plight of the displaced.
Without borders, says Trump, you do not have a country; and most people in America and Europe will agree with that proposition. Those who reject it in order to parade their humanitarian credentials need to provide solutions beyond self-serving pseudo-compassionate grandstanding. If we are unwilling to open our gates, then we need to start taking some hard-headed collective decisions about how to stop the migrants leaving home in the first place.