Trump’s struggles no surprise to those who witnessed Ottawa’s O’Brien years
Nations must contain Trump’s belligerence
The problems Donald Trump is having as president aren’t a surprise to anyone who watched Larry O’Brien struggling to figure out how to be mayor of Ottawa.
The scale is different. The stakes are a whole lot higher. But the basic dynamic — a big-talking businessman unexpectedly wins power then doesn’t know how to wield it — is all but identical.
Politico reported Friday that Trump has been surprised to learn that he can’t run the United States government the way he was accustomed to running the Trump Organization, which is precisely the problem O’Brien ran into when he was elected mayor in 2006 after building Calian Technologies into a company with a nine-figure market cap. When you’re the boss, aren’t you supposed to be, you know, the boss?
I asked O’Brien on Friday to talk about what businessmen need to learn when they get into politics. He didn’t answer; Twitter says he’s having a boys’ week on a yacht someplace with palm trees, so good for him.
There’s a story about the standard postelection mini-retreat after O’Brien won the mayoralty, where councillors and the mayor get together to meet (some for the first time) and talk about what they’re going to do together. This one was at Lansdowne Park. O’Brien laid down the law.
The councillors watched and listened. O’Brien was new and brash, elected on a promise to apply his iconoclasm and business experience to fix the godawful mess of endless tax increases and weird transit plans down at City Hall. Most of the councillors were the authors of that godawful mess, freshly re-elected to third, fourth, fifth terms. But he had just won an election of his own and was the rightful mayor, so they were patient while the new mayor explained to them how it was going to be.
Patient for a while. Downtown councillor Diane Holmes, a leftie with 25 years of politics under her belt, reached her limit for being spoken to like somebody’s subordinate. She stood and scooped up her briefing papers. “Bye!” she said, and headed for the door. Right there and then, O’Brien’s one vote on anything that reached the council table was cancelled out.
O’Brien named an expert panel to redesign Ottawa’s rapid-transit plans, which recommended a spaghetti-plate of train routes based on existing heavy-rail lines and was totally ignored. He named a different expert panel on governance, which warned the city government itself was in an organizational death spiral and could only be rescued by wholesale restructuring and was also totally ignored.
Like Trump’s, O’Brien’s business savvy and the sheer force of his will were supposed to be magic, but they fizzled. His key campaign promise, to freeze property taxes, was one he was able to make so convincingly because he had no idea what he was talking about. City councillors who did know what they were talking about ran off with the budget. Throughout, O’Brien was dogged by an inability to recruit experienced staff or keep the good people he could get.
Eventually he went on trial — and was acquitted — for “purported influence peddling” for allegedly offering to get rival candidate Terry Kilrea a patronage job in the 2006 campaign — the sort of thing people who don’t work in the public sphere might not even realize is illegal. The judge said he suspected there was funny business there but the Crown hadn’t proved it. After all this, here’s the thing. Ottawa’s damage was limited because our mayor has more influence than he has real power and O’Brien didn’t have a pliant council. His mayoralty taught councillors, and City Hall generally, that they have responsibilities and agency of their own. Bob Chiarelli had been Ottawa’s only mayor after amalgamation and people learned that the way Chiarelli did the job was not the only way it could be done, that the office was severable from the person who held it.
Institutions, customs and rules develop for a reason. An outsider’s willingness to smash idols can be valuable, but it’s dangerous if it’s not married to competence, an understanding of what you’re doing and why and what will probably happen after. Plenty of people don’t have that, no matter how good a game they talk. If you elect such a person, you can’t assume everything will be OK. dreevely@postmedia.com twitter.com/davidreevely
For forty-odd years after the Second World War, the policy of the free world towards the Soviet Union was one of containment: a strategy of collective resistance, rather than (on the one hand) appeasement or (on the other) open conflict. We now face the sad reality that, for the next four years at least, some version of containment will have to be our policy towards the United States.
Territorial expansion is not the issue, as it was then. But the policies of the United States under President Donald Trump, it grows more clear each day, cannot be regarded in the same light as those of any president we have known. On trade, on defence, on international law, in its choice of allies as much as its antagonists, his administration is not only wholly indifferent to the international order that presidents of both parties have laboured to build over seven decades, but hostile to it.
I think this is the correct lens through which to view the challenge confronting Justin Trudeau, as he prepares for his first summit meeting with Trump. There has been much discussion of what sort of “tone” Trudeau should strike: Should he forthrightly condemn such gross abdications of responsibility as the executive order suspending all refugee admissions for the next 120 days — indefinitely, in the case of Syria — or the ban on all travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries? Or should he, in the interests of good trade relations, grit his teeth, look the other way, and cozy up to the president, in the ingratiating style Japan’s prime minister adopted on his visit? Perhaps some ungainly combination of the two?
To which the only answer is: whatever you do, do it not alone. To be sure, the prime minister has the task of dealing with a leader who presents with a variety of known personality disorders; who knows less about foreign policy, or any policy, than the average doorman or taxi driver; who has no visible moral compass, is unconstrained by any norm of personal, political or presidential conduct, and seems determined to avenge any slight to his monstrous vanity.
And yes, I’d prefer that my prime minister spoke up for what is right, even at some cost to Canada’s economic interests — just as one would hope he would with respect to China, or Russia. That doesn’t require that he be needlessly provocative. But the sort of Finlandization scenario in which we would sit quietly to one side and hope not to fall under Trump’s ravenous eye, strikes me as not only dishonourable, but futile. At some point we will find all our prostration and self-abasement has been for nothing.
Or rather, it will very likely have made things worse. To defend our interests, as much as our values, we will have to start setting boundaries early — picking our battles, yes, but firmly and patiently asserting our rights. And if we are to do so effectively, we will need to do so in concert with other countries. The widely varying reaction to the travel ban, with some world leaders, like Germany’s Angela Merkel, speaking out clearly against it, while others, like our own, couched their response in cleverly ambiguous tweets, must not be repeated. Neither was it sensible for Canada, in its first flustered response to Trump’s demands to renegotiate NAFTA, to appear so eager to abandon Mexico to its fate.
This is exactly what Trump wants. This is his foreign policy, or at any rate Steve Bannon’s: to cast off entangling alliances; to break up even those, such as the European Union; to do everything bilaterally, in which negotiations he supposes the United States, with its size and might, will always prevail. It is an exceedingly pinched construction of the American national interest — Trump sees every issue in terms of winners and losers, rather than mutual or collective benefit — but in that narrow sense he is probably right.
So we had better, as Ben Franklin said, hang together — “or most assuredly we will all hang separately.” The same is true of Trump’s domestic opponents, for example in the business community: so long as each company is left to deal with him separately, he will pick them off one by one. Only by presenting a united front can they hope to defend themselves.
It seems weird and unsettling to be talking about “containing” our erstwhile ally in this way. But that is the world we are now in; the calamity that has befallen the United States is also ours. We will still need to work with the Americans; we can still hope to engage them in common causes; we can make discreet alliances with like-minded people in the U.S. Congress and political establishment. But we cannot, so long as Trump is in power, count on them to be with us. We cannot even count on them not against us.
It is surely no coincidence that the fighting in eastern Ukraine has flared up since Trump’s election. The Baltic states will have drawn the appropriate lessons about Trump’s readiness to protect them from Russian expansionism — as indeed have the other democratic powers, who are expressing reluctance to share intelligence with the United States, given the many close ties between Trump’s circle and Vladimir Putin.
It all sounds reminiscent of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, which imagines what would have happened if Charles Lindbergh — the original America Firster — had won the 1940 presidential election, on a platform of isolationism, intolerance towards minorities, and collaboration with America’s adversaries. But this is not a novel.
It is, astoundingly, real life. to be