Donald Trump is not a normal president
From the US Congress to Theresa May, everyone needs to understand that when the next US leader takes office, the usual rules will no longer apply
There is one week to go and all is confusion. On Friday Donald Trump will take the oath of office and be sworn in as president of the United States. But still no one has the first clue how to handle what’s coming.
Politicians, journalists and diplomats, in the US and around the world, are searching for guidance, desperately flicking through the pages of the rule book, a manual full of past precedents and norms that they have spent their careers mastering — but that Trump burnt and shredded months ago.
In normal times, even those few parts of this week’s “dirty dossier” affair that are firmly established would be enough to undo an incoming president. Put aside the lurid details of what went on in Moscow hotel rooms. Assume they’re untrue. Focus instead on the fact that the US Department of Justice sought and eventually gained secret court warrants to investigate two Russian banks and their links with a series of Trump associates.
Remember how much damage it did to Hillary Clinton for the FBI to be looking (again) at her use of a private email server. Regardless of what they found — nothing, as it happens — the mere fact that she was under investigation wounded her badly, perhaps even denying her the presidency. Yet now we know that federal investigators were keen to probe Team Trump not over its email habits, but something much more serious: possible links with a hostile foreign power. We’ve learnt too that the dossier included a claim of secret meetings between Trump aides and Russian officials. Now, that claim has not been proved and could of course turn out to be, as Trump insists, “garbage”.
But it comes from a document deemed sufficiently credible by US intelligence agencies that they briefed both President Barack Obama and Trump on its contents. In the same vein, and in an astonishing development, the Israeli press has reported that its country’s intelligence officials have been advised by their US counterparts not to share intel with the Trump administration, lest that information find its way to Moscow, and from there to Tehran.
In normal circumstances just the fact of these investigations would be enough to hobble a president. But nothing about these circumstances is normal. Indeed, the lesson of the past year is that what would destroy a normal politician often leaves barely a scratch on Trump. Sometimes it even makes him stronger.
Unconstrained by conventions
The mistake is to project on to Trump the standards that would normally apply. For critics, this poses a conundrum. Too often they deal with Trump as if he is a normal politician, constrained by the usual conventions, including embarrassment at being caught in a lie. But Trump is not a normal politician. He has no shame. While most politicians blush if exposed as inconsistent, let alone dishonest, Trump is unembarrassable. Even Nixon tried to squirm and wriggle his way into a sentence that could be parsed as truth. There is no precedent to guide the media or policymakers. Sticking to the old rule book, will be a grave mistake.
Nowhere more so than Britain. London’s default setting since 1945 has been to be as close to Washington as humanly possible. Sure enough, Theresa May is following it. This is certainly what you’d expect of a British prime minister if a normal American president were about to take over on 20 January.
But May has not sufficiently absorbed that Trump is an aberration, and therefore the usual rules should not automatically apply. (Angela Merkel has been much more wary.)
Instead, May is repeating the same mistake so fatefully made by Tony Blair in 2001. Blair thought he should be as close to George W. Bush as he’d been to Bill Clinton, failing to appreciate that the two men were entirely different, that Bush was surrounded by ideological obsessives who were bent on war with Iraq from the very start. May is being similarly undiscriminating. In her post-Brexit longing for friends and trading partners, she is getting ready to cosy up to a man who makes Bush look like Abraham Lincoln. It may prove to be her costliest error.
But you can see why it’s happened. She and her officials know no other way to operate. Along with everyone else, they keep clinging to the hope that Trump is about to transform himself into a politician they can recognise and understand. But he hasn’t and he won’t. They, and we, need to stop deluding ourselves — and work out how to deal with Trump just the way he is.