WHAT IF HE DID WIN?
Pals with Putin. Race riots. Border battles with Mexico. And nuclear war against China a heartbeat away. A rollicking but terrifying vision of President Trump’s first 1,000 days . . .
THE 45th President of the United States reached his 1,000th day in office yesterday, and he marked it in characteristic style. Rising shortly before lunch, the most powerful man in the world took a congratulatory phone call from his closest ally, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, before strolling into the White House Rose Garden, where a group of swimwear models were waiting with an enormous white and gold cake.
‘Thank you, Mr President,’ they chorused, ‘for making America great again!’
If the impromptu party was overshadowed by the chanting of thousands of protesters outside the perimeter, the President showed no sign of being particularly worried.
‘Take care of them,’ he told the head of his Russian bodyguard, who had replaced the Secret Service a few months ago. Then he nodded meaningfully at the models: ‘I’ll see you girls later . . .’
According to his spokesman, the President spent the afternoon closeted with his advisers in a private suite at his wife Melania’s $1,000-an-hour spa (formerly the White House’s East Wing), discussing the opening of his Senate impeachment trial in a few days’ time. Then he retired for the evening with some of his closest confidants, among them the actor Charlie Sheen, the former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson and the ex-wrestler Hulk Hogan.
To look at the President’s beaming, orange-skinned face, you would hardly know that Washington is in meltdown, that he faces multiple congressional investigations into his finances and that, every day, rival mobs of demonstrators do battle only steps from the White House.
Nor would you know that the American economy is in deep recession, its cities are ablaze after months of race riots, an undeclared war is raging on the Mexican border and a nuclear conflict now seems inevitable in the Pacific.
Never has the gap between image and reality been greater. Never has the world’s greatest republic plunged to such depths.
But then what did you expect from President Donald Trump?
The trouble started within moments of Mr Trump’s unexpected comeback victory in the election of Tuesday, November 8, 2016, when riots broke out in several cities, including Chicago, Boston, Miami and Los Angeles.
Thousands of buildings were burned, but the new president- elect nevertheless maintained that it had been the ‘greatest night’ in American history: ‘ The greatest. Period.’
In his victory speech he broke with the traditional courtesies by openly pouring scorn on his defeated opponent, Hillary Clinton (‘a major- league loser’), and promising his supporters that ‘Crooked Hillary’ would shortly be facing a ‘long stretch in jail’.
In fact, Mrs Clinton remains very much at large.
EVEN though President Trump insisted that her criminal conviction would be one of his chief priorities, and immediately appointed a special prosecutor with a brief to investigate her activities dating back to the Seventies, the FBI are reportedly still trawling through thousands of emails, having unearthed yet another tranche last month.
There were more signs of the new era, meanwhile, at his inauguration ceremony in January 2017, when Mr Trump appeared on the stage waving his ‘ Make America Great Again’ baseball cap, in front of a mock- classical façade in which his own surname was spelled out in gigantic, diamond-studded letters.
Unusually, the 45th President broke with precedent by refusing to deliver a prepared speech, preferring to ‘speak from the heart’, as he put it.
Returning to some familiar themes, he told his audience that his predecessor, Barack Obama, was a ‘terrorist’ and a ‘Muslim’, that most Mexicans were ‘rapists’ and ‘murderers’, that China was ‘in for a shock’ and that Nato was ‘a complete waste of time and money’.
Most foreign leaders were appalled. But one man who clearly approved was Vladimir Putin, who had been the first head of state to telephone his congratulations to the new president-elect.
After only two weeks in office, Mr Trump rewarded his new friend by making his first overseas trip to Moscow, where he assured the press that Mr Putin ‘couldn’t have been nicer’ and promised that under his administration, the Russians would be ‘our number one ally. Number One. I mean that’.
His European tour later in 2017, however, was a disaster.
After Mr Trump was recorded making remarks about Germany’s Angela Merkel that cannot be repeated in a family newspaper, he moved on to London, where he told Theresa May that she had a ‘massive Muslim problem’ and urged her to redevelop Chequers as a high-end golf course. Today, the American republic’s reputation in the world has never been lower. Even at the United Nations it has become a laughing stock, especially after Mr Trump’s UN ambassador, Sarah Palin, gave a speech in which she confused Iraq and Iran, suggested Africa was a single country and joked about dropping a nuclear bomb on Saudi Arabia.
On the U.S.-Mexican border, however, things have gone well beyond a joke.
Work on what Mr Trump calls his ‘Great Wall’ began within days of his inauguration, though it is unlikely to be finished before he leaves office and will reportedly cost at least $25 billion.
After a series of sabotage attacks by Mexican protesters in mid-2018, Mr Trump abruptly lost patience and ordered the U. S. Marines to cross the border and occupy a strip some ten miles deep — which prompted the Mexican government to move its own troops to within a mile or two of the U.S. incursion.
As yet, the two sides have merely skirmished, though the death toll currently stands at almost 400 — a figure that would have been unthinkable three years ago.
It would take only one incident, one clash that gets completely out of hand, to trigger a full-scale war.
At home, meanwhile, Mr Trump’ s authoritarian measures, such as his shambolic
and callous attempt to deport 11 million undocumented migrants, have provoked outrage.
The summer of 2018 was marked by weeks of rioting in many major cities, while the President’s insistence on declaring the Left- wing activist group Black Lives Matter a ‘terrorist organisation’ sparked huge protests on campuses across the nation.
It was at this point that Congress, already enraged by Mr Trump’s reliance on high- handed and arguably unconstitutional executive orders, began discussing impeachment proceedings against the President.
But of course, this only enraged his loyal supporters, who maintain that he is the innocent victim of a conspiracy masterminded by Barack Obama, the Clintons and the American media.
Mr Trump himself remains remarkably unruffled by the prospect of impeachment, though some experts claim his famously unearthly hair is a lot thinner that it used to be.
He maintains that his congressional critics are ‘crooks’ and ‘liars’, and has made extraordinarily insulting remarks about the potency and masculinity of both the democratic leader of the Senate, Harry Reid, and the Republican Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan.
RECENTLY, Mr Trump’s attacks on Congress have reached new heights. He now appears to believe that many leading politicians, both democratic and Republican, have secretly converted to Islam.
‘How do we know that the Bushes aren’t Muslims?’ he demanded last week. ‘Why else were they so keen on going to Iraq?’
Genuine Muslims, however, have no place in Mr Trump’s America. He made that very clear within hours of taking the oath of office, when he signed an emergency executive order banning any Muslims from entering the United States.
Since he became president 1,000 days ago, attacks on Muslim Americans, including men and women who have worn their nation’s uniform, have reportedly increased tenfold.
There have been arson attacks on mosques in Boston, New York, Chicago and detroit, all of which Mr Trump refused point-blank to visit afterwards.
All of this has naturally put him at odds with America’s traditional Nato allies. But Mr Trump’s disregard for Nato was well-known even before he took office.
Most European leaders can barely bring themselves to look at him. Theresa May has reportedly not even said a word to him for more than a year.
The one British public figure who still has time for Mr Trump is Nigel Farage, who recently returned to the position of Ukip leader after a short stint in Washington as ‘special adviser to the President on community relations’.
Even TV presenter Piers Morgan — his long-time friend from The Celebrity Apprentice — has deserted the U.S. President, which surely tells its own story.
But as Mr Trump is fond of reminding people, ‘ small- time’ countries such as Britain and Germany are ‘finished’.
‘My friend Vladimir,’ he says smugly, ‘is the strongest man in the world. Apart from myself, obviously.’
Mr Putin was the only world leader to voice support for Mr Trump when, in March 2018, the President began bombarding his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, with insulting tweets, culminating in a threat to ‘drop the bomb on Beijing’.
What enraged Mr Trump is not clear. Some analysts argue that he was provoked by recent figures showing that since the onset of his disastrous policies — involving huge spending increases at the same time as sweeping tax cuts — many indicators now put the Chinese economy well ahead of its U.S. rival.
The irony is that Mr Trump campaigned for the presidency on the promise that he would revive American industries that had lost out to cheap Chinese competition. Yet the impact of his gigantic deficit spending has shattered confidence in the dollar, sent the stock market plunging and done more damage to U.S. economic credibility than anything since the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
Some White House insiders, though, claim that what lay behind the presidential Twitterstorm was simply Mr Trump’s irritation at jokes about his hair circulating on Chinese social media.
In any case, the fact is that SinoAmerican relations are now worse than at any time since the Sixties.
Many military experts think the Chinese are genuinely worried by Mr Trump’s increasingly frequent threats that he will soon press the nuclear button.
Indeed, only last month an unnamed Pentagon official told the press that the Chinese might soon strike first, so frightened are they by Mr Trump’s bellicosity.
If nuclear war does break out in the Pacific, then it will be interesting to see whether Mr Trump’s Russian ally comes to help him.
Mr Putin is, after all, already militarily committed in Ukraine and the Baltic States, which he reoccupied in early 2019 without a squeak of protest from the White House.
The Russian occupation of Syria and Iraq, meanwhile, has proved immensely costly in both money and men. But Mr Putin is reportedly confident that, having seized Iraq’s vast oil reserves, he will soon have enough money to do whatever he wants.
As it happens, the Russian President is scheduled to fly into Washington next week to express his solidarity at the beginning of his friend’s formal trial in the Senate.
As usual, he is likely to arrive with a large military entourage, many of whom are expected to stay on in the U. S. capital as additional ‘security’ for his beleaguered ally.
AS MR TRUMP remarked last week, he has already arranged a suitable welcoming committee of young American female interns for his Russian counterpart. ‘All gorgeous,’ he said proudly. ‘I just start kissing them . . . and when you’re a president, they let you do it, you can do anything.’
Those last words have been something of a motto for Mr Trump. Since his election as President, he has indeed done anything he wants.
The result, however, has not merely tarnished forever the image of the presidency, driven the American economy into recession and destroyed relations between religions and races. It has shattered the Western alliance, allowed Vladimir Putin to rebuild the Soviet empire and left the United States on the brink of nuclear war with the world’s most populous country.
Yet even as American cities burn and Congress attempts to drive him from office, Mr Trump remains undaunted. As he points out, there is only a year left until the 2020 election, and this time he expects to win by a landslide.
Campaigning, Mr Trump says, is ‘much more fun’ than governing. And once again he believes he has the perfect slogan: ‘Make America Great Again — Again.’
He appears not to have noticed the obvious irony.