Bad news, Trump haters: this bonkers show’s made him MORE popular
RADIO 4 TODAY PROGRAMME PRESENTER
ALeft-wing American friend confessed a few days ago that he was beginning to like Donald trump: ‘He’s got no mental teleprompter,’ he told me admiringly, ‘no notes, no filter, no volume control. He just says stuff, and sometimes he’s got a point . . .’
My friend has been uncontactable since wednesday’s press conference. i think he might either be in Heaven or in hospital from shock. Because this was the most madcap performance by an incoming president since the 19th century, when Andrew Jackson took a bullet in the arm in a bar fight with a Senator.
it was a wild ride — terrifying, exhilarating, sometimes just plain pinchyourself odd. it was ‘ proper’ in only in one respect: a proper beginning to the era of Donald trump.
Let us deal briefly with the notion that the 45th president is — unwittingly or not — an agent of the Kremlin. Yes, yes i know this would normally be enough of a big deal, but there is so much more we need to get to. the allegations of sexual oddness in Russian hotel rooms are highly unlikely to be proved one way or the other, so they sit in the background, toxic to some but not fatal.
His line dismissing the sex tape news — ‘it was a group of opponents that got together, sick people, and they put that crap together’ — was vintage trump.
no lawyer would have advised a client to say that. no spin doctor would have massaged and sculpted our dear old english language into that phrase. He just blurted it out; plain and lumpy and utterly, utterly trump.
And then, when you thought ‘wow’, it got wilder still. i confess when i heard the posh english tones of my friend Robert Moore, washington correspondent of itV news, asking about ‘conduct you now regret’ in hotel rooms, i did think he was on a hiding to nothing; that trump would contemptuously ignore his question and move on to the next.
But no! He gave Robert the low-life line of the whole affair. He would not have done those disgusting things in Russia because ‘i am also very much of a germaphobe, by the way. Believe me.’ there was laughter. And around the poorer parts of America, in diners and bars, there will have been grins and admiration for the sheer chutzpah of the man.
THe same people will have appreciated the pile of documents flourished at one point by one of trump’s lawyers.
the documents were there ostensibly to prove Mr trump is properly distancing himself from his business interests during his time in office. But they meant much more than that. the true extent of that handover is questionable, not least because those he’s asking to look after his business affairs while in office happen to be his sons.
But the documents spoke loudly. ‘Yes sirree,’ they were telling his tV audience, this fellow has to go through the same legal and administrative hoops as all you folks out there have to go through to get anything done, and look at the effort he makes.
His opponents will call it a piece of fraudulent theatre. it may well have been — but i reckon it worked.
You see, one of the reasons low-income Americans admire rich people is that they are do-ers who seem to live gilded lives, and not on the backs of the poor.
it’s the professional classes they don’t like — the lawyers and doctors and teachers, who invade their lives with bills and lectures. the people who look and sound like Hillary Clinton.
trump was showing that he, too, was under the cosh of the miserable lawyers — he even had one come to the podium.
And he was demonstrating that, despite this, he had admirably emerged with his businesses intact. i am no psychology professor, but this seemed to me to be playing to the gallery — i.e. those ‘ordinary’ Americans who are so fed up with the political class — with something bordering on genius.
i am not suggesting for a minute that trump acted civilly or gave convincing answers to all the questions. Poor Jim Acosta, the correspondent from Cnn — one of America’s biggest cable networks — was brushed away having seen his outfit unfairly abused because it reported the existence of the Moscow dossier, and left ranting like a drunk at a bus-stop as the President-elect moved on.
trump’s was not a fair and open and reasonable performance by normal standards. But when he gave a good shot at answering questions you had the real feeling that he was going to say something surprising or shocking, and that even the world’s most powerful supercomputer, primed with trump algorithms, could never have managed reliably to predict what it might be.
was he about to declare war on China? At one point during the press conference, during a question about trade, he appeared to be veering in that direction, saying China had ‘taken total advantage of us economically . . . in the South China Sea by building their massive fortress’.
i wondered about the Chinese translators back in Beijing trying to make sense of it. Collars will have been damp by the end of the section in which he talked of China ‘respecting us more’ under his administration. But he lost interest and just moved on.
the same with Mexico. ‘i love the people of Mexico . . . the government of Mexico is terrific,’ he declared. But then: ‘ Mexico has taken advantage of the United States.’
But then again: ‘i don’t blame them.’ And then, after that: ‘it’s not going to happen any more . . . they will pay for the wall.’ He was, of course, referring to the wall he’s promised to keep out illegal Mexican migrants.
How will they pay? ‘they will reimburse us . . . it will happen’.
Clear? not really. Cogent? Hardly. But effective: well, perhaps. And this is the serious point.
no lesser figure than Dr Robin niblett, director of the foreign affairs think-tank Chatham House, acknowledged to me on the radio yesterday that unpredictability is not a bad thing in a world leader.
OBAMA, he suggested, had become predictably cautious. He has surely got a point: if this new President’s pronouncements occasionally bring America’s enemies out in a sweat, is that a bad thing?
As for his friends, well trump keeps them guessing, too. Among the answers he gave very firmly and clearly on wednesday was an absolute corker on the pharmaceutical industry — which is supposedly on his side.
for months during the election campaign, smarty-pants commentators (yes, including me) said that a Hillary Clinton victory would be bad for the big pharmaceutical companies because she wanted to reduce the amount spent on drugs by the U.S. healthcare system.
Under trump, we said, all would be fine. well, the Donald confounded all of us. the drugs companies are ‘getting away with murder!’ he declared. He would reduce the prices they can charge. He didn’t say how. Or when. But his remarks will have had many Democratic party members cheering him (Hillary would never have had the courage to say such a thing) and many Republicans, aghast at this attack on a massive American industry, reaching for their heart medication.
what will the Republicans in Congress do if trump remembers what he said in a few weeks and wants to act on it. will they humour him? ignore him? fight him?
Sooner than you think, they might choose the latter option. One of the
genuinely funny barbs was at the expense of a Republican Senator called Lindsey Graham. He is a big cheese in Washington and a widely respected Russia expert with a dim view of President Putin — a traditional Republican.
But to Trump he was a joke — he crushed him in the contest to get the Republican presidential nomination and at the press conference chose to crush him again. ‘I’ve been competing with him for some time. He’s going to crack that one per cent barrier some day,’ Trump said in a jab at his poor performance in the presidential primaries.
Cue more laughter. And another reason for Graham to plot revenge. In a Senate where Trump has a majority of just four, this might be unwise. And plenty of Republicans in lesser roles are also supporting Trump only as a stop-gap until they can figure out a way to get their party back from the clutches of the loud-mouth New Yorker. They have, in many cases, sold their souls to him. They may intend to buy them back.
DONALD TRUMP turns everything upside down. He is a Republican president capable of saying things (and maybe doing things) that a Left-wing Democrat would be happy with. He is a human tornado. An alpha male maelstrom. We are on a collision course with normality.
But it also showed a propensity seemingly unprecedented in a President for picking fights. Those he chose this week with CNN, China, Mexico, the drugs industry and senior Republicans could just be the start.
So while the press conference was in many respects a success, I do wonder whether he might quickly prove too unpredictable, too combative, for the men in suits in Washington. Men who might be thinking, if Trump carries on like this, that dull old Vice President-elect Mike Pence might be a better bet. And who, sooner than we think — whether by arrangement or impeachment — could try to force the Donald to step aside.
If they succeed, it would be a bitter blow to the millions of working-class Americans who voted for Trump, folk who felt he alone among politicians understood their aspirations, and who would have been thrilled by his extraordinary, rumbustious performance this week.
It would again confirm their view that the political establishment looks after its own — while the ‘little people’ are brushed aside.