Will the world survive Trump?
Trade war with China? Real war with Iran? Nato torn apart? In the week the White House gets a new President — and America holds its breath — a deeply worried MAX HASTINGS asks ...
NEXT Friday noon, I shall be among hundreds of thousands of spectators in Washington DC as Donald Trump is inaugurated as President of the United States.
The circumstances of the ceremony will be unique in history: never before has a man been elevated to the greatest elective office on earth burdened by such a deadweight of sensations, scandals and controversies.
The latest allegations — that Russia’s President Putin holds a treasure chest of pornographic material about Trump’s dallying with prostitutes in Moscow — have been angrily denied by Trump.
Yet so much evidence already exists about Trump’s conflicts of interest and past financial shenanigans that these will dog his presidency from its first day, and probably persist until its last.
The word ‘ impeachment’ is already being bandied about.
The majority of Americans who rejected Trump in November — Hillary Clinton won almost three million more popular votes — together with the Democratic establishment, almost all the media save the right-wing Fox News, and some Republican grandees such as Senator John McCain, will grant the new president not a moment’s peace or trust.
Yet president he will be, installed in the White House with control of the nuclear button and powers of life and death that will influence the destinies of us all.
Almost nobody, even those in Trump’s inner circle, has much clue how this supreme narcissist, this tweeter who has risen to the summit of power by firing words at friends and foes with the abandon of a tennis ball machine run amok, will behave in the White House.
Will he launch a trade war with China? A real war with Iran? A deal with Putin to surrender much of Ukraine and maybe the Baltic states to Russian control? A licence to torture for the CIA? A big tax cut for the rich and infrastructure spending that will widen America’s fiscal deficit to Grand Canyon proportions? A break-up of Nato? A multi-billiondollar enhancement of America’s already bulging nuclear arsenal?
Those are just a fistful of the threats or promises made by Trump.
HE CONFORMS to no precedents or conventions, treating life as liar’s poker. Yet now this erratic, vengeful figure, unshakeably sure that he knows better than any of us, will be playing chicken among great nations, some of which own atomic bombs. If he bluffs too far, there will be a war, a contingency many people in Washington think not remote.
At the age of 70, Trump is unlikely to disappear into a phone box and emerge as Superman, or indeed as anything other than he has hitherto been, through his manic roller-coaster life of deals, company bankruptcies, sexual couplings and TV game shows.
Some of my cleverest American friends have succumbed to near-hysteria about the worrying prospect before us, but it seems more profitable to grope for hopeful straws.
Creative chaos theorists argue that a shake-up of stale U. S. foreign, defence and economic policies could be bracing and beneficial.
Almost no one thinks Barack Obama’s foreign policy, combining strong words with limp-wristed action, has been a success. There is a good case for the U.S. to get tougher with China about its trade and investment policies — though not too tough. It is faintly possible that Trump’s planned rapprochement with Putin will succeed and that being nice to the Russians will yield benign results.
As Trump himself said on Wednesday: ‘If Putin likes Donald Trump, I consider that an asset, not a liability, because we have a horrible relationship with Russia.’
It must be right to acknowledge Moscow’s stake in Syria, which only means accepting the reality that the West’s governments have foolishly denied since 2011. The scary stuff will start if Trump goes further, and also makes dramatic concessions about Ukraine and other Russian neighbour states.
Trump is right to brand it a disgrace that, for decades, European nations have lived at bargain-basement cost behind a shield almost entirely provided by American taxpayers: even Britain’s defence spend is inadequate.
So feeble is the European will to protect itself that Germany, especially, could reject a Trump demand to commit more cash. This would unleash justified fears for the survival of Nato.
Meanwhile, some of Trump’s
top office selections have roused alarm even among Congressional Republicans.
A friend of mine inside the U.S. defence hierarchy says that there are doubts about Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, the new National Security Adviser.
Following his 2014 departure as director of the Defence Intelligence Agency (which advises Department of Defence strategists) Flynn was accused of having a fondness for what staff dubbed ‘ Flynn facts’, convictions he clung to obsessively, despite everybody else considering them nonsense.
On the credit side, Defence Secretary John Mattis is highly regarded, and it seems premature to write off Rex Tillerson, the oil baron nominated as Secretary of State. Tillerson knows a lot about the world, as some of his predecessors did not: he may deserve the benefit of some doubts.
Henry Kissinger is now 93, yet still loves a finger in the power pie, which probably explains the respected former Secretary of State’s willingness to talk with Trump. It will be welcome if the new president heeds Kissinger’s vast experience.
We may be witnessing historic economic change, an application of the brakes on globalisation, the onset of protectionism, which will give short- term pleasure to nationalists, but make us all poorer over the long haul. Economists say Trump’s strident campaign to force American industry to manufacture more at home will eventually drive up consumer prices and cost jobs.
Because immigration was, I believe, the issue that did most to win Trump the presidency, he must make some gesture towards building his vaunted latter-day Maginot Line across the Mexican border, though there are already signs that Congress trembles at its estimated £12 billion cost.
Trump, of course, insists the Mexicans will pay for it themselves.
More than this, white Americans must confront a dilemma. Little as they like uncontrolled immigration, unless they redress their own fall- ing birthrate, they need to accept some foreigners in order to sustain the workforce and economy. A columnist wrote last month that for Trump’s supporters, a better slogan than his campaign motto of ‘Make America great again’ might be ‘Make America mate again’. Out there in Colorado and Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, if they want to paint America whiter, they need to produce more white kids.
Trump is expected to mark his first days in office with a blizzard of executive orders, to reverse much of President Obama’s legacy, especially on immigration and the environment.
Congress will need to sit day and night to work through a mass of new legislation, to review Trump’s appointments to offices, and not least to fill a vacant post of judge for the hugely influential Supreme Court. The U.S. government will now presumably take the stance long held by Trump and assume that man-made climate change is mostly bunk — and thus Obama’s drive to reduce America’s carbon dioxide emissions will be reversed.
I can testify from my own recent visits that much of rich America is ecstatic about the prospect of the Trump presidency, which promises to make it richer still, thanks to a bonfire of financial regulations and the lifting of restrictions on fracking (which should lead to reduced energy costs), together with a tax cut.
POOR America, by contrast, is in despair. With an Administration that includes avowed advocates of white Judeo- Christian supremacy, including White House senior counsellor Steve Bannon, we are set for four lousy years for blacks and Latinos.
The Donald does not do losers. Compassion has been kicked off the show.
Trump has never been a detail man. Thus he is thought likely to reject micro-management and play showman president, tweeting to the world while his subordinates pursue their own chosen courses — and probably also fight like ferrets in a sack.
Sooner or later, there will be rage among the white working-class and middle- class Americans who backed Trump, if he fails to give them what they supposed he offered: ring- fencing of their traditional culture and restoration of their prosperity.
Certainly, the new president cannot fulfil many campaign promises which are either contradictory or unaffordable.
Yet any such a reckoning with his core constituency could conceivably be postponed past 2020, and, conceivably, after his re- election, because the bad news will take that long to work through.
There is an alternative scenario, of course.
It is one, understandably very popular among Democrats and making headlines this past week, that within months, Trump will implode and be impeached following some moment of personal madness, new revelations about his business affairs or, especially, links with Russia.
Most Americans respect and even revere wealth. The election of a plutocrat as president showed that they reserve their deepest loathing for the professional politicians, lawyers, bankers, diplomats and government officials whom they believe — for understandable reasons — have screwed them.
Yet even some Republican majority senators and congressmen are already venting distress about Trump’s conduct and proclaimed purposes: the most outrageous of his appointments and government programmes could be voted down.
Be that as it may, I believe that Trump reflects a new kind of politics and national leadership of which we shall see distressingly more in the years ahead.
The shift of wealth from West to East and the chronically stagnant earnings of tens of millions of workers are creating an ongoing crisis for democracy and many of its familiar institutions.
In the decades after 1945, as the developed nations became ever more prosperous amid a general sense of well-being, it was possible to enlist public support for, or at least acquiescence in, grand liberal ideas and partnerships, among which the UN, Nato and the EU were conspicuous.
Today, the mood among hundreds of millions of voters — spurning the judgment of elites — is far more sceptical, and frankly selfish.
For example, there is despair that no Western leader has yet articulated a credible response to the historic problem posed by migration and the fears it generates. Hope is in short supply.
The big danger in the months ahead, fuelled by this week’s lurid reports, is of a crisis of confidence in the nation he’ll lead, the greatest economic and military power on earth. Stability is critical to a successful world order, and that requires trust.
Yet Trump’s personality is more dysfunctional than was that of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, whose limitations precipitated World War I. Here is a man who this week accused his own country’s intelligence services of ‘behaving like Nazis’.
It is impossible to be sure whether Trump means what he says on any given topic. He has achieved power by proclaiming the virtues of raw might, the superiority of macho white men over blacks, Muslims, Mexicans, Europeans, women, the disabled, to name only a few ‘lesser’ breeds.
Just as with the Kaiser, Trump invites unbridled ridicule, save for the fact that he will soon wield almost unbridled power. If aspects of his administration already promise farce, it can only be the blackest farce.
Our most fervent prayer should be that he does not feel obliged to use the power of his office to assert his own and his nation’s virility.
If he makes a mistake with nuclear weapons, he cannot shrug: ‘It was worth a shot.’
WHILE of course the British government must treat the new U. S . Administration with courtesy and respect, it would be tragically mistaken to endorse its policies and values mindlessly — simply to suck up. This would be not merely undignified, but politically and morally wrong. Trump has achieved the presidency on the back of a yearning that is widespread in numerous countries to break traditional moulds.
It is too soon to say whether this will prove wholly toxic in its consequences, or instead produce unexpected benefits.
What is plain is that supposed wisdom and experience are discounted — with voters willing to plunge into the unknown, to risk riding with some wild people who tell them what they want to hear.
Do you remember the Chinese curse ‘ May you live in interesting times’? Donald Trump’s tenancy of the White House will be the most interesting the world has seen for decades.
Our consumption of tranquillisers is likely to soar. As a mere British citizen, I shall be sufficiently grateful if the 55th president does not precipitate a global slump — or get us all blown up.