OUR MAN IN U.S. SAYS TRUMP IS ‘INEPT’
EXCLUSIVE: Leaked secret cables from British Ambassador risk diplomatic rift
BRITAIN’S Ambassador to Washington has described Donald Trump as ‘inept’, ‘insecure’ and ‘incompetent’ in a series of explosive memos to Downing Street.
Sir Kim Darroch, one of Britain’s top diplomats, used secret cables and briefing notes to impugn Trump’s character, warning London that the White House was ‘uniquely dysfunctional’ and that the President’s career could end in ‘disgrace’. His bombshell comments risk angering the notoriously thinskinned President and undermining the UK’s ‘special relationship’ with America.
In the memos, seen by The Mail on Sunday following an unprecedented leak, Sir Kim:
Describes bitter conflicts within Trump’s White House – verified by his own sources – as ‘knife fights’; Warns that Trump could have been indebted to ‘dodgy Russians’; Claims the President’s economic policies could wreck the world trade system; Says the scandal-hit Presidency could ‘crash and burn’ and that ‘we could be at the
When dealing with Trump you need to make your points simple, even blunt
beginning of a downward spiral... that leads to disgrace and downfall’;
Voices fears that Trump could still attack Iran.
In one of the most sensitive documents, Sir Kim writes: ‘We don’t really believe this Administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept.’
He also says that he doesn’t think Trump’s White House will ‘ever look competent’.
In reference to Trump’s ability to shrug off controversies in a life which has been ‘mired in scandal’, he says that the President may nonetheless ‘emerge from the flames, battered but intact, like [Arnold] Schwarzenegger in the final scenes of The Terminator’.
He warns senior politicians in London: ‘Do not write him off.’
The leak is embarrassingly timed for the British Government, coming just weeks after the Queen welcomed Trump and his family with a 41-gun salute and a State banquet at Buckingham Palace as part of a diplomatic drive to secure a post-Brexit free-trade deal.
In a memo sent after the visit, Sir Kim warned that while Trump and his team had been ‘dazzled’ by the visit, and the UK might be ‘flavour of the month’, Trump’s White House remained self-interested: ‘This is still the land of America First’.
The Washington Files span the period from 2017 to the present, covering everything from Trump’s policy in the Middle East to his 2020 re-election plans.
One account of a Trump rally says that there is a ‘credible path’ for Trump to win a second term in the White House – but describes the crowd as ‘almost exclusively white’.
In what is likely to be regarded as a patronising passage in the cache, officials in London are told that in order to deal with Trump effectively ‘you need to make your points simple, even blunt’.
The most incendiary paper is a letter to National Security Adviser Sir Mark Sedwill sent on June 22, 2017 – 150 days into the Trump administration – and copied to what Sir Kim describes as a ‘strictly limited’ number of senior figures in Downing Street and the Foreign Office.
The document, sent ahead of a National Security Council discussion on the UK-US relationship, paints a damning picture of the President’s personality and leadership style.
It says media reports of ‘vicious infighting and chaos’ inside the White House – dismissed by Trump as ‘fake news’ – are ‘mostly true’.
And referring to allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia – since largely disproved – the memo says: ‘The worst cannot be ruled out.’
The cache also includes diplomatic telegrams – known as ‘DipTel’ in Foreign Office jargon – updating Downing Street on political events in the US and providing commentary on Trump’s foreign policy decisions.
They reveal details of highly sensitive negotiations over efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, as well as the disarray surrounding the President’s handling of recent attacks on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.
One memo, sent by Sir Kim on June 22, refers to ‘incoherent, chaotic’ US-Iran policy, adding: ‘It’s unlikely that US policy on Iran is going to become more coherent any time soon. This is a divided Administration.’
He questioned Trump’s recent claim that he aborted a missile strike on Iran because it would have caused a predicted 150 casualties, saying it ‘doesn’t stand up’.
‘It’s more likely that he was never fully on board and that he was worried about how this apparent reversal of his 2016 campaign promises would look come 2020’ – at the next Presidential election.
Another memo, sent on June 10, warns of tensions ahead over Brexit: ‘As we advance our agenda of deepening and strengthening trading arrangements, divergences of approach on climate change, media freedoms and the death penalty may come to the fore.’
The leak of diplomatic cables is extremely unusual and will raise new questions about morale in the Civil Service.
There is mounting evidence that Brexit has politicised many mandarins, with officials who privately support Brexit accusing the Civil Service of trying to stop the UK leaving the EU.
Darroch, who became British Ambassador to Washington in January 2016, is a former UK Permanent Representative to the EU and widely regarded as a europhile.
The Foreign Office last night said that the British public ‘would expect our Ambassadors to provide Ministers with an honest, unvarnished assessment of the politics in their countries’.
A spokesman added: ‘Their views are not necessarily the views of Ministers or indeed the Government. But we pay them to be candid, just as the US Ambassador here will send back his reading of Westminster politics and personalities.
‘Of course we would expect such advice to be handled by Ministers and civil servants in the right way and it’s important that our Ambassadors can offer their advice and for it to remain confidential.
‘Our team in Washington have strong relations with the White House and no doubt these will withstand such mischievous behaviour.’
IT WAS summer 2017, and Britain’s National Security Council was convening to discuss a problem. President Trump had been in office for 150 days, and Prime Minister Theresa May and her Cabinet colleagues were still struggling to get a handle on his chaotic Administration. They needed advice. At his desk in his splendid official residence in Washington DC, the British Ambassador, Sir Kim Darroch was trying to help. Britain’s National Security Adviser Sir Mark Sedwill had asked him to put together some thoughts on the President’s personality and leadership style, and he was compiling a briefing note.
Copied to a ‘strictly limited’ number of senior figures in Downing Street and the Foreign Office, it ran to six pages of highly unflattering observations about the President’s character and political record.
In the confidential memo – marked ‘Official Sensitive’ – the UK’s most important diplomat accused Trump of ‘radiating insecurity’, filling his speeches with ‘false claims and invented statistics’ and achieving ‘almost nothing’ in terms of domestic policy.
Earlier, Sedwill had sent Sir Kim an outline presentation for the meeting. Sir Kim thought the slides ‘looked good’. There was just one point he felt he needed to correct: ‘My only disagreement with the slides: I don’t think this Administration will ever look competent,’ he declared.
It was an extraordinarily damning assessment. The problem was that Ministers and diplomats had to find a way to deal with the President.
Sir Kim highlighted how America was still the UK’s No1 security partner and the ‘cultural and historical ties’ between the two countries were ‘profound’. The UK needed America: as an export market; for defence and intelligence cooperation; and for a post-Brexit trade deal.
‘The starting point is that this is our single most important bilateral relationship,’ Sir Kim wrote.
But he added: ‘As seen from here, we really don’t believe that this Administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional, less unpredictable, less faction-riven, less diplomatically clumsy and inept.’
He therefore compiled a threepoint guide for how Britain’s politicians and officials should handle this most unpredictable of Presidents. His first suggestion was to ‘flood the zone’, which meant influencing as many of the President’s key advisers as possible.
Sir Kim said Trump spends his days in the Oval Office asking his White House team, Cabinet members and senior Republicans for their opinions ‘on the business of the moment’.
But, crucially, the diplomat also highlighted how the President spends his evenings phoning his friends outside the administration ‘seeking reinforcement or a different take’. Many of these friends have been ‘cultivated’ by the British, Sir Kim boasted.
‘It’s important to “flood the zone”: you want as many as possible of
those who Trump consults to give him the same answer,’ he wrote. ‘So we need to be creative in using all the channels available to us through our relationships with his Cabinet, the White House staff, and our contacts among his outside friends.’
Sir Kim’s second recommendation was for Theresa May to call Trump more often, stressing ‘there is no consistently reliable substitute for the personal phone call from the Prime Minister’.
‘The President respects and likes her,’ he added. ‘I know they have already talked several times. But in a perfect world, they would be speaking two or three times a month, if not more.’
The diplomat’s third pointer was to urge Britain’s politicians and officials to use flattery and to pander to the President’s ego when they come into contact with him.
‘You need to start praising him for something that he’s done recently,’ he advised. ‘You need whenever possible to present them as wins for him.’ In comments which could be viewed as highly patronising, Sir Kim also advised his bosses to make their points ‘simple’ and ‘even blunt’, adding: ‘as a senior White House adviser told me, there is no upside with this President in being subtle, let alone ambiguous.’
His stark assessment reveals the scale of concern at the highest level in the British Government about Trump. By summer 2017, the President had torn up the Paris climate change accord; junked key international trade agreements and launched military strikes against Syria. Western allies were reeling: he didn’t seem to care who he upset.
But while Trump was making waves on the world stage, his domestic programme was getting nowhere, Sir Kim said.
The President’s big election pledges – building a wall between the US and Mexico; stopping Muslims from certain countries coming to America and reforming tax and healthcare – had all hit the buffers.
‘Of the main campaign promises, not an inch of the Wall has been built; the executive orders on travel bans from Muslim countries have been blocked by the state courts; tax reform and the infrastructure package have been pushed into the middle distance; and the repeal and replacement of Obamacare is on a knife edge,’ Sir Kim wrote. The Ambassador ‘wouldn’t bet a tenner’ on Trump’s health proposals passing through the Senate.
Sir Kim’s confidential letter, sent to Sedwill, who is now also the Cabinet Secretary, on June 22, 2017, is unsparing in its assessment of the President’s personality flaws and the chaos of his administration.
In language that is likely to prove highly embarrassing for Sir Kim, the Ambassador declared: ‘For a man who has risen to the highest office on the planet, President Trump radiates insecurity.’
He highlighted how the Administration had been ‘dogged from day one by stories of vicious infighting and chaos inside the White House, and swamped by scandals – all, one way or another, linked to Russia.’
And while the President would deride media stories about such chaos as ‘fake news’, Sir Kim privately advised his bosses in London to believe what they were reading in the newspapers. ‘The stories about White House knife fights are, we judge, mostly true: multiple sources and confirmed by our own White House contacts. This is a uniquely dysfunctional environment.’ He warned Whitehall to be braced for more presidential outbursts including the use of ‘immoderate, sometimes offensive, language’, like his attacks on London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
‘There is no filter,’ Darroch advised. ‘And we could also be at the beginning of a downward spiral, rather than just a rollercoaster: something could emerge that leads to disgrace and downfall.’
But while warning Whitehall that Trump’s White House could collapse under the weight of scandal, he also urged the British Government not to write Trump off.
The President, he noted, has been mired in scandal most of his life but has always survived.
Sir Kim drew a parallel with The Terminator, a 1984 science fiction film featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cyborg that is almost impossible to destroy.
‘Trump may emerge from the flames, battered but intact, like Schwarzenegger in the final scenes of The Terminator.’
Looking to the future, Sir Kim warned ‘there are real risks on the horizon’ and that Trump ‘will do or say things we oppose’.
‘This “America First” Administration could do some profoundly damaging things to the world trade system: such as denounce the WTO, tear up existing trade details, launch protectionist action, even against allies. It could further undermine international action on climate change, or further cut UN funding.’
You need to start by praising him for something he’s done recently There’s no upside in being subtle, let alone being ambiguous
By ISABEL OAKESHOTT
He said that Trump’s ‘spontaneous’ missile strike on a Syrian airbase in April 2017 had won him ‘the best headlines of his brief time in the Oval Office’ but warned that ‘a less well judged military intervention is not inconceivable.’
In the face of the chaos, Sir Kim highlighted how German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and French President Emmanuel Macron, were busy distancing themselves from Trump. But Sir Kim warned London: ‘I don’t think we should follow them.’
He admitted it could be rocky, but suggested that sometimes it might make sense to criticise the President, ‘provided we are careful’. Sir Kim added: ‘Arguably, you get more respect from this President if you stand up to him occasionally – provided the public comments do not come as a surprise and are judicious, calm and avoid personalising.’
Today he may regret that his confidential memo does not meet that test.
Indeed, last night, Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage, a friend of the President, called for Sir Kim to leave his post, saying: ‘The sooner he is gone the better.’