When May visited
Trump, the UK media were full of comparisons with Thatcher and
Reagan. The US free press paid little attention to the visit, because
they were fully preoccupied by the enormity of what was happening to
their country. They were not seeing the first few tentative steps of
another Republican president, they were seeing the confident strides
of the equivalent in the UK not of Nigel Farage, but the leader of
the BNP or the EDL. If you think this is going over the top, read on.
There were three
kinds of story about Trump that encouraged people to think things
wouldn’t be so bad. The first, which we now know is untrue, is that
he would surround himself with more experienced and wiser counsel.
Instead probably the most powerful
man in Trump’s White House is Steve Bannon.
He is executive chairman of Breitbart News, essentially a far right,
or what is called in the US alt-right, news and opinion outlet that
promotes white supremacist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic ideas. One of
Trump’s latest actions
is to oust the director of intelligence and the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff from always attending the Principals Committee of the
National Security Council and replacing them with Bannon. John McCain
said the appointment of Mr. Bannon is a radical departure from any
National Security Council in history.
The second story was
that everything said on the campaign trail was to win the presidency,
and that once that was achieved more ‘serious’ (aka traditional
Republican) measures would be introduced.
(US financial markets might
have bought into that idea, and are now beginning to realise their
error.) Once again the first few days, and particularly this travel
ban, have proved that wrong. Trump is enacting the headline measures
that were both highly controversial and also effective on the
campaign trail, and doing that fast. This is smart politics. His
strength was never in the Republican party or in the business
community, but in those who watch propaganda networks like Fox News
and who helped him into the White House.
The final story,
which continues on both the left and right, is that Trump and his
team are inexperienced buffoons who will quickly make fools of
themselves, and will be brought to heel by the checks and balances of
the US constitutional system. Its too early to tell, but the signs so
far do not look good. Take the holocaust statement. According to this
story, leaving out any mention
of Jews or anti-Semitism from the Holocaust Day statement was perhaps
an oversight that would get corrected later. But it was not,
but instead intentional and purposeful.
A far more plausible
explanation of what is going on is that it is part of a strategy,
not only to firm up Trump’s base but also to test those checks and
balances. Telling border agency staff to ignore
court orders is not confusion but deliberate, to see how far they can
go. Initial reports that the top state department officials had
resigned were perhaps deliberate misinformation: they were all fired
by the White House, with no replacements in sight. What this looks
like is a concentration of power at the very centre. The lack of
consultation about the immigration order was not inexperienced
oversight but the shape of things to come.
The trouble with
checks and balances are that they are designed to work on the margin,
stopping small acts of overreach by different parts of a normal
government. Whether they can cope with a determined and fast moving
small team in the White House we have yet to see. These checks and
balances are often slow. For example Trump has become president with
his business affairs hardly altered. The travel ban excluded the four
countries in the area in which Trump has business interests. “This
isn’t the way the presidency has worked since Congress passed the
Ethics in Government Act in 1978,” said
the director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, but what is
anyone going to do about it?
Given all this, for
Prime Minister May to celebrate
a “new era of American renewal” after meeting Trump represents
either craven grovelling or a complete misreading of what is going
on, or both. As Simon Schama tweets:
“Nothing is being renewed in USA except hatred. Nothing is being
renewed in USA except ignorance and the dissolving of distinction
between lies and truth. Nothing is being renewed in USA but much is
being destroyed: equity under law, the climate, civil decency, public
education, public health.”
If you think that quote, and this post more generally, are
overreactions of the type often found in the worst kind of left-wing
hyperbole, here
is Charles Koch, scourge of the American Left: “We have a
tremendous danger because we can go the authoritarian route ….”.
All this is going to
have huge consequences for the people of the US and the world. But I
make no apology for ending on a more parochial point, because it is
critical and happening right now. Brexit is like a train with no way
of stopping before its destination, full of people who think they are
going to paradise, but their paradise has just been taken over by
someone who is turning it into hell. Does our leader say we must get off the train before it
starts, fit it with more brakes or even that we must pause before we
leave? No, she says she sees and hears nothing, and even the normally
rebellious guard says we must follow the will of the people. As Trump
goes about putting his campaign pledges into action within days of
taking office, Boris Johnson in the Commons yesterday actually said
that it was clear that “Trump’s bark is considerably worse than
his bite”. Keynes may not have said
“When the facts change I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”,
but it is the right question to ask right now..
