Given the likelihood that the 2024 US election will be a repeat of 2020, Joe Biden vs Donald Trump, and Trump has a realistic chance of winning, I've been catching up on Trump 1.0 via the venerable Bob Woodward. He wrote three Trump books. Fear was published in 2017 and dealt with Trump's transition to power and the first nine months of his presidency. Rage was published in 2020 and dealt with most of the Trump presidency, from its early days to the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests. The final book, Peril, cowritten with Woodward's younger Washington Post colleague Bob Costa, deals with the 2020 election, its aftermath and the early months of Biden's tenure.
Woodward is an engaging story-teller and his books are a kind of superior version of Nikki Savva's chronicles of the recent Australian Liberal governments. He is more measured and objective than Savva, but similarly focused on who said what to whom rather than any serious engagement with policy. (For what it's worth, I had a brief look at Trump's policy legacy back in 2021.) His books rely heavily on what he calls 'deep background' - what Australian journalists, with less grandiosity, call 'off the record' discussions, where unnamed sources close to the action provide interviews and information on condition of anonymity. For Rage he also had a surprising level of cooperation from Trump who engaged in 17 'on the record' interviews over a period of months.
What picture of Trump emerges from these books? The short answer is, not great, and pretty much like his public persona. Trump arrived at the White House from a lifetime of success as a property developer but zero experience in government. He had not so much as sat on his local school board. Yet here he was, the most powerful person in the most powerful government in the world.
You would have thought this would perhaps call for a little humility, an effort to learn the ropes, perhaps some time spent with his predecessors to get some tips, or a bit of study of the mechanisms of government. But Trump doesn't do humility and expressed his scorn for all his predecessors, even those of his own party. Nor does he do due diligence, so his picks for various senior posts were an erratic mix of competence and craziness. His first National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, had to step down within weeks when it was revealed he had contact with the Russian embassy while working for the Trump campaign. He chose former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State on the basis that he had negotiated oil concessions with multiple governments. On the other hand his Defence Secretary, Jim Mattis, was a veteran general with 40 years military experience.
In any case he had little interest in listening to any of these people, novices or veterans. He never read briefings and would barely listen to summaries of them before leaping in to make decisions. He admitted to Woodward that when the COVID crisis broke out he never sat down with his medical advisors and had them explain the virus to him. He told Woodward he didn't have time, and in any case he didn't need to, he understood the virus already. No wonder his pandemic press conferences consisted of Anthony Fauci wincing through an endless stream of misleading and often mischievous nonsense.
He had no sense of orderly policy-making and this meant that he approached major issues through a series of thought bubbles. For instance, from the beginning of his presidency he was massively critical of the US military presence in South Korea, wondering why the Koreans weren't paying for it and wanting to withdraw. His advisors would explain to him that the Koreans were in fact paying 90% of the cost and providing most of the troops and equipment (the latter bought from the US arms industry) and the benefits of trade with prosperous South Korea and the chance to spy on China at close quarters. Yet next time they discussed the issue it was like they never had this previous conversation.
Yet Trump's erratic, unorthodox approach could also yield some surprises. For instance, his cautious foreign policy and military advisors were horrified when he decided to engage in a Twitter war with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, calling him 'little rocket man' and taunting him over and over. Yet somehow the war of words transformed rapidly into a kind of bromance where the two met, exchanged affectionate letters and even negotiated an agreement of sorts. Ultimately the agreement broke down and there was no lasting change, but Trump got further along the road to peace than any of his predecessors had in the previous seven decades.
Meanwhile, Woodward describes a horrendous, chaotic working environment in the White House. Trump had a volcanic temper and did not tolerate being contradicted. He delighted in playing advisors off against one another, and there were various people on his team whose roles were only vaguely defined, like his 'chief strategist' Steve Bannon and his son-in-law Jared Kushner who was designated a 'special advisor', not to mention the constant presence of 'first daughter' Ivanka. These loose cannons, with no more government experience than Trump himself, would come in unexpectedly on any policy issue and turn it on its head. Trump had little hesitation in firing people, often over Twitter after assuring them in person that he wanted them to stay, and many more resigned in despair at the toxic working environment he created. Over 90% of his staff roles changed hands over the four years of his presidency.
Meanwhile, Trump was massively impulsive. He would tend to discuss a policy issue with whoever was in the room, then ask them to go away and write a memo on it for him to sign. Rob Porter, his long suffering staff secretary, had to be always on the lookout for these rogue memos that had not been discussed with the key people who would have to implement them, quietly withdrawing them from the correspondence folder and referring them back to the relevant person. Trump rarely followed up to ask what had happened to them, he seems to have had the attention span of a flea. In Woodward's detailed accounts of their interviews he leaps about from subject to subject, refuses to answer direct questions, never goes into detail on policy issues and provides grandiose assessments of how popular he is, the scale of his electoral victory and his achievements as President.
But all of this was nothing to the final stanza of the Trump presidency, the 10 weeks between him losing the election and Biden's swearing in. He spent this period raging about in an increasingly empty White House as his staff departed early to escape the madness, sitting with Rudy Giuliani and his team listening to their concocted evidence of electoral fraud and finally, as we know, egging his supporters on to storm the Capitol in an attempt to prevent the certification of the election. In the midst of this madness anything could have happened and nearly did. At one point, General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the most senior commander in the US Military) and the acting Defence Secretary were presented with a signed memo (in the wrong format) ordering the rapid withdrawal of US personnel from Afghanistan and Somalia. They took it to National Security Advisor Richard O'Brien, who hadn't seen it either. So who had written it, and on what had they based the timetable? O'Brien managed in the end to persuade Trump to rescind it.
In the midst of all this, Biden never got a proper handover. He didn't even get the courtesy tour of the White House that is traditional for incoming presidents. Trump didn't have the grace to attend his inauguration, instead flying out by helicopter to his Florida home while it was taking place. Fortunately, Biden is a seasoned professional and was ready to roll from Day 1.
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In the three years that have passed since the publication of Peril, whenever we see or hear from Trump we seem to be in a version of Groundhog Day. The various pieces of legal jeopardy he accumulated across his life are gradually winding their way through the tortuous US legal system. He is facing charges in both Federal and State courts over his role in trying to subvert the 2020 election, charges of falsifying business records over his hush payments to porn actor Stormy Daniels in the 2016 campaign, and charges under the official secrets act for taking classified documents to his home when he left the White House and hiding them from the FBI when they came looking. His companies are facing charges of tax fraud in New York, while he is being sued for defamation over a rape he is alleged to have committed many years ago. (A couple of days ago a New York court ordered him to pay E. Jean Carroll $US83m in damages for defaming her following her allegations of rape against him).
Not that any of this, nor Woodward's damning assessment, has any impact on his electoral prospects. Trump dismisses each charge as a Democrat 'witch hunt', defaming court officials, judges and prosecutors with impunity, and his supporters swallow his lies whole and beg for more. Woodward, no doubt, is just another fake news reporter. Unless the current legal moves to bar him from the nomination process on the grounds of having engaged in insurrection are successful (and it will have to get past a Supreme Court stacked with Republican appointees), he looks set to win the Republican presidential nomination in a landslide, and various polls show him about level in a head-to-head contest with Biden. Of course a lot can happen between now and November but we have to ask, how does such a person get to remain a realistic challenger for President of the world's richest and most heavily armed country?
As I have often said, no individual can rule a large and complex country, and no individual can ascend to the pinnacle of government on their own. Trump is where he is because significant forces within US politics support him, while others enable him despite preferring that he was not there.
First of all, it's important to remember that Trump is not actually that popular, and has never received the votes of a majority of US voters. In 2016 he received about two million fewer votes than Hilary Clinton, who herself was not a popular figure. In 2020 he received seven million fewer votes than Biden, an ageing, gaffe-prone political veteran. He won the first election, and came close to winning the second, because the US electoral system is based on State boundaries and gives greater weight to voters in small rural States (who are more likely to vote Republican) than larger more urbanised ones. Biden would have lost the election if a few thousand votes in half a dozen key States had gone the other way.
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Even then, it is indisputable that 74 million people voted for Trump in 2020 and that over half of the Republican voters believe he won and the election was stolen from him. How do we explain this bizarre fact? There are many elements that come together to make it happen.
- Trump has been able to bring together and take advantage of many dissident currents in US politics. Some of these are long-standing, like the white supremacist sense of grievance that has been rumbling along since the Civil War of the 1860s and the persistent rise and fall of conspiracy theories loosely linked to fundamentalist Christianity of which QAnon is merely the latest. Others are more recent, including the rise of the Tea Party libertarians and their increasing power in the Republican Party, and the growth of the religious right in recent decades and their unswerving devotion to the Republican Party in the name of preventing abortions.
- Alongside this there is a fracturing of the media landscape which has taken place in the internet age. America is awash with misinformation masquerading as news via organs such as Breitbart and Infowars with more mainstream sources, particularly Murdoch's Fox News, taking an 'if you can't beat them, join them' approach. The irony is that this has paved the way for the demonisation of those sources with higher editorial standards, so that while people like me think it is Fox, Breitbart and Infowars spreading lies, their dedicated viewers and readers think it is CNN, NBC and the New York Times.
- Sitting behind this is the hold of billionaires over the US political system. Their handsome funding of think-tanks, electoral campaigns and lobbyists ensures the relentless promotion of candidates who will enable them to get richer (which both Trump and Biden will do, but Trump will do it more) while running down government services to pay for massive tax cuts. These billionaires don't care if unemployed people and sole parents are homeless and starving, lining up for hours at welfare offices for their meagre cheques and sent to prison for petty crimes, as long as nobody looks too closely at how they came by their obscene wealth and what they do with it. It's not surprising, in this context, that poor people are massively cynical about government and don't bother to vote, or vote for some billionaire celebrity who promises them things he has no intention of delivering.
- The final thing to note is what might be self-serving venality, or might simply be spinelessness, among the Senators and Representatives who are elected under the Republican banner. The Republican leaders in Congress - House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell - both made their distaste for Trump known before the election. Yet once he became President they locked in firmly behind him, never wavering in their support for his maddest schemes or standing up for their friends and colleagues when Trump publicly pilloried and defamed them. Neither of these men, nor their various supposedly moderate colleagues, owed their election to Trump or were at risk of dismissal by him, yet with rare honourable exceptions (Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney) they continued to support him right up until election day in 2020. It was only in the aftermath that their support wavered. Vice President Mike Pence - who as an elected officer was also not vulnerable to dismissal - stood up to Trump just once, when he refused to go along with Trump's demand that he (illegally) refuse to allow the certification of Biden's election to go ahead.
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