7
Another American pageant was unfolding – a celebration for many, a carnival of grief for others. At an outdoor concert on the eve of the inauguration, the country star Lee Greenwood reprised his old hit ‘God Bless the USA’ against a backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial and a wall of Jumbotron screens filled with the stars and stripes of Old Glory fluttering in slow motion. His voice sounded frailer now, and he struggled in the high register. The tone was different too. Back in the 1980s, the song exemplified the patriotism of the Reagan years and the optimistic spirit of that summertime of resurgence. Thirty years on, it sounded more nationalistic and hoarse – and not only because of the singer’s frayed vocal cords. Camera cutaways showed President-elect Donald Trump heartily singing along. When the song came to an end, he punched the twilight air, as if this Reaganite anthem now belonged to him.
In advance, the Trump team let it be known that the Gipper’s 1981 inaugural address had been the inspiration for the billionaire’s first speech as president. As he was sworn in as vice-president, it was on Ronald Reagan’s Bible that Mike Pence placed his hand. A steady chant of ‘USA, USA’ rose from the crowd below the inaugural stand, where the scarlet baseball caps were imprinted with that Reaganite slogan ‘Make America Great Again’. There was also an ’80s vibe about the Trumps. Melania and Ivanka looked like modern-day Krystle Carringtons. The lesser-known members of the incoming first family could have stepped out of the set of Falcon Crest.
For all the Reagan-era grace notes, Trump’s inaugural was emphatically Trumpian. Determined to stamp his brand on the proceedings in the most literal sense of all, his first stop after arriving in Washington was at his new hotel in the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue, which instantly became an administration hangout. To perform the national anthem, he chose a 16-year-old singer who came runner-up in America’s Got Talent. Not for him a poet, cellist or opera singer, although Steve Bannon, his famously dishevelled campaign chief, did turn up wearing a suit.
Political poison polluted the Washington air, more pungent even than during the Obama years. When Hillary Clinton took the stage, the mosh pit of MAGA diehards chanted, ‘Lock her up!’ When the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made a plea for inclusiveness – ‘Whatever our race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity; whether we are immigrants or native-born, whether we live with disabilities or not ...’ – there was a wall of boos.
Back in 1981, when Reagan stepped to the podium, the clouds parted and sun drenched the inaugural stand in perfect natural lighting, as if adhering to stage directions from some Hollywood biblical epic. When the time came for Donald Trump to speak, it started to rain. And lest you think this is fake meteorology, I was standing on the press riser off to the side, and felt those raindrops myself.
What followed was an inaugural address that could just as easily have been delivered in an aircraft hangar in Mobile, Alabama, a stadium rally in Youngstown, Ohio, or the lobby of Trump Tower after one of his primary victories. Like a revolutionary leader ransacking the capital, he opted for fiery words – the language and hellfire tone that had provided the script for his campaign. ‘[W]e are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another,’ he bellowed, ‘but we are transferring power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the people.’
While Trump was at the podium, those of us in the press stand who had provided hours of commentary in the lead-up to the ceremony were prohibited from speaking, for the entirely understandable reason that it would be distracting. For most of us, though, this directive was superfluous. This dystopian inaugural – which talked of crime-ridden inner cities and ‘rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation’ – left us struggling to articulate words. ‘This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,’ the new president thundered. It was akin to seeing in the pulpit of some medieval cathedral a TV evangelist speaking in tongues.
Afterwards, Barack Obama was generous enough to applaud, and even pay his successor the courtesy of a compliment. ‘Good job,’ he said, as Trump retook his seat. A more stinging review came from George W. Bush, who further endeared himself to his one-time liberal detractors by muttering, ‘That was some weird shit.’
Immediately after his election, I had wondered whether Trump would revert to being the man I met in his conference room all those years ago, before the red light of the camera activated his showman self. During an Oval Office meeting with Obama two days afterwards, he seemed respectful both of the institution of the presidency and of the man he was about to succeed. Unusually sheepish, abnormally quiescent, there were hints that day that he might be suffering from impostor syndrome. Yet his first 24 hours as president showed that Trump would be Trump. The anti-politician had morphed into the anti-president. He would change the presidency more than the presidency would change him.
Musical confirmation came at the first inaugural ball, which he and Melania visited that night, when they danced to Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’. At the second ball on his itinerary, the Freedom Ball at the Washington Convention Center, Trump asked the crowd about his presence on social media, ‘Should I keep the Twitter going or not?’ His question was met with a wall of affirmative cheers. It meant the Trump White House would come with its own microclimate of Twitter storms, with thunderclaps before dawn and lightning bolts before bed. The early hot take on his tweets was that they were chaff: a distractive counter-measure intended to jam our journalistic radar. Yet as his Twitter handle attested, this was the @realDonaldTrump. His tweets weren’t distractions but distillations of his mind and mood. First with 140 characters and then with 280, he channelled his authentic self.
The first full day of the Trump presidency was madder still. Incensed by photographs showing his inauguration crowd to be smaller than his predecessor’s in 2009, Trump ordered the National Park Service to edit aerial photographs in a way that cropped out the empty spaces on the National Mall – an extraordinary ‘size matters’ fit of pique. Then he dispatched his press secretary, Sean Spicer, to deliver an angry statement to gobsmacked reporters, falsely claiming Trump had attracted the biggest-ever inauguration audience – a rant that at that time stood as perhaps the most bizarre spectacle ever witnessed in the White House Briefing Room, but which ended up serving as a curtain-raiser for stranger performances to come.
Later on, during a visit to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Trump launched a vicious attack on reporters from a presidential podium placed in front of the Memorial Wall, where 133 stars are carved into the marble to mark the intelligence officers killed in the line of service. It is hard to think of a more hallowed space in any US government building. During the presidency of Donald Trump, however, nothing would be sacred. Political no-go zones were a thing of the past.
In a bastardised version of Ronald Reagan’s role of a lifetime, Trump embarked on a performative presidency in which playing the part seemed just as important as executing his practical duties. ‘Twitter Trump’ inevitably generated the early headlines, but it was the televisual possibilities of the presidency that seemed to animate him most. He conceived of his presidency as a television event, and of himself as a content provider as well as head of government. Not long after taking the oath of office, he instructed aides to treat every day as if it were an episode of a television show in which, as The New York Times reported, ‘he vanquishes rivals’.1
The medium fixated him. Trump described his victory in 2016 as ‘the biggest night in television history’. ‘Welcome to the studio,’ he said from his high-back leather chair at the beginning of a Cabinet meeting of 2018. In the first television interview of the presidency, he took David Muir of ABC News on a tour of the White House, treating it like a giant new set. ‘I can be the most presidential person ever, other than the great Abe Lincoln,’ he said. The essence of presidential leadership, he seemed to think, was to adopt a presidential persona, just as Ronald Reagan had done; this was as much a role-playing exercise as a practical, philosophical or moral undertaking.
Even as he assumed the most onerous job in the world, the metrics of television consumed him. That first decree-like statement from Sean Spicer, in which he sounded more like a propagandist than a press secretary, was about television ratings, false though they were. Attending his first national prayer breakfast little over a week later, Trump mocked Arnold Schwarzenegger for his poor ratings as the new host of The Apprentice (even as president, Trump remained an executive producer on the show). When he taunted hostile news channels, such as CNN, he frequently made fun of their ‘terrible ratings!’, one of the few areas in which he displayed a granular knowledge.
Major announcements, such as his choices as Supreme Court nominees, were teased on Twitter with tune-in-for-the-next-instalment expectancy. First with Judge Neil Gorsuch, then again with Brett Kavanaugh, the suspense came to an end in primetime specials broadcast from the East Room and compèred by the president. ‘So, was that a surprise?’ asked Trump, as Gorsuch and his wife approached the podium, treating them like contestants on a game show who had just won a Caribbean cruise.
Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton had announced their picks in less showy daytime roll-outs. Reagan had nominated Justice Anthony Kennedy in the evening. After Kennedy’s replacement, Brett Kavanaugh, scraped through a nomination battle overshadowed by historic allegations of sexual assault and heavy drinking, Trump threw a primetime pep rally. Even the conservative Supreme Court justices in attendance looked distinctly uncomfortable about the politicisation of this White House tableau.
Trump’s first State of the Union address replicated the Reagan made-for-television model. The centrepiece was his Gipper-like salute to human heroes in the balcony, among them the widow of a Navy SEAL killed in Yemen. In his 2020 State of the Union address, Trump gave the genre a personal twist, with a surprise reunion of a military wife with her warrior husband and the Oprah-style awarding of a scholarship to a beaming African-American schoolgirl. At any moment, one half-expected him to point towards one of his Cabinet secretaries and to utter his famous catchphrase ‘You’re fired!’, or to announce that every lawmaker would return home with the keys to a new Pontiac.
Trump’s campaign-style rallies were an attempt to bypass the media by producing his own programming. Fox News regularly carried these speeches in their entirety. CNN and all the other networks broadcast the highlights.
While reporters justifiably complained about the cancellation of daily White House press briefings, Trump appeared before the cameras to take questions far more than his predecessors. Oval Office sprays, when Trump fielded reporters’ questions, commonly with an international leader left wordless at his side, were often so long they cut into the time allotted for face-to-face diplomacy. His question-and-answer sessions on the South Lawn of the White House before boarding Marine One were so rambling you wondered whether the helicopter might run out of fuel.
Television cameras often became flies on the wall, a documentary-like style he actively encouraged. A favourite moment of his presidency came after the Parkland school shooting in Florida, where 17 teenagers were massacred, when cameras were allowed into the Roosevelt Room to film his 64-minute meeting with Republican and Democratic leaders on gun control that was broadcast in its entirety on cable news. Despite the seriousness of the subject matter, it had the feel of the boardroom scene from The Apprentice.
When a cameraman was allowed to linger at an early Cabinet meeting, it provided a stream of footage that resembled state television, the Pyongyang on the Potomac moment when Cabinet officials took turns to lavish praise on their boss. Mike Pence, who early on perfected the devoted gaze of the prototypical political wife, was the most sycophantic. The then Defense Secretary, James Mattis, was the only person at the table not to bend the knee.
Always the visuals of his presidency obsessed him. Sean Spicer was instructed to wear better suits. Trump hated his National Security Advisor John Bolton’s bushy moustache. An early star performer was his first UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, whom Trump commended for bringing ‘glamour’ to the Security Council’s horseshoe table. Richard Grenell, his ambassador to Germany, became a Trump favourite not only because he publicly berated Washington’s European allies but also for his angular, telegenic good looks. ‘If you’re not on TV, you don’t really exist as far as Trump is concerned,’ an associate of his second press secretary, Sarah Sanders, told The New Yorker.2
Foreign policy regularly took the form of made-for-television show diplomacy. In Saudi Arabia he happily participated in a bizarre ceremony where he placed his hands on a glowing orb that looked like a cross between a mystical, occult ritual and the draw to decide on the group tables ahead of the FIFA World Cup. When he visited NATO headquarters a few days later, he barged his way to the front of the family photo, strong-arming the Prime Minister of Montenegro out of the way, not only to assert US dominance but also to make sure he was centre-frame.
Some of the more cinematic moments of his presidency, such as when he met the plane carrying three Korean-American prisoners released by Pyongyang, were packaged into what looked like movie trailers, this one with footage in slow motion married with the stirring soundtrack of the Harrison Ford film Air Force One. After a trip to Iraq, his first to a combat zone, he told rally-goers, ‘And I said, “Bring the cameras. I’m going to make a movie. This is the most incredible thing.”’ Following a visit to the Pentagon, he observed the generals were ‘like from a movie, better-looking than Tom Cruise’.3
The artificiality of television helped create the pretence of continual achievement. This was true of his first summit with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in Singapore, which was intricately choreographed so that the two leaders shook hands in front of a tableau of alternating US and North Korean flags. The imagery was arresting. The pictures appeared on front pages around the world. Tensions were reduced, but not much substantively was achieved in terms of denuclearisation.
‘Little Rocket Man’, whom Trump had threatened with ‘fire and fury’, now co-starred in a buddy movie. Kim, in one of his flowery letters to the president, likened their first meeting to a ‘fantasy film’. Or was it a rom-com? After their summit, Trump told supporters in West Virginia he ‘fell in love’ with the diminutive North Korean. Thereafter, he treated him like an on-air spouse. No matter that the dictator has been accused, among other brutalities, of carrying out executions with anti-aircraft guns and of detaining up to 130,000 of his compatriots in gulags.
Even when events went completely off the rails, he did not seem to mind, so long as they produced good television. Trump made no attempt to shut down Kanye West’s wacky, profanity-laden soliloquy when the two men met in the autumn of 2018, surely the first time in broadcast history that the word ‘motherfucker’ was caught on camera in the Oval Office. Trump liked what he was hearing. Kanye, who turned up wearing a Make America Great Again cap, said his headgear made him ‘feel like Superman’.
As for the revolving-door turnover of his administration, it constantly introduced new characters into the mix. The only problem was when new cast members eclipsed the lead. It helped explain why Anthony ‘The Mooch’ Scaramucci lasted such a short time as the White House communications director, those ten glorious profanity-filled days in July 2017. Even The Mooch’s protestations in an infamous New Yorker interview that he did not have a ticket on himself – ‘I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock’ – failed to save him.4
Mark Burnett, the producer of The Apprentice, was not much of a fan of the term ‘reality show’ to describe his genre of programming. Instead, he preferred the word ‘dramality’. This neologism applied also to the Trump presidency.
The style of his presidency found a parallel in those trashy daytime talk shows where the aim was to stoke controversy, engineer confrontations, conjure up dramatic surprises and appeal to the basest elements of a screaming audience baying for sensation and sometimes even blood. Fist fights always got the best ratings. Trump cast himself not as the on-screen referee, the arbiter of these disputes, but rather as the central combatant: the thrower of the punches, the deliverer of the most insults and the perpetual victim.
Watching television was almost as central to his presidency as appearing on it. TV was so often the motor for his rage, his Twitter tirades, his abrupt changes in policy, his foreign policy. Trump, who described the digital video recorder TiVo as ‘one of the greatest inventions of all time’, was thought to consume at least five hours of television each day, starting each morning at about 5.30 with his favourite show, Fox and Friends, and other cable shows less to his liking, such as MSNBC’s breakfast offering Morning Joe – ‘Morning Joke’, he called it.
As a candidate, he admitted TV was a primary source of information. ‘Well, I watch the shows,’ he told Chuck Todd of Meet the Press, who asked from whom he got military advice. As president, it became clear his tweets came in real-time response to segments on Fox News and other cable channels. In a six-month period between the summer of 2018 and the following spring, Media Matters chronicled more than 200 instances where Trump passed on information gleaned from Fox News to his followers on Twitter. ‘There is no strategy to Trump’s Twitter feed,’ wrote the journalist Matthew Gertz, who chronicled his tweets. ‘He is not trying to distract the media. He is being distracted.’5
Foreign diplomats quickly grasped that booking themselves on his favourite shows was the most effective way of putting a word in his ear. The then British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson adopted this ‘audience of one’ strategy in a last-ditch attempt to persuade Trump against pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, appearing on Fox and Friends and also, as a back-up, Morning Joe. In one interview, Johnson suggested Trump should be a contender for the Nobel Peace Prize for his nuclear diplomacy on the Korean peninsula, an attempt to massage his ego if he couldn’t physically shake his hand.
Trump’s response to some of the landmark moments of his presidency, such as the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, was often as a viewer. After mocking Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, at one of his rallies in Mississippi, he told reporters he found her televised testimony ‘very compelling and she looks like a very fine woman’. Her performance on television had seemingly impressed him. When US Special Forces hunted down Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State, Trump described the video feed he watched near the Situation Room as ‘something really amazing to see’, and likened it to ‘watching a movie’.
To highlight the primacy of television is not to diminish the importance to the Trump presidency of Twitter. It was through the combination of television and Twitter that Donald Trump achieved his omnipresence. It enabled him to replicate the kind of total media saturation he achieved during the campaign. Twitter gave him a platform to bypass and attack the media, needle Democrats, shame corporations, taunt foreign enemies and allies, disparage dissident Republicans and even sack members of his own administration. Rather than saying ‘You’re fired!’ in person, Trump did it digitally. Rex Tillerson found out he had been dismissed while he was on the toilet.
Ceaselessly we were witnesses to this presidential psychodrama, and the round-the-clock availability of Twitter meant that it played out almost every waking hour of almost every day. ‘It’s morning again in America’ took on a new connotation: rolling over in bed, picking up a smartphone and seeing who Trump had decided to vilify or smear in his latest pre-dawn attack.
It was commonplace to say that Twitter was to Trump what television was to JFK and radio to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But it was his means of expression more than just his use of a new medium that was so norm-shattering. Back in the early ’60s, televised press conferences showcased Kennedy’s wit, élan and self-deprecation. Roosevelt’s fireside chats soothed a nation traumatised by the Great Depression. Trump’s Twitter tirades, by contrast, created a sense of perpetual crisis and anxiety, and showed how the White House was hostage to the whims and temper of its occupant. To many of his supporters, however, it offered ALL CAPS proof that he was carrying out the job they hired him to do.
So this America First president himself became an American first. Never had we witnessed a US leader who so flagrantly flouted the customs of presidential behaviour. From the juvenile nicknames (‘Nervous Nancy’, ‘Shifty Schiff’, ‘Cryin’ Chuck’) to the ugly slurs (‘Horseface’ for Stormy Daniels, a former porn star with whom he was once apparently intimate). From the weird boasts (who describes himself as a ‘very stable genius’?) to the wacko tweets (the photo-shopped image of his face superimposed on the body of Sylvester Stallone in Rocky boxing garb). From the trashing of one-time colleagues (his first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was as ‘dumb as a brick’ and the Republican House Speaker, Paul Ryan, was a ‘baby’, while Anthony ‘The Mooch’ Scaramucci was a ‘nut job’) to his strange fixations (he was flushed with pride after he ‘aced’ a simple cognitive test designed to detect signs of dementia, where he had to remember the words ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV’).
Never before had we witnessed a president with such a strained relationship with the truth. A running tally kept by The Washington Post recorded more than 22,000 falsehoods, and showed that the more time he spent in office the more prolific became his dissembling. Nor had we seen a US leader mount such a prolonged assault on members of the press, part of a deliberate campaign to delegitimise the correctors of his mistruths. Along with his daily Twitter attacks on media organisations such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, he praised the Montana Congressman Greg Gianforte, the ‘tough cookie’ who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour assault after body-slamming a reporter from The Guardian. Every day brought new fights and clashes – unending confrontation.
The occupant of the White House is ideally supposed to articulate the nation’s principles, personify its values and serve as a role model for the nation’s children, but these were not part of the job description that he felt any need to fulfil. The Boy Scouts of America even had to apologise to parents after Trump appeared at its jamborees in the summer of 2017 and delivered a highly politicised speech railing against Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the fake news media.
Six weeks into his presidency, Trump transgressed yet another norm by accusing his predecessor of criminality. ‘Terrible. Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory,’ he tweeted, without citing any evidence. ‘Nothing found. This is McCarthyism ... This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!’ Having observed a ceasefire during the transition, the anti-Obama candidate became the anti-Obama president, reverting to the vitriol of his birther crusade.
Personal vendettas became a running theme. After the death of John McCain, whose dramatic thumbs-down vote in the Senate helped save Obamacare, he refused initially to fly the flag at half-mast at the White House. Ahead of Trump’s visit to Japan, the Navy and Air Force even received a request to hide the USS John S. McCain, which was named in honour of him, his father and grandfather, so that its presence in a Tokyo naval base would not upset the president.
This was a presidency of the here and now. Trump was preoccupied by the moment. Frenetic and impulsive, there was something fast and furious about almost everything his administration did. Like Reagan, his focus on the presentational aspects of the presidency meant he often floundered at the back-office aspects of the role. As he lacked the curiosity or patience to digest briefing papers, aides often provided information in diagrammatic form – classroom-style visual aids. Decision-making was offhand, and he was not always a full participant in his own administration. As Bob Woodward reported in his pull-back-the-curtain bestseller Fear: Trump in the White House, senior officials routinely decided not to act on his orders in the hope he would forget ever having made them. Orderly long-term policy-making was cast aside. Quick policy fixes were often botched.
The Trump White House flunked its first two attempts to institute a travel ban restricting the entry of immigrants from mainly Muslim countries. The president also failed to repeal and replace Obamacare, one of his core campaign promises. On healthcare, the dysfunction of the Republican Party – which could not agree on how to kill off Obamacare despite seven years of trying – mirrored the dysfunction of the West Wing.
Even though the GOP controlled the presidency, Senate and House, it struggled to advance its agenda, and found it difficult to transition from being a party of opposition to one of government. The Party of No remained the Party of No, as House Speaker Paul Ryan despairingly conceded: ‘We were a 10-year opposition party. Being against things was easy to do.’
Gridlock was ordinarily the consequence of divided government, but the healthcare debacle suggested it had become endemic. Without the unifying presence of Barack Obama in the White House, Republican discipline in the early phase of the Trump presidency sometimes fell apart.
Despite promising to bring his business skills to Washington, Trump proved to be a poor chief executive. The chaos of administration staff turnover – four White House chiefs of staff, four National Security Advisors, three secretaries of defense, two secretaries of state, two attorneys general and a revolving door of senior West Wing aides – was without precedent. We were introduced to the phrase ‘kakistocracy’, meaning the rule of the incompetent, and reminded of the warning from Jeb Bush: ‘He’s a chaos candidate and he’d make a chaos president.’ Adults in the room were either shown the door or headed for it themselves. Afterwards, they made little attempt to conceal their true feelings towards their former boss. Tillerson called him ‘a fucking moron’. Gary Cohn, his economy tsar, labelled him ‘a professional liar’. John Kelly, his one-time chief of staff, described him as an ‘idiot’ and ‘unhinged’. James Mattis noted: ‘Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people.’
Early on it became clear that this would be by far the most obviously improper presidency of the modern era. Conflicts of interest abounded. This was so much the case that it became hard to differentiate where the presidency ended and the family business began. China’s decision to grant trademark rights to Ivanka Trump during Xi Jinping’s visit to Mar-a-Lago was a case in point. Foreign diplomats wanting to curry favour with the Trump White House booked into his Pennsylvania Avenue hotel. The president even announced that the G20 summit of international leaders would be held at a Trump resort in Miami, before the outcry forced a rare climb-down.
The self-styled billionaire repeatedly refused to release his personal tax returns, presumably to save himself from financial embarrassment. The New York Times revealed that he had paid just $750 in income tax in 2016 and 2017, and also that his business had haemorrhaged hundreds of millions of dollars over the previous 20 years. Continually, he was the litigant president, fighting, among other things, claims that he had violated the emoluments clause of the constitution, barring personal enrichment. The swamp that Donald Trump promised to drain became even more saturated and putrid.
Not since the Reagan years and Iran-Contra had a presidency been hit by so many criminal indictments, including his first National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, his one-time campaign chief, Paul Manafort, and his long-time political advisor Roger Stone, who celebrated his arraignment by flashing a Nixon-style victory salute. When his former lawyer Michael Cohen was arrested and agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors, the president spoke like the boss of a crime family. Deploying the lingua franca of the Mafioso, he described his one-time fixer as ‘a rat’.
The overall effect was to turn the White House into a hub of unceasing agitation and anxiety, rather than a place, as it should be, of competence and calm.
Under Trump, the economy continued its post-Great Recession rebound. Unemployment declined further. The stock market continued to grow. Journeying into the Rust Belt, there was a sense of economic revival. The Ohio River, which was almost empty of traffic when we visited in 2016, was buzzing again with coal barges. Workers in heartland towns told us their prospects had improved. What was striking about the Trump presidency, however, was its failure to tackle many of the deep-rooted problems, such as income inequality, that got him elected. His boasts of a ‘blue-collar boom’ were contradicted by statistics suggesting the growth in middle-class income had fallen to 2.7 per cent, down from 5.8 per cent during Obama’s final two years in office. Wage growth dropped in 48 out of 50 states.6
Largely because of the Trump trade war, the steel industry continued to shed jobs – almost 2,000 since he took office. It was estimated that tit-for-tat tariff fights cost 175,000 manufacturing jobs. The trade war also meant pain for farmers, who had to be given massive cash hand-outs from Washington to compensate for the drop in exports – precisely the kind of big government conservatism that brought the Tea Party into existence.
The tax cuts from this populist president benefited the rich far more than the middle class. According to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, the wealthiest 20 per cent saw their post-tax income rise by 2.9 per cent, compared with just 1.6 per cent for middle-income earners.7
Trump failed to make much headway with his vaunted wall along the southern border, eventually resorting to siphoning funds from the Pentagon, sparking a constitutional showdown in the process when Congress blocked funding to build a 110-mile section of fencing.
Even draconian measures that drew widespread international condemnation, such as separating immigrant children from their families at the southern border, failed initially to end the refugee crisis. The wire cages of the detention centres became the Guantánamo watchtowers of the Trump presidency.
The controversy and bedlam did not concern his base. They had not sent him to Washington to play by normal rules. Negative headlines were dismissed as fake news, the jaundiced coverage of a liberal press out to destroy his presidency. Having voted for the billionaire partly to punch sneering bi-coastal liberals in the nose, there was also gratification in seeing elite blood shed with such profusion. Awards ceremonies such as the Oscars, when stars queued up to skewer Trump, were catnip to his red-capped supporters.
Donald Trump could also point to a significant record of right-wing accomplishment. Tax cuts. Two right-wing Supreme Court nominees elevated early on to the bench (and a third by the time he left office). The travel ban – eventually. The bonfire of federal regulations.
He claimed to have achieved more than almost any other administration in history. However, a poll of nearly 200 political science scholars, which routinely placed Republicans higher than Democrats, ranked him 44th out of the 44 men who have occupied the post. Conservative scholars who identified themselves as Republicans placed him 40th, a humiliating ranking for a president who likened himself, unabashedly, to Abraham Lincoln.
Among historians the Trump presidency was starting to be viewed as an aggregation of the lesser traits of his predecessors. The bullying of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who demeaned White House aides and even humiliated his vice-president, Hubert Humphrey – forcing his deputy once to recite a speech on Vietnam while he listened, legs akimbo, trousers round his ankles, on the toilet. The intellectual incuriosity of Ronald Reagan. The shameless lying of Bill Clinton. The paranoia of Richard Nixon. The incompetence of George W. Bush. The historical amnesia of Gerald Ford, who asserted during the sole 1976 presidential debate that Eastern Europe was not dominated by Moscow. The strategic impatience of Barack Obama, whose instinct always was to withdraw US forces from troublesome battlefields, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, even if it meant leaving behind a mess. The distractedness of Jack Kennedy, who whiled away afternoons in the White House swimming pool with a bevy of young women to sate his libido, an X-rated version perhaps of Trump sitting for hours in front of his flat-screen TV watching friendly right-wing anchors bowing down before him.
Those same historians struggled to detect the kind of virtues that offset his predecessors’ vices: the optimism of Reagan; the inspirational rhetoric of JFK; the legislative cunning of LBJ; the governing pragmatism of Nixon; the decency of Ford; the foreign-policy insight of Bush senior; the empathy of Clinton; the racial inclusivity of Bush junior; or the personal rectitude of Obama. Rather than being viewed as the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan, Trump was cast as a modern-day James Buchanan or Franklin Pierce, the worst of presidential worsts.
Because Donald Trump was unwilling to accept that he was anything other than an A+ president, the grade he frequently bestowed on himself, he was not prepared to adopt the kind of course corrections that saved troubled administrations. This was not a learning presidency. Trump lacked the self-awareness to admit he was wrong, still less alter course. Incumbents can benefit from self-doubt, a trait Donald Trump seemed to regard as a character flaw.
A master of blame transference, he always lashed out at others, whether members of his administration, such as Jeff Sessions, or the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, his own hand-picked appointee. Whereas Harry S. Truman used to say, ‘The buck stops here’, Trump’s version of it, which he revealed on the South Lawn in January 2019, was ‘The buck stops with everybody.’ Presidents also usually grow in office. But while there were physical signs the septuagenarian had aged, there was little evidence he had matured.
For many of his supporters, however, the fact that he became president was as consequential as his presidency itself – the racial reverse of how African-Americans construed the victory of Barack Obama. In perhaps the ultimate expression of negative partisanship, their man occupied the White House and the Democrats did not. Like Reagan’s and Obama’s, this was a hugely symbolic presidency, but whereas the Gipper signified resurgence and Obama embodied renewal, Trump represented revenge.
On the morning after Trump took the oath of office, two very different Americas passed each other by at Washington’s Union Station, as bleary-eyed revellers who had danced long into the night at the inaugural balls made their way back to New Jersey and New York with hang-up bags slung over their arms and incoming trains disgorged female demonstrators by the carriage-load. The first mass protest of the Trump era took place less than 24 hours after his swearing in, and many of the empty spaces on the National Mall from the day before were now packed shoulder-to-shoulder with women in a pink blossoming of the ‘Trump Resistance’.
The organisers of the march had not much liked the idea of women knitting pink pussy hats, but they came to be instantly iconic. So too did some of the banners, especially those carried by women who had marched over the decades in favour of Roe v. Wade and the Equal Rights Amendment. ‘My arms are tired from holding up this sign since the 1960s,’ read one. ‘I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit,’ sighed another.
The country was irrevocably split. Like the ink blots of a Rorschach test, how you reacted to the Trump presidency determined which America you inhabited. The most deliberately divisive president of the modern era, Trump governed in a manner designed to reward those who voted for him and to neglect, or even punish, those who backed Hillary Clinton.
In an attempt to guarantee his re-election, he pursued a more extreme version of George W. Bush’s 51 per cent model: a 30-state strategy to safeguard the 304 votes he won in the Electoral College. The aim was to consolidate his base, rather than significantly expand it – to build a Trumpian wall, in effect, around the states that voted Trump.
His travel schedule early in his presidency suggested he would be a sectional rather than national leader. Shortly after winning the presidency, he embarked on a ‘victory tour’ that took in Ohio, North Carolina and Iowa, three states he carried on Election Day. Of the ten states Trump visited first as president, seven helped send him to Washington. His trips to the three Democratic states were unavoidable. Virginia was the home of the CIA and Pentagon. Delaware was the site of the Dover Air Base, where Americans killed in combat are repatriated. His first trip to Maryland was to attend a conference of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The blue state he visited most was New Jersey, to play golf at one of his country clubs.
Not until May did he return to New York, a blink-and-you-miss-it foray for a commemorative dinner to mark the Battle of the Coral Sea with the then Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. Avoiding the city of his birth for fear of massive demonstrations, he did not step through the doors of Trump Tower until August. His preference was for political comfort zones, and the worshipping crowds they brought.
The make-up of his administration was emphatically partisan. Trump dispensed with the tradition of appointing a high-profile figure from the opposing party to run a government department. Gary Cohn, a former head of Goldman Sachs, became the most high-ranking Democrat in the White House, with a seat at the Cabinet table, but was derided by the president as a ‘globalist’ and resigned in early 2018.
Nominating Jeff Sessions as his attorney general was particularly provocative, for the Alabama senator had faced accusations of racism in the 1980s that cost him a federal judgeship. Sessions would have joined the Ku Klux Klan, he allegedly said, had its ranks not included pot smokers. Yet accusations of racism and Islamophobia were no bar to entry into the administration. Steve Bannon had been the executive editor of the Trump fanzine Breitbart News, ‘the home of the alt-right’. The president’s first National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, who had to step down because of his ties with Russia, had once tweeted that the ‘fear of Muslims is rational’. Stephen Miller, the main architect of the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies, promoted white nationalist literature from alt-right websites and bemoaned the loss of Confederate symbols in the aftermath of Dylann Roof’s racist gun rampage in Charleston.
Trump’s policies rewarded red states and penalised the blue. His attempt to repeal Obamacare would have resulted in a massive redistribution of funding from blue states that had expanded Medicare eligibility under the Affordable Care Act to red states that had not. His 2017 tax reforms hit Democratic states especially hard, because of the state and local tax reduction known as SALT. The ten states with the highest SALT deduction all voted for Hillary Clinton. Trump targeted the so-called sanctuary cities obstructing his deportation policy by withholding federal law enforcement funds. His municipal enemies list included the Democratic strongholds of Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Washington DC.
California and New York, those bi-coastal bastions of the Trump resistance, were singled out. Trump revoked a waiver allowing the Golden State to set its own emission standards that had been renewed repeatedly since the Nixon years. He pressured Republicans in Congress to block federal funding for a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River between New Jersey and New York, which had been ranked by the Obama administration as the number one infrastructure project in the country, because the existing tunnel was in danger of failing. The Trump administration even blocked New Yorkers from enrolling or re-enrolling in trusted traveller programmes that speeded up international travel at John F. Kennedy International Airport.
The ‘with me or against me’ principle applied to the federal government. Trump expected top-ranking officials to put personal allegiance to him over their oaths to serve the American people and uphold the US constitution, a loyalty culture that added to the sense of chaos. The FBI Director, James Comey, was fired when he refused to drop the Russian collusion investigation into Michael Flynn. Almost daily for a time, the president humiliated Jeff Sessions with abusive tweets for recusing himself from the Russian investigation, which paved the way for his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, to appoint a special counsel. ‘I’m fucked,’ said Trump, when he heard the news. Sessions, the first senator to back Trump’s candidacy, had been sent to the Justice Department precisely because of his presumed loyalty.
Even as he became the head of government, Trump escalated his attacks on the institutions of state. He assailed his intelligence services, the FBI and the ‘deep state’ for raising legitimate questions about his links with the Kremlin and Moscow’s support for his candidacy. He berated his generals. ‘You’re all losers,’ he told them during a meeting at the Pentagon. ‘You don’t know how to win any more.’ He gave carte blanche to Rex Tillerson, the former Texan oil man, to hollow out the State Department, which he thought was populated with ‘globalists’, liberal interventionists and Hillary Clinton sympathisers. After the exodus of career diplomats and the difficulty in attracting new Foreign Service Officers, its headquarters in Foggy Bottom looked more and more like a derelict shell. This is precisely what Steve Bannon meant when he spoke of ‘the destruction of the administrative state’.
Governmental institutions that ordinarily transcended politics, and which dealt with hard facts, were treated like extensions of his personal organisation. After Trump mistakenly claimed Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama, the White House pressed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to ‘correct’ the forecasters who contradicted the president. The National Archives, the repository of the country’s history, altered a photograph of the women’s march that was critical of Trump. The federal judiciary was a frequent target. His criticism of the ‘Obama judges’ who blocked his travel ban earned a rare rebuke from the Chief Justice, John Roberts. ‘We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,’ he pointedly asserted.
Taking on blue America often meant maligning black and brown America. In doing so, Trump relied on the political business model that helped him reach the White House, which meant inflaming America’s angriest fault line: race. His first travel ban targeted immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries. Continually, he assailed black athletes in the ‘Take a knee’ protests, which unfolded during the playing of the national anthem before American football games. He retweeted anti-Muslim videos from a fringe far-right group, Britain First, and repeatedly attacked Sadiq Khan, London’s Muslim mayor. Immigrants from Haiti and African nations, he told senators in an Oval Office meeting, came from ‘shit-hole countries’.
African-American lawmakers, such as the late Elijah Cummings, the much-loved chairman of the House Oversight Committee, also became his target. Cummings’s district in Baltimore, tweeted the president, was ‘a disgusting, rodent and rat-infested mess’. His attack fitted a long-established pattern in which he depicted black neighbourhoods as pathologically unhygienic and unsafe, playing on racist stereotypes that for generations had portrayed African-Americans as dirty and inferior. After the Cummings controversy, Trump claimed to be ‘the least racist person there is anywhere in the world’, but his words and actions going back decades belied that outlandish boast.8
In the summer of his first year in office, it took him 48 hours to specifically condemn the white-supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, where torch-carrying neo-Nazis shouted ‘Jews will not replace us!’, and where a counter-protester was killed when a racist deliberately rammed his car into the crowd. In an extraordinary press availability held a few days afterwards in the lobby of Trump Tower, he claimed there were ‘very fine people’ on both sides, suggesting a moral equivalence between neo-Nazi protesters and their opponents. Standing next to me in the press huddle that surreal afternoon was an African-American cameraman who abandoned his tripod to join reporters in hurling questions, something I had never before seen in 25 years as a journalist (cameramen never leave their rolling cameras in press conferences and leave the questions to reporters). ‘What should I tell my children?’ he shouted. ‘What should I tell my children?’
When Trump hosted events at the White House intended to be more inclusive, often they had the opposite effect. A ceremony in the Oval Office to honour Navajo veterans took place in front of a portrait of Andrew Jackson, the president who had signed the Indian Removal Act leading to the forced eviction of Native Americans from their land, a calamity known as ‘The Trail of Tears’. Trump compounded this error by telling the bewildered veterans, ‘We have a representative in Congress who has been here a long time – longer than you – they call her Pocahontas,’ yet another dig at Senator Elizabeth Warren, who claimed Native American ancestry.9
After the Democrats won back the House of Representatives in the 2018 congressional midterms, Trump was presented with new targets for his racist attacks: four women of colour – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and her fellow Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a group that called themselves ‘The Squad’.
‘Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,’ tweeted Trump in the summer of 2019, even though three of the four were born in the United States. Rekindling notions of selective citizenship from nativist panics of the past, Trump was not just assailing these women for being un-American, but suggesting they were non-American.
Days later, he crossed another behavioural threshold when he followed up his racist tweets with ugly racial demagoguery at a stadium rally in North Carolina. After singling out the members of The Squad in turn, and ending on Congresswoman Omar, who, he had earlier suggested, falsely and outrageously, had married her brother, Trump did nothing to quell the crowd as it chanted, ‘Send her home, send her home.’ Never before had a modern-day US president publicly used such nativist language. Not since George Wallace’s campaign for the presidency in 1968 had we seen this kind of rabble-rousing – the former segregationist governor, who ran as an independent, got nowhere near the White House.
The politics behind the attack was not hard to unpick. Trump wanted to make these four women the face of the modern-day Democrats: to create four new hate figures, or four new Hillary Clintons. ‘Send her home’ sounded like it was about to become the ‘Lock her up’ mantra of the 2020 race, until GOP leaders made it clear, via Mike Pence, that the party of Lincoln could not be defined by those words.
The night of the infamous North Carolina rally I was on the National Mall and watched Marine One swoop in over the Tidal Basin and fly past the Washington Monument, before dropping the president on the South Lawn of the White House. The obelisk was illuminated with a gigantic projection of Apollo 11, a spacecraft that still inspired awe. At the very moment the country was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, a unifying national mission detached from earthly politics, an American first of such noble ambition, the president was actively sowing the seeds of disunion. How far off that Sea of Tranquillity seemed now.
It came as little surprise that America witnessed an alarming increase in hate crimes from the moment Trump won the presidency. Between 9 November 2016 and 31 March 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center recorded 1,863 incidents, the biggest spike since the aftermath of 9/11. This was brought home to my own family when the playground my children regularly went to after school was daubed with Nazi swastikas and the pro-Trump graffiti ‘GO TRUMP’. By the end of 2020, hate crimes had reached their highest level in more than a decade, and hate killings were the worst on record.
Sometimes it appeared that a line could be drawn between the president’s words of incitement and racial violence. In August 2019 a white nationalist whose online manifesto vowed to end the ‘Hispanic invasion’ shot dead 23 people at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas. Trump had used that very word ‘invasion’ at a Florida rally in May, and had then asked his supporters, ‘How do you stop these people?’ When someone shouted, ‘Shoot them,’ he laughed.
After the 2018 synagogue mass shooting in Pittsburgh, when 11 people were killed by a gunman armed with an AR-15 assault rifle shouting anti-Semitic slurs, a coalition of local Jewish leaders issued a letter telling Trump he would not be welcome in the city until he denounced white nationalism. I was in Pittsburgh that awful weekend – the Tree of Life synagogue was located in the neighbourhood where the children’s TV star Fred Rogers used to live – and heard for myself from community members who regarded the president as a purveyor of hate. Trump’s own rhetoric made it impossible for him to assume the traditional mantle of ‘mourner-in-chief’.
A vigilante president encouraged vigilantes. ‘A Trump super fan’ is how prosecutors described Cesar Sayoc, who posted 16 bombs to people he deemed to be enemies of the president, including prominent Democrats and CNN. Arrested in Florida, his white van was festooned with pro-Trump stickers and pictures of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama overlaid with the crosshairs of a rifle. Not long afterwards, a picture emerged of him at a Trump rally holding aloft a home-made banner reading ‘CNN sucks’. President Trump’s first hate tweet had targeted ‘Fake News @CNN’, while he had also retweeted a crazed video of himself tackling and punching a man at a WrestleMania event, with a CNN logo superimposed on his opponent’s face.10
Political violence made an unwelcome reappearance. In December 2016, a 28-year-old from North Carolina launched a gun attack on a pizzeria in Washington DC, which a spate of fake ‘Pizzagate’ news stories embraced by QAnon conspiracy theorists claimed was imprisoning sex slaves who were victims of a child-abuse ring operated by Hillary Clinton. Nor was the violence solely confined to the right. In the summer of 2017 a left-wing activist who was a supporter of Bernie Sanders carried out a gun attack on a Republican congressional baseball team practising in Alexandria, Virginia. The House Majority Whip Steve Scalise became the first sitting member of Congress to have been shot since Gabby Giffords.
As the country continued to rip itself apart, the president sought to appropriate America’s birthday, 4 July, and turn it into a personal celebration. Trump’s 2019 Salute to America, which looked to all intents and purposes like a MAGA rally on the National Mall, provided yet another reminder of the over-politicisation of American life. The pictures from this pageant were quickly packaged up into campaign advertisements. And what pictures they were. The Lincoln Memorial was decorated not just with red-white-and-blue bunting but also with martial trappings – two 60-ton M1 Abrams tanks and a pair of armoured Bradley Fighting Vehicles. A B-2 Stealth Bomber, F-22 Raptors, the plane used as Air Force One and the Navy’s Blue Angels Flight Demonstration Squadron soared overhead. This was Make America Great Again as a military tattoo.
It was no wonder that sales of dystopian literature soared, as worried citizens compiled a crisis reading list that included George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. Roth’s novel imagines a President Charles Lindbergh, the aviator who became the spokesman of the America First Committee in the early years of World War II. In answer to the question posed by all three novels – ‘Could it happen here?’ – concerned readers responded with an emphatic ‘Yes’.
Invocations of a modern-day Third Reich were hysterical and overblown. They showed how anger had warped political discourse. Donald Trump’s America was not Gilead, although when I interviewed Margaret Atwood in Toronto she thought it was easy to imagine Mike Pence as one of the theocratic commanders. Just as the billionaire unwisely compared himself to the heroes of history, so his more strident critics overreached when they likened him to history’s worst villains.
Nonetheless, there were parallels with the tales from the autarchic canon. Trump’s response to the aerial photographs from his inauguration, in which he asserted a ‘truth’ that defied the evidence of our eyes, was eerily Orwellian. Orwell himself could have coined the phrase ‘alternative facts’, mouthed by the president’s aide Kellyanne Conway in defence of his truth-twisting.
Addressing a convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars, Trump even argued that reports of his trade war with China hurting the US economy, an almost uniformly held view in corporate America, were false. ‘What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,’ said Trump, prompting a wave of memes quoting one of the better-known passages from 1984. ‘The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’
Trump also displayed authoritarian impulses. Repeatedly he claimed an ‘absolute right’ to exert control over the Justice Department, and was convinced of his immunity not just from federal and state prosecution but from any form of oversight. Frequently he gave the impression his presidency was not constrained by the law. ‘I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want,’ he declared in the summer of 2019, which was reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s infamous assertion during his interviews with David Frost: ‘when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.’
With the courts and Congress constraining the Trump White House early on, and with the constitutional checks and balances seemingly working as the framers intended, the fandom surrounding the founding fathers reached new heights. They were cast as positively prophetic for anticipating a president like Trump. Going to watch the musical Hamilton, which celebrates the brave early years of the fledgling republic, and cheering at the line from the French General Lafayette ‘Immigrants, we get the job done’, became an act of resistance. However, the veneration of the founding fathers once again blinded Americans to how their flawed constitution had contributed to the country’s downward slide.
All the living ex-presidents, regardless of party, received a Trump Bump. None more so than George W. Bush, who, having made it clear he did not vote for the billionaire, benefited from a dizzying revisionism. Now the ‘Toxic Texan’ looked like an elder statesman. Iraq and Katrina no longer seemed so heinous. His impish friendship with Michelle Obama, sealed again with the discreet handover of a sweet at his father’s funeral, stood in such marked contrast to the humourlessness of his Republican successor. As with the fawning over the framers, it created the misleading sense that ex-presidents were blameless in the rise of Donald Trump.
Clinton, Bush, Obama. America had seen a succession of schismatising leaders. But Trump instantly became the most polarising president of them all. There was a staggering 79 per cent gap in his approval ratings between Democrats and those of Republicans. For blue America he was a national embarrassment. Much of red America, though, still saw him as a national saviour.
So extreme was the temperature on the afternoon Donald Trump announced America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate change accord that the journalists seated in the White House Rose Garden, awaiting his emergence from the Oval Office, noticed the red thermometer warning symbol appear on our smartphones – ‘iPhone needs to cool down before you can use it’ – and our laptops start to overheat.
In keeping with his reality TV advisory to West Wing staffers, he tried to create the greatest possible suspense before giving his statement. ‘I will be announcing my decision on Paris Accord, Thursday at 3.00 pm,’ he teased in a tweet beforehand. The White House even laid on a military jazz quartet, sweltering in their scarlet tunics, to serenade the waiting administration officials and press corps. This inevitably invited comparisons with the string orchestra that kept playing as the Titanic nosed beneath the waves, though it was melting icebergs which this time were potentially calamitous.
The remarks prepared that day sounded like a teleprompter version of a rally speech. Elucidation as rant. ‘The Paris Agreement handicaps the United States economy in order to win praise from the very foreign capitals and global activists that have long sought to gain wealth at our country’s expense,’ he bellowed, revisiting his decades-old themes of national victimhood and humiliation. ‘They don’t put America first. I do, and always will,’ he stressed. ‘I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.’ (We drove to Pittsburgh the following morning, a forward-thinking city with a Democratic mayor and cutting-edge environmental policies.)
Early on in his presidency, it became clear the Trump doctrine was primarily an anti-Obama doctrine, aimed at demolishing his predecessor’s foreign-policy legacy. More a deal-breaker than a deal-maker, one of his first acts as president was to withdraw the United States unilaterally from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Obama’s geopolitical gang-up intended to contain China. Likewise, the Paris climate change accord, Iranian nuclear deal and rapprochement with Cuba were Obama legacy items. The new president bombed targets in Syria partly to show his preparedness to enforce the very red lines prohibiting the use of chemical weapons that had proved so elastic for Obama.
Trump’s view of international leaders was shaped to a large extent by how they got on with his predecessor. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, was given short shrift, because she was the international leader whom Obama most respected – the departing president made his last foreign visit to Berlin, where they dined together for three hours. Nor did it help that Time magazine named her ‘Person of the Year’ in 2015, and acclaimed her as ‘the leader of the free world’. The Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, another Obama favourite, was a regular target of Trump’s tweet tirades. Obama’s foes, most notably Benjamin Netanyahu, became bosom buddies.
‘America First meant America alone’ was our standard line as reporters. I parroted it myself from the White House after he jettisoned the Paris accord. That, however, was only part of the story. While relations soured with longstanding allies as Trump abdicated America’s traditional role as the leader of rules-based international order, he lent support to an informal axis of authoritarians.
In Saudi Arabia he spoke with almost fatherly pride of the country’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, even though he had been implicated by US intelligence in the murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was decapitated with an electric saw. He praised Egypt’s autocratic president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, as ‘a fantastic guy’. He complimented Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, for an ‘unbelievable job on the drug problem’, even though the crackdown resulted in the extrajudicial killing of an estimated 12,000 suspected drug dealers and users. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey received ‘very high marks’, despite his increasingly authoritarian rule. The far-right president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, the so-called Trump of the Tropics, received a brotherly welcome at the White House. After a 21-year break, the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, the face of European ultra-nationalism, was invited back to the White House. International strongmen seemed to make Trump go weak at the knees.
Vladimir Putin occupied a special place in Trump’s affections, and from the very beginning the president exhibited an almost phobic aversion to any form of criticism of the Russian leader. This inevitably raised suspicions over Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. After Russian agents launched a nerve-agent attack targeting a KGB defector in the UK, in the cathedral town of Salisbury, the president fumed at aides for pushing him to expel 60 Russian diplomats and suspected spies in retaliation and favoured a far more limited response. At a summit in Helsinki with Putin, Trump sided with the former KGB spymaster over his own intelligence agencies on the question of Russian collusion – jaw-dropping remarks he had to walk back on after his return to Washington following a rare outcry from normally obsequious Republicans.
Trump actively sought to expand this network of nationalist fellow travellers. Ahead of the French presidential election in the spring of 2017, Trump backed the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, tweeting ‘she’s the strongest on borders and she’s the strongest on what’s been going on in France’. Before becoming president, he announced in a late-night tweet that Nigel Farage would make an excellent UK ambassador in Washington, which sent a lightning bolt through Whitehall.
When it came to relations with Washington, the world’s authoritarians and nationalists had rarely had it so good. Certainly, a US president had never before showered them with such praise or given them such licence. In the red, white and blue of America First, autocrats saw a green light to act with impunity.
Though it may be premature to speak of the creation of a new world order bringing together nationalists and authoritarians, the old post-war order was crumbling under the weight of Trump’s wrecking ball. The transatlantic alliance, the bedrock of the international system, faced its most severe stress test since the Suez Crisis in 1956. As Downing Street desperately eyed a post-Brexit trade deal, the special relationship came to look more like a servile relationship.
Traditional alliances now meant little. In his first telephone call with Malcolm Turnbull, Trump tried to tear up the agreement reached with the Obama administration over the resettlement into the United States of refugees from Australia’s offshore detention centres. On his first trip to Europe, he berated NATO allies over burden-sharing, with a scorched-earth speech at the alliance’s new headquarters in Brussels that turned into the most humiliating public dressing-down of allies ever witnessed from a US president. Standing in front of a lump of twisted metal retrieved from Ground Zero, Trump markedly failed to endorse Article Five of the NATO charter, the provision invoked by America’s allies after September 11 to rally to the defence of any member under attack.
Trump attended historical commemorations, such as the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, but there was something ahistorical about his approach – as if the alliances forged in blood on the battlefields of the two world wars were now expendable. Perhaps his true feelings surfaced when he failed to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, which officials at the time said was because of bad weather. ‘Why should I go to that cemetery?’, The Atlantic magazine reported him as asking aides. ‘It’s filled with losers.’ In another conversation during that trip, he reportedly referred to the 1,800 US Marines who had lost their lives at the Battle of Belleau Wood as ‘suckers’.
The gathering he seemed to least enjoy was the G7, largely because it brought together Washington’s longest-standing friends. He stormed out of the summit in Quebec City, refusing to sign its communiqué. In Biarritz, he complained the gathering was focusing on ‘niche issues’ such as climate change, and bemoaned the ongoing exclusion of Vladimir Putin in punishment for his annexation of Crimea. The message conveyed in all these settings, when America’s closest allies were at his side, was that there was no longer a joint Western project. Trump did not seem to believe in the concept of the United States standing at the head of a free world, the cornerstone of US policy since the war.
America’s post-war dominance was based on the strength and durability of its alliance system, which was a product of careful diplomatic design. Yet whether it was Australia, Britain, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Germany, France, Mexico, Ukraine or NATO, Trump was trashing these vital relationships and guilty of a betrayal of trust, the sine qua non of diplomacy. In Syria, Trump threw the Kurds who had fought alongside US Special Forces in the campaign against Islamic State to the wolves by green-lighting the Turkish invasion of north-eastern Iraq. This betrayal showed that America was no longer a trustworthy friend, and also indicated how Trump sometimes failed to understand the might of US military power: in this instance, how a tiny deployment of just 50 American Special Forces troops could maintain stability in northern Syria and prevent Turkey and the Kurds from engaging in all-out war.
The conduct of foreign affairs became unusually personalised. Whereas in recent decades America’s influence has been defined in terms of soft power and hard power, the new president pinned his faith in ‘Trump power’. An ‘I alone can fix it’ approach: ‘America First’ as ‘Me First’. Often it was predicated on his egotistical view that international leaders would put the alchemy of good personal chemistry with him ahead of their country’s vital national interests.
There were obvious drawbacks. This belief in ‘Trump power’ created the misleading sense that a friendly relationship would inexorably lead to positive policy outcomes, which was manifestly not the case in the trade dispute with China or the nuclear diplomacy with North Korea. This highly personalised approach also undercut traditional forms of diplomacy. ‘I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time negotiating with Little Rocket Man,’ he wrote on Twitter, while Tillerson was working through back channels with Pyongyang and before Trump’s infatuation with the North Korean despot had begun.
Foreign governments no longer knew who spoke for the United States. The word of secretaries of state, national security advisors and ambassadors all over the world could be undercut with a single tweet. Besides, Trump often instructed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to be his emissary.
For all that, Trump restored a fear factor to US diplomacy absent during the Obama years; a bringing together of a twentieth-century view of American power, based on the preparedness to use military might, and a nineteenth-century sense of American manhood, based on the disposition towards physical violence – a kind of John Wayne doctrine.
The Assad regime hesitated before ordering another chemical strike – although it continued its use of barrel bombs, which killed far more civilians. NATO allies started to stump up more cash. At the United Nations, the constant threat that the organisation’s biggest donor could withdraw funding provided fresh impetus for US-led reform, especially of the bloated peacekeeping operations.
When I interviewed the new Secretary-General, António Guterres, in his wood-panelled suite of offices on the 38th floor of the United Nations in New York, which looks onto a Trump apartment building, he was so afraid of insulting the former property tycoon that he told me afterwards he never referred to him publicly by name. Instead, he spoke generically of ‘the US government’. Trump, after all, could bankrupt the United Nations with a single tweet.
There were times when Trump’s unpredictability was a national security asset. After he gave the order to assassinate Iran’s second most powerful leader, Qasem Soleimani, critics drew parallels with the killing of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the spark that ignited World War I. Yet Iran’s initial response – to launch missile strikes on two US bases in Iraq – was relatively mild, because they feared a disproportionate response from the US commander-in-chief.
This dread of Trump had shades of Nixon’s ‘Madman Theory’, where friends and foes alike feared his irrationality and volatility and could not entirely rule out the awful possibility of him pressing the nuclear button. Yet here again was a paradox: in an inversion of President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous dictum, he spoke loudly and rarely reached for the big stick. Trump sounded like a warmonger, but he did not want to wage war.
Frequently, in a kind of Trump-versus-Trump doctrine, the president contradicted himself, as his macho compulsions vied with his isolationist impulses. Having given the go-head for an attack on the Iranians in June 2019 for downing an unarmed American drone, he made a last-minute decision not to retaliate militarily.
Though the president was feared, often he was ridiculed. During his 2018 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, his extravagant boasts about how he had made America great again were met with open laughter from the diplomats arrayed before him. At a Buckingham Palace reception during the 2019 G7 summit, he was mocked in a huddle of world leaders that included Justin Trudeau, Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron – a slight caught on camera that prompted yet another early exit from a G7 gathering.
His extremism meant he was also reviled. The then Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, announced Trump would not be welcome to address a joint session of parliament, a courtesy extended to Xi Jinping only a few years earlier and an astonishing snub from America’s closest ally. His Muslim travel ban was denounced not just by adversaries such as Iran but also by allies such as France and Canada. No longer did the world look to America for moral leadership. No longer did the United States actively pursue a human rights agenda. In an interview early on with the disgraced Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, when asked why he was so fond of ‘a killer’ like Putin, he scoffed at the idea that America had ever offered the ethical lead. ‘There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?’ It was true, but no US president had been prepared to admit to the amorality of US foreign policy, partly for fear of the legitimising message it would send to authoritarians.
Yet another way of understanding Trump’s foreign policy was through the prism of electoral politics, for much of what he did in foreign affairs was with an eye on re-election. True to this doctrine of political self-preservation, and true to his pledges as a candidate, he avoided military entanglements. He launched a trade war against China. He relocated the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a popular move among evangelicals. ‘Promise made, promise kept’ became something of a guiding principle in foreign policy, and lent a measure of consistency to an often haphazard approach. In his memoir, The Room Where It Happened, John Bolton observed how he was ‘hard-pressed to identify any significant decision during my Trump tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations’.
The summer of 2019 offered a case study of Trumpism on the global stage. On the eve of the G20 summit in Osaka, Vladimir Putin declared in an interview with the Financial Times that the Western-style liberal order had ‘become obsolete’. Trump seemed intent on proving him right. As he flew into Japan, there was the now almost ritualistic hazing of the host.
‘If Japan is attacked, we will fight World War III, but if we’re attacked, Japan doesn’t have to help us at all,’ he complained in an interview, before heading for Osaka. ‘They can watch it on a Sony television.’
Attacking Shinzo Abe seemed especially cruel, for the Japanese Prime Minister had been the most slavish practitioner of the child-monarch approach to the US president, taking calculated flattery to the point of craven obsequiousness. In the lead-up to Osaka, Abe even produced a simplistic colour chart for Trump showing how much Japan invested in America, not that it granted Abe any diplomatic immunity from the schoolyard bully.
In Osaka, Trump showered praise on Mohammed bin Salman. When an American pool reporter allowed into the room asked about the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the press were immediately shown the door, with Trump pretending not to hear the question. In his first meeting with the Russian president after the publication of the Mueller Report, Trump was even chummier with Vladimir Putin. ‘Don’t meddle in the [2020] election,’ he said laughingly when invited by a reporter to admonish the Russian president, treating the Kremlin’s interference as if it were an adolescent prank.
Nor was he troubled by Putin’s requiem for Western-style liberalism. Bizarrely, at his end-of-summit news conference he did not even appear to understand what was meant by the term, confusing it with West Coast liberalism. ‘[Putin] sees what’s going on, I guess, if you look at what’s happening in Los Angeles. And what’s happening in San Francisco and a couple of other cities which are run by an extraordinary group of liberal people.’ Invited to defend democracy, he attacked the Democrats. Offered the chance to contradict Putin, he condemned Pelosi.
In his bilateral meeting with Xi Jinping, Trump also demonstrated how his transactional approach to foreign policy merged with the electoral. The president pleaded with his Chinese counterpart to purchase soybeans from hard-pressed US farmers in key battleground states.
The most surreal moment in Osaka came with the president’s unexpected, early morning offer to Kim Jong-un for a quick meet-and-greet at the demilitarised zone on the Korean Peninsula: ‘if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this,’ he tweeted, ‘I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello (?)!’
If the impromptu invitation felt like a diplomatic form of online dating, the staging of the meeting itself owed more to The Bachelor. At this brief encounter, a starry-eyed Kim Jong-un gambolled down the steps on the northern side of the armistice line while Donald Trump emerged, with a self-satisfied smile, from a building on the south through its mirrored glass doors, the most theatrical entrance on offer. Ordinarily, moments of history are sealed with a handshake, but here it was with a footstep. Donald Trump left his Secret Service security detail behind to stride out alone into what for decades had been enemy territory, a country that less than two years earlier he’d threatened to wipe from the map. The North Korean leader had gone from mortal foe to chirpy tour guide.
The shortest presidential foreign trip on record lasted little more than a minute. Yet by crossing a geographic threshold no other occupant of the White House had ever stepped over, he lent legitimacy to a totalitarian regime with one of the worst human rights records in the world and granted a murderous despot the imprimatur of American acceptance. As for nuclear diplomacy, ‘Little Rocket Man’ retained his arsenal of weapons capable of reaching the West Coast.
This was the first instalment in what became a tale of two Kims, with the amorousness at the DMZ followed in short order by the president’s frigid reaction to the leak of critical diplomatic cables from the UK ambassador in Washington, Sir Kim Darroch. Inept, incompetent and insecure was the diplomat’s assessment of the president and his administration, supposedly secret words spelt out in bold tabloid font on the front page of The Mail on Sunday. With his gossamer skin pierced, Trump made the White House a no-go zone for the ambassador of America’s closest ally. Here his famed catchphrase, ‘You’re fired!’, was superfluous. Fearing a trial by tweet, Darroch resigned shortly afterwards, knowing his position had become untenable.
Now in the final weeks of her prime ministership, Theresa May bore the brunt of his fury. Via Twitter, Trump mocked her negotiating skills on Brexit as ‘a disaster’. So a relationship that began in Washington shortly after his inauguration with a gentle tap on the hand from the president as the two walked down the colonnade that connects the West Wing to the Executive Mansion ended with repeated kicks in the teeth.
Before the summer’s end there were more eccentricities. Trump intervened with the Swedish Prime Minister on behalf of the rapper A$AP Rocky, held for alleged assault, following a lobbying campaign from Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. In a meeting with the Pakistani Prime Minister, Imran Khan, another celebrity politician, Trump talked casually about wiping Afghanistan off the map and killing 10 million people, something he said he ideally did not want to do. ‘Kabul seeks clarification on Trump talk of wiping out Afghanistan,’ read the headline the next day from Reuters, which sounded more like it belonged on the satirical website The Onion. He even raised the possibility of buying Greenland – something, admittedly, the Americans had proposed doing three times before – and cancelled a visit to Copenhagen at the last minute after the Danish Prime Minister called his real-estate offer ‘absurd’.
There were a few countries, such as Israel and India, where Trump was popular, but most of his signature policies were rejected around the world: the wall along the Mexican border, the withdrawal from the Paris climate change accord and the Iranian nuclear deal. In a shocking illustration of how US prestige had suffered under his leadership, Vladimir Putin had a higher international approval rating (33 per cent), according to Pew Research. Trump’s 29 per cent was just one point better than China’s Xi Jinping.11 Three decades on from the end of the Cold War, an authoritarian Russian president who regularly flouted international law apparently commanded more global respect than the president of the United States.
The snaking lines outside high schools in the commuter belt of Philadelphia were a portent of political change. It was the morning of the midterm congressional elections, and we were witnessing a pre-dawn suburban revolt. Many of the well-heeled Republicans who in 2016 had backed Donald Trump, but held their noses as they did so, were now expressing voters’ remorse. Many of those Starbucks moms now had regrets. Two years after the detonation of the blue wall, a blue wave now swept across much of the country. It lifted the Democrats to a majority in the House of Representatives.
From that moment on, it seemed inevitable that the Trump presidency would include the spectacle of impeachment, even if the returning House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was initially reluctant to take this rarely used option, mindful of the backlash against the GOP in 1998 and how it had cost two of her predecessors as House Speaker their jobs.
Those who wanted to rid the White House of Donald Trump clung to the belief that Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling would provide the grounds for his removal from office by uncovering evidence of a conspiracy or of obstruction of justice. The chatter in Washington was that the former FBI director was masterminding a slow and deliberate game of three-dimensional chess, while Donald Trump was playing hungry hippo. A string of high-profile indictments and convictions – Flynn, Manafort, Stone, Cohen, the former Trump campaign advisors Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos and 12 Russian intelligence officers – suggested the king might soon be under threat.
Far from moving in for the kill, however, Mueller made choices that greatly diminished the president’s legal jeopardy. After Trump reneged on an agreement to be interviewed at Camp David, the special counsel decided not to subpoena him. Nor did he obtain Trump’s tax returns or examine his financial ties with Russia. Crucially, he adhered to the Justice Department guideline that a sitting president could not be indicted, which meant he soft-pedalled the findings in his report. Russian meddling had been sweeping and systematic, he concluded. Links were uncovered between Trump campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Kremlin. Yet the investigation did not find sufficient evidence to conclude beyond reasonable doubt that the campaign had coordinated and conspired with the Russian government. On the issue of the obstruction of justice, Mueller found ‘multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations’. These included ‘efforts to remove the Special Counsel’. In damning terms he had accused the president while stopping short of a formal indictment.
Unveiling the 448-page report, the Attorney General, William Barr, wilfully distorted its findings, providing important political cover and lending official credence to the Trump boast that there had been ‘no collusion and no obstruction’. Amid this miasma of misrepresentation, Mueller felt the need to correct the record in a press conference, the first time he had broken his silence. ‘If we had had confidence that the president did not commit a crime,’ he stressed, ‘we would have said so.’ Yet Trump continued to enjoy the undying support of Republican leaders and had the protection of an attorney general who exhibited the loyalty of a personal lawyer. For now, impeachment was off the table, and the president emerged emboldened.
Perhaps it was a sense of impunity that encouraged Donald Trump to propose his quid pro quo to the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky: the release of nearly $400 million in congressionally authorised military aid to Kiev in return for political dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
This time Nancy Pelosi was more willing to pursue impeachment. After all, using an instrument of US foreign policy for personal political gain was precisely the kind of abuse of presidential power that the framers had anticipated in laying out the grounds for removal from office.
Trump, of course, claimed his famed call in July 2019 with Zelensky, a fellow celebrity politician, was ‘perfect’, but the partial transcript suggested a classic shakedown. ‘I would like you to do us a favour,’ he said, immediately after discussing the question of military aid. ‘There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son [Hunter], that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you could do with the attorney general would be great.’ When the transcript was released in September 2019, the momentum driving impeachment became unstoppable.
So much of what was wrong about American politics was resident in the trial of Donald John Trump. The hyper-partisanship of Republicans and Democrats was evident in the party-line votes to impeach and acquit that made its outcome so very predictable. Not one House Republican broke ranks on the articles of impeachment. Just two Democrats voted against the abuse of power article, while three were against the obstruction of Congress charge – in 1999, during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, 81 Republicans helped kill off an abuse of power charge, although admittedly, the charge in this instance was easier to justify.
So coarse and ugly was the political discourse that Chief Justice John Roberts, who presided over the trial, told both sides to dial back the rhetoric. There was also no shortage of hype and sensation, although it never lived up to the melodrama of Clinton’s impeachment, partly because Zelensky was no Lewinsky.
A low point was the negative statecraft of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who used parliamentary procedures to bar witnesses from even appearing in the trial – a case of jurors actively obstructing justice. Embracing his role as a wartime consigliere, McConnell’s loyalty to the White House was never in question. For a Senate leader who managed to block Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court appointment for almost a year, preventing the Democratic House managers who prosecuted the case in the trial from calling witnesses hardly required breaking sweat.
Constantly it has been remarked upon how Trump has trashed presidential norms, but the impeachment process underscored how the previous three years had destroyed the shared sense of what those norms should be. Washington could not even agree, as it had done during Watergate, on what constituted right and wrong. Between red and blue America, there was no longer agreement on the difference between black and white.
In many aspects, the impeachment of Donald Trump felt like another rerun of the O. J. Simpson trial. Just as O. J. appealed to the racial allegiance of African-American jury members, so Trump relied on the tribalism of Republicans. Just as O. J.’s legal team railed against the Los Angeles Police Department and its rogue officer, Mark Fuhrman, so Trump complained about the Democratic ‘dirty cops’ led by the former California prosecutor Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff. As with ‘The Juice’, so with ‘The Donald’: the facts of the case were ultimately secondary to the feelings aroused by it. It turned on the question of whose side you were on.
Even the cast list included a familiar name. The celebrity law professor Alan Dershowitz, who had been part of the O. J. defence team, now appeared on the floor of the Senate to defend Donald Trump. Astonishingly, he tried to advance the argument that, because Trump believed his re-election was in the public interest, he was justified in his quid pro quo with Ukraine. Not only did that contradict a central tenet of the president’s defence – that there was no favour for a favour – but Dershowitz was essentially claiming that a sitting president could do anything to get re-elected, a banana-republic defence.
To give the trial even more of a throwback feel, Bill Clinton’s accuser, Kenneth Starr, was given a cameo by the president. Remarkably, he used his speech to the Senate trial to bemoan ‘the age of impeachment’ which he himself had helped usher in.
The president’s ‘Read the transcript’ mantra even had echoes of the O. J. defence team’s ‘If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit’ description of that bloodied black glove: a successful attempt to turn the most damning evidence into the most exculpatory. Democrats complained that the Republicans had turned the Senate into Fifth Avenue, the place where Trump boasted he could shoot someone without losing any support. Only one Republican senator refused to play the partisan game by voting for removal. Mitt Romney’s tearful speech sounded almost like a requiem for moderate Republicanism.
The Senate jury reflected America’s polarised divide. Of its 100 members, 85 came from states that had voted for their party’s presidential nominee in the 2016 election, the highest proportion in history. At the same time, however, the body could hardly be described as representative. Senators sent to Washington from states with 152 million Americans voted to acquit. Senators representing 170 million Americans found Donald Trump guilty.
After his acquittal, some moderate Republican Senators suggested Donald Trump would be chastened by impeachment, that it would be a teachable moment. However, the president’s first post-trial tweet suggested he regarded it as proof of his omnipotence. To his 70 million plus followers, he posted an animation of election placards reading ‘Trump 2020, Trump 2024, Trump 2028’ and beyond – an age of Trump stretching endlessly into the future. Not once did he display any contrition.
His victory rally in the East Room of the White House the morning after his acquittal, where Republican jurors stood to applaud the president, was another definitive moment: when the party of Reagan truly became the party of Trump. They had fallen into line, becoming his loyal soldiers. It was noticeable that the term GOP, an abbreviation for the Grand Old Party, was no longer so commonly heard. It was almost as if commentators no longer thought the party was deserving of that historic title.
Striking, too, during that ceremony was how the Attorney General, William Barr, got up from his seat to clap and salute Trump’s legal team. The gesture suggested that the firewall between prosecutors at the Justice Department and political operatives at the White House had been incinerated, and that Barr was the arsonist.
The president’s post-impeachment purge was quick in coming. Instantly, he ousted administration officials who had testified against him. Trump fired his Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, who claimed during his explosive testimony that ‘everyone knew’ about the quid pro quo with Ukraine. He even subjected Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a decorated veteran who listened in on the Zelensky call and testified against his commander-in-chief, to the dishonour of being marched out of the White House by security guards.
Above all, the impeachment saga illustrated how partisanship had nullified one of the most important constitutional checks and balances. Removing a president required 67 votes, an impossibly high threshold when Senators vote by party. The process therefore no longer held presidents to a higher ethical standard. If anything, it ran the risk of promoting presidential bad behaviour. Incumbents now know they enjoy a certain degree of impunity if they command the loyalty of just 34 of the 100 senators.
The 2020 State of the Union address, delivered on the eve of his acquittal, showed how acidic the air in Washington had become. It began with the president refusing to shake Nancy Pelosi’s hand, and ended with her angrily ripping up his speech – both infantile gestures. Yet the moment that truly encapsulated America’s chronic state of disunion came half-way through, when Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh. An honour bestowed on Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and the astronauts who first flew to the moon now hung around the neck of the high priest of American polarisation. Truly this was the age of Trump.