Macron’s Moment

National Review Online, April 24, 2017

The news that Emmanuel Macron, the nice centrist candidate, was going to win the first round of France’s presidential election was greeted with undisguised delight by the European Union’s ruling elite. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, is not meant to weigh in on elections that are still underway in EU member states, but rules are for little people. He was quick to pass on his congratulations and wish Macron well in the run-off against the National Front’s not-always-so-nice Marine Le Pen two weeks from now. Juncker’s ‘foreign minister,’ Federica Mogherini, gushed that seeing the EU and French flags fly at Macron’s victory celebration was “the hope and future of our generation.” Michel Barnier tweeted that, as a “patriot and European,” he was confident about Macron’s prospects on May 7, and added that “France must remain European.” What Barnier, the faintly sinister former European Commissioner and member of France’s defeated Republican party who will serve as Brussels’ chief negotiator in the Brexit negotiations, meant by “European” was that France must remain in the EU, something that Le Pen might well put in jeopardy. That’s what really mattered.     

Unemployment in France is approximately 10 percent, more than twice German levels. About a quarter of those between the ages of 16 and 25 are unemployed. French GDP growth has been sluggish for years, and government spending accounts for around 57 percent of GDP, compared with 44 percent in Germany.

Then there is terror: the Charlie Hebdo murders that began 2015, the massacre in Paris that ended it, the truck plowing into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice last year, and, most recently, the shooting in the Champs-Élysées that left one policeman dead and two other people seriously wounded just days before Sunday’s vote. These attacks are part of a wider Islamist assault on the West, but they are also symptomatic of failings in the effort to integrate France’s large Muslim minority, failings with consequences that have done more than their bit to contribute to the growth of the hard right. In 2016, Patrick Calvar, the head of France’s General Directorate for Internal Security, told a parliamentary enquiry that he feared a “confrontation between the far right and the Muslim world.”

And Federica Mogherini is cheered up by some flags.

Observing the behavior of the Bourbons and their aristocratic entourage on their return to France after the fall of Napoleon, the French statesman Talleyrand is said to have remarked that the king and his entourage had “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” For some reason that quip came to mind as I read those tweets and other celebratory commentary from, it seemed, every corner of Davosworld,

Looking at Emmanuel Macron, it’s not difficult to understand why. He is one of them — likable, clever, the son of a professor and a doctor, with degrees from the right places, impressive stints in both investment banking and government to his credit, and a fondness for the EU, free trade, and the politics of the Third Way or whatever the old Blairite snake oil is known as these days. As a Socialist minister of the economy, he put together the Loi Macron package of reforms in 2014 and 2015 as a modest — very modest, and it says something about French politics that they had to be forced through by decree — step in toward deregulation. At about the same time, he left the Socialist party, before quitting the government the following year amid speculation about the independent presidential run that duly came to be.

There’s another problem for the tale of populist retreat: Between Le Pen’s share of the first-round vote (roughly 21.5 percent) and that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, left-wing maniac and standard-bearer of France Unbowed (about 19.5 percent), four out of ten first-round ballots were cast for champions of the hard right and left. At 23.9 percent, Macron came out ahead of both of them, but not that far ahead. As establishment triumphs go, this looks a touch thin, even more so after you remember that neither of the two main parties managed to get their man into the final round. Former prime minister François Fillon, of the center-right Republicans, had looked at one point to be a strong challenger, but his campaign was dragged down by scandal. He is under criminal investigation, as is his wife, so the fact that he still managed to reach nearly 20 percent of the vote gives a hint of what might have been. As for the official candidate of the Socialist Party, poor Benoît Hamon, he was eclipsed by Macron and left with barely more than 6 percent of the vote.    

So what now? Le Pen will press on, as candidates described as far right so often do, with a mix of policies from both ends of the political spectrum, a mix that has not harmed her blue-collar appeal. Her tough line on immigration and Islamic extremism is accompanied by a somewhat protectionist economic platform designed to appeal to those who have found themselves struggling to keep up. This blend runs through into Le Pen’s Euroskepticism, driven from the right by nationalism and from the left by her suspicion of the EU’s attachment to what is, by French standards, an over-fondness for the free market. Oh yes, she’d also pull France out of NATO.

When Macron (who has been endorsed by Fillon and Hamon, but not, interestingly, by Mélenchon, who has said he won’t be endorsing anybody) wins in the second round — and he will — the next hurdle he’ll face is the parliamentary elections in June. No one knows how his fledgling party, En Marche! (echoes of Jeb!) will fare, but assuming that coattails and a honeymoon work their magic, enough of his team may make it into the National Assembly to form the nucleus of some sort of centrist coalition. But putting that together is still likely to involve horse trading of a type that won’t make it easy to build even on the meager reformist achievements of the Loi Macron, let alone address the mess in which France — statist, sclerotic, and stuck with the Euro — now finds itself.

Away from the economy, Macron appears to believe that there is not that much that can be done about mass immigration (climate change is, he explains — of course he does — one of its causes). This is not something that appears to worry him much, and it’s not only National Front voters who will find his lack of concern off-putting. As for doing a better job of integrating France’s Muslim minority, it’s far from clear that Macron has anything new to offer. The same may hold true of terrorism. “This imponderable, this threat,” Macron explained after the Champs-Élysées shootings, “will be a fact of daily life in the coming years.”

France’s next presidential election isn’t until 2022, but Marine Le Pen — or someone like her — will be waiting, and that wait may not be in vain.

Underrated: Mike Pence

Standpoint, April 1, 2017

If the stories are accurate, Donald Trump had last-minute doubts about Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana and the person he’d just chosen as his running mate. If so, those doubts said more about Trump than Pence. The Donald would probably have preferred someone from his comfort zone: maybe Newt Gingrich, an eccentric whose glory days were decades ago, or New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a star eclipsed by scandal. He knew them reasonably well and, more importantly, understood that their last best hope of political advancement rested with him. They would know their place.

But Pence looked dangerously like his own man, an outsider foisted on Trump to reassure traditional Republicans and to bring decorum and a credible political track record to a ticket desperately short of both. To be sure, Pence faced a tough re-election fight for the governorship (which in the end he would have probably won), but he had also served six terms in Congress and had been mentioned as a potential presidential candidate for years. He had no need to jump aboard a Trump train only uncertainly connected to the rails. Worse, Pence had endorsed Ted Cruz and reportedly loathed The Donald. The Indiana governor denied that he felt that way, but it was hard to imagine a meeting of minds between a self-described “Christian . . . conservative and . . . Republican, in that order” and a chancer of no fixed party married to Ivana, Marla and Melania, in that order.

The Pence pick was enthusiastically received by GOP loyalists, and, however appalled they were by his hardline social — and not just social — conservativism, even the party’s opponents seemed somewhat soothed by the thought that, in the not-going-to-happen event of a Trump win, at least one pro would be in the new president’s vicinity. If there was a consensus, it was that Pence was a touch dull. There were mutterings too that he was not the brightest. Some of the latter can be put down to the lazy assumptions often made about religious types from flyover country, but, yes, Pence was a C student at high school and, yes, getting into law school had been something of a struggle. The vice president was not, one former associate told me, someone to get too deeply into policy details, but this former talk radio host was “good at messaging”.

That has not always been as true as it might have been. After his second (unsuccessful) attempt to make it into Congress, Pence apologised for running a campaign so negative that it backfired (that was then). A quarter of a century later, there was that looming re-election fight for the governorship. It looked trickier than it should have been, thanks partly to a battle over legislation designed to protect “religious freedom” (but seen by its critics as allowing discrimination against gays). Pence had annoyed both sides, initially by signing the law, then by agreeing to water it down.

That was unusual: Pence’s determination to stick to his principles, even if it meant defying a Republican president, had served him well in Washington after he won election to Congress in 2000. Grasping all the “legs” — fiscal, social and hawkish — of what Ronald Reagan famously described as conservatism’s “three-legged stool”, it wasn’t too long before he was on his way up.  The hardening attitudes on the Right that accompanied the financial crisis (Pence voted against the TARP bailout) and Obama’s election did him no harm either. He became a Tea Party favourite, largely without alienating more mainstream colleagues — no mean achievement. Chatter about a bid for the White House grew louder, but Pence opted to take aim first at the governor’s mansion, a shrewd choice for an ambitious legislator looking for the executive experience that could, if the opportunity arose, bolster a run for the presidency.

Four years later, an unexpected and rather different opportunity presented itself. Pence — more flexible than his reputation suggested — took it. There are dignified rationalisations, of course (patriotic duty, saw something good in Trump) for that decision, but it looks a lot like a brilliant contrarian bet. It would have been made easier to take by the prospect of that re-election fight at home and the thought that, if Trump lost, there was always 2020 and, in the interim, lucrative gigs on the conservative media and lecture circuit — a stint as a Palin, but with gravitas and a future.

Now Pence is a heartbeat, a scandal, or even a tweet away from the presidency. Quite how power is distributed in the Trump administration is opaque, but Pence is clearly much more than a state funerals’ veep, cold-shouldered onto the sidelines. He is out and about too, an ambassador for the administration: to Congress say, or attending the Munich Security Conference in February. He is professional, respectable, calming — no Spiro Agnew he, and, for that matter, no Trump either — and yet, a wise fellow, demonstratively loyal to his boss.

And if in the depths of the night, thoughts that are not quite so loyal come into this still sometimes underrated man’s head, I’m sure they are banished without more ado.

Trump’s Taiwan call: I wonder what he meant by that

Prospect, December 7, 2016

East 52nd Street, NYC, January 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

When Metternich heard the news that Talleyrand, the legendarily devious French diplomat and statesman, had died he is said to have asked “I wonder what he meant by that?” While the connection between Metternich, Talleyrand and Donald Trump is not obvious, China’s leaders may now be asking themselves a similar question about a series of tweets by America’s next president—and the phone call that set them off.

Let’s start with the phone call. On Friday, Trump’s staff announced that The Donald had had a telephone conversation with Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, effectively, and publicly, ignoring a long-standing taboo. Officially at least, no American president (or, it is thought, president-elect) has talked to his Taiwanese counterpart since the 1970s, the decade in which the US recognized the People’s Republic as the sole legal government of a China that included Taiwan. Unsurprisingly, those in charge in Beijing were less than thrilled to hear about Trump’s chat with the head of what they see as a fugitive province.  “Solemn representations” were lodged with the US.

On the other hand, Beijing initially also seemed willing to put the whole incident down to inexperience and widespread suspicions that Trump simply did not know what he was doing were reinforced by a tweet he sent the same day:

“The President of Taiwan CALLED ME today to wish me congratulations on winning the Presidency. Thank you!”

The caps looked defensive: the president-elect had merely taken a call from a president. Polite! Important! And the sense of defensiveness was underlined by the tweet that came next:

“Interesting how the US sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call.”

Trump was still stressing that Tsai had called him and that the call was about him (congratulations!). But the would-be dealmaker-president also took the time to point out that Taiwan is a good customer of USA, Inc. and, while he was at it, undiplomatically highlighted the extent to which America’s “one China” policy is a convenient fiction.

Over the next day or so, The Donald’s tweetflow moved onto more familiar territory: domestic politics, an attack on Saturday Night Live (“unwatchable! Totally biased, not funny and the Baldwin impersonation just can’t get any worse”), support for an errant golfer (“Great to have you back Tiger – Special!”) and a spot of mercantilist menace (“Rexnord of Indiana is moving to Mexico and rather viciously firing all of its 300 workers. This is happening all over our country. No more!”), but concern over the call continued to bubble away. Grumbling that through ignorance, recklessness or bravado, the president-elect had done real damage to relations with China, America’s chatterati appeared as upset as the apparatchiks in Beijing.

So on Sunday Trump tweeted again on China:

“Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the US doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!”

If the call, which lasted for about ten minutes, had not originally been thought through, it was now being defended in terms that looked a lot like policy. There were hints of the trade fight to come, including over the yuan (formally designating China a “currency manipulator” could pave the way for retaliatory action) as well as more conventional strategic concerns over Beijing’s ambitions in the South China Sea. And note the implication contained in the tweet’s opening few words: The president who is going to make America great again is not going to ask any third country for permission to make a phone call or, for that matter, for permission to do quite a bit more besides.

Whether or not it was a blunder, the best guess is that the call was not an accident. It followed months of cultivating Team Trump on Taiwan’s behalf by former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, who now works as a lobbyist in Washington. As for Trump himself, well, five years ago he tweeted this:

“Why is @BarackObama delaying the sale of F-16 aircraft to Taiwan? Wrong message to send to China. #TimeToGetTough”

Team Trump may be downplaying the significance of the call with Tsai (Vice President-elect Pence has referred to it as a “courtesy call”) and Taiwan’s president, acutely aware of the perils of her neighborhood, has said that it should not be taken as an indication of a “policy shift.” “We all,” she told USA Today, “see the value of stability in the region.”

Nevertheless, despite the characteristic confusion and bluster, Trump was almost certainly sending a signal by taking Tsai’s call. The US has neglected the art of great power politics since the fall of the Soviet Union, firstly because it could (for quite a while it had no serious rivals) and secondly, after chastening in Iraq and the election of Obama, because it preferred to put its faith in an internationalist order—from the European Union to the United Nations and beyond—that allowed it to pretend that such selfish maneuvering could safely be consigned, as the lofty phrase went, to the nineteenth century.

Trump is clearly under no such illusion. He believes that America is number one, but he also appears willing to accept that there are other big kids on the block with interests of their own and little intention of playing by the globalist equivalent of the Queensberry rules. Put another way, he is comfortable with a traditional idea of great power rivalry, and engaging in the jostling that comes with it.

If reordering America’s trading relationship with China is high on Trump’s agenda—and it is—then he will be looking for leverage, and that may include the threat to cozy up to Taiwan. It’s a threat that comes with the added advantage that it is likely to please a Republican Party that Trump still needs to reassure. Taiwan, after all, is a friendly democracy, the People’s Republic not so much.

But diplomacy by tweet comes with hazards, particularly when those tweets are being generated by someone with remarkably poor impulse control. There’s a difference between what China can accept and what it can be seen to accept. Push too much and too publicly and Beijing might take a far harder line—be it on trade or be it on Taiwan—than might otherwise be the case. Calculating the right balance is a tricky task—but American voters have been led to think Trump can handle it. He is the self-proclaimed maestro of the deal, after all.

Whether he will succeed in doing so is an entirely different question. Chinese criticism of the call sharpened after Trump declined to back down.

That said, as I write, it’s being reported that Trump’s nominee as US ambassador to China will be Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, who has got on well with Chinese president Xi Jinping since the 1980s.

That’s a signal too.

Trump Is No Loser, But Government Will Be Harder

You know the shot: “We finally really did it,” Charlton Heston contemplating the ruins of the Statue of Liberty. Well, the Statue and what she symbolises will survive the Trump presidency but that scene from Planet of the Apes leapt into my mind as I sat in a Manhattan restaurant on election night with a crowd of startled Republicans, some pleased, some not, watching another compelling drama lurch to a conclusion that most of those there, including me, had not anticipated.

So, what had “we” done? Well, by voting for Trump, or hazy Gary Johnson, the Libertarian (as I did), or crazy Jill Stein (the Green) or, in many cases, by not voting at all, Americans had rejected Hillary Clinton, the direction the country was going, or both. But it was not that much of an endorsement of The Donald. Trump has his fans, to be sure, but, even allowing for the polarisation that such figures generate, he proved to be a most unpopular populist, the most unpopular major party presidential candidate in American electoral history. He was, however, the handiest brick to throw through the establishment’s window.

What we can now expect, absent some last astounding scandal, is that Donald Trump, bully, braggart, billionaire (presumed), and defendant (currently) in some 75 lawsuits, will soon take up residence in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the first president never to have held earlier elective office or served in the military. But that won’t stop him benefiting from the way that the legislative branch — and this is a bipartisan offence — has acquiesced for some time now in the transfer of power to the executive.

Barack Obama: “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation . . . I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.”

Trump will also have Congress — and a Supreme Court nomination — in his pocket.

Working out what Trump will do with the power heading his way is not made easier by his pronouncements over the years.  The Donald is always sure, but in sometimes inconsistent ways. In 1999 he was sure about a one-time “net worth” tax on the very rich to wipe out the national debt. He was also sure that the Republicans were “just too crazy right” for him to remain in the party. He was “very pro-choice” then; now he is “very, very proud to say that [he is] pro-life”.

Looked at kindly, this shows a willingness to change his mind; looked at less benignly, it shows a willingness to play to whoever is in the room, but running through it all is his conviction that he has the answers.  “Nobody knows the system better than me,” Trump told the Republican convention, “which is why I alone can fix it.” I alone: what’s right is what Trump says it is — I, I, I.

Party affiliation provides less of a clue than it might. Trump, a former member of the Democratic, Reform and Independence parties, enjoys an equivocal relationship with a GOP that he has hijacked, or at the very least exploited, taking advantage of its resources, its people and its brand when it suited him, bypassing them when it did not, helped by his money, social media, the power of celebrity — and the fact that his revolt against the GOP’s establishment actually increased his appeal to many Republican voters.

In an attempt to reconcile these contradictions he hired Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, as his chief of staff on the same day as he picked Steve Bannon as chief strategist and senior adviser. Chalk meet cheese:  Priebus is establishment, Bannon is a bomb-thrower (there are harsher words), the executive chairman of the hard-right, sometimes dog-whistling Breitbart News and the former CEO of the Trump campaign. Bannon’s appointment announced that the revolution continues; choosing Preibus was a signal that members of the old regime were welcome to help ensure that it would be professionally run and, whisper it discreetly, be less of a breach with the past than some feared. As the old saying goes, people are policy. And, as I write these words, the news flashes across the screen that former Goldman Sachs partner Steven Mnuchin “has been recommended by Donald Trump’s transition team to serve as Treasury Secretary”.

Whether such recruits will be able to steady the controls on the Trump train must, however, remain an open question for now, dependent on who else is along for the ride, and who, beyond his immediate family, Trump will listen to. The operation of his fractious and chaotic campaign is not an encouraging precedent.

And how, once in the Oval Office, will Trump run his team?  One guess — the reassuring guess — is that he will set a general course and then delegate much of the day-to-day business to, maybe, his Vice-President, Mike Pence, a former congressman and current governor of Indiana, and, therefore, someone with both legislative and executive experience and good connections in Washington. He is someone who could, presumably, work well with Priebus.

Backing that up is the idea that The Donald is the dog that caught the car. In all probability, Trump never thought he’d be the Republican nominee (and nor, it’s credibly suggested, did he want to be). He almost certainly never thought that he’d end up in the White House, a job that promises the pomp he relishes, but circumstances that are a lot less fun than the billionaire frolics he has enjoyed for decades.

“If Donald,” wrote Colin Powell (no fan) last June, “were to somehow win, by the end of the first week in office he’d be saying ‘What the hell did I get myself into?’” On the other hand, Trump has sold himself — and quite genuinely sees himself — as the master of the deal. Thus he claims to favour free or, more accurately, freer trade, but not “stupid trade”, and stupid trade is, he jeered in 2015, the result of deals negotiated by “political hacks and diplomats”. The US has, he reckons, “the greatest negotiators in the world, but we don’t use them”. Something tells me that he considers Donald J. Trump to be one of those world-beaters, and that, when it comes to rewriting America’s trade deals, he plans on being very much involved. He has boasted of hiring the best and then letting them get on with it, “but I always watch over them”.

To be fair, this is what many Trump voters want him to do. The Donald has, for decades, marketed himself with remarkable success and occasional accuracy as mogul and wheeler-dealer. He has been hired as a businessman, to do for his country what politicians could not.

Trump the dealmaker will see politics as transactional and turn his talents to diplomacy, trying to rework Nato, say, or America’s poisonous relationship with Putin (“I think I’d be able to get along with him”) or with China, the last a relationship where trade disputes and great power rivalry could intersect in dangerous ways.

The greatest negotiators in the world are going to be busy, and if they apply the brinkmanship, bad faith and histrionics that typically come with big-ticket real estate transactions, the world will be in for sleepless nights, nights made more fraught still by Trump’s long-held belief that negotiation is a zero-sum game. There are only winners and losers, and Donald Trump is not a loser. 

But, for all this uncertainty, there are themes certain to be reflected in the policies that will be pursued by a Trump administration. Pre-eminent among them is his suspicion — shared by many Americans — that the US is being ripped off by its partners, whether in trade or in defence. As far back as 1987, Trump spent nearly $100,000 on full-page newspaper ads in which he maintained that Japan (then regarded as America’s main economic challenger) was free-riding off America’s willingness to pick up the tab for the country’s defence. He argued for a different approach: “Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend our allies . . . ‘Tax’ these wealthy nations, not America . . . Let America’s economy grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defence of their freedom. Let’s not let our great country be laughed at any more.” 

Nearly 30 years later, Trump was making a similar case to the New York Times (and not only the New York Times), except that the list of freeloaders now included most of Nato, run on a basis that he described as “unfair”, an adjective that, with its synonyms, has long been a bad, bad word in the Trump lexicon. In keeping with The Donald’s paranoid style, it hints at hostile conspiracy. Remember all that talk of a “rigged” election? But back to Nato: the US, Trump complained, was paying a “disproportionate share” of the freight.

He has a point. Currently America pays a little over 20 per cent of Nato’s direct costs, a number which is adjusted regularly and based on a percentage of its share of the alliance’s collective GNP. That seems reasonable enough (and, as these things go, the number is not huge), but the real problem concerns something far larger. The US effectively accounts for more than 70 per cent of all defence spending by Nato members. Some of that mismatch reflects the global reach of American power, not all of which is of much benefit to other Nato states either directly or indirectly, but even so.

More damaging still is the fact that so few Nato states meet the organisation’s decade-old commitment to spending at least 2 per cent of GDP on defence, a commitment only satisfied by five out of the Nato 28, something that also led Barack Obama to talk of “free-riders”, and he was far from the first American president to grumble. The US shells out some 3.6 per cent, mighty Greece comes next with 2.4 per cent and the only other countries to hit the target are the UK, Estonia and Poland.  France comes close with 1.8 per cent, and the other Baltic States are, wisely, scrambling to catch up. The rest of Nato falls far short: Angela Merkel may be being hailed by some as the leader of the free world in the wake of Trump’s triumph, but her country only spends 1.2 per cent. Others are even stingier: Canada, home of Justin Trudeau, hero of Davos, coughs up just 0.99 per cent.

Trump has hinted that Nato countries that don’t pay their way might not be able to count on the US coming to their aid as required by the mutual defence obligations that underpin the alliance. He has since backtracked somewhat, and the optimistic take is that those remarks were simply an example of Trump the negotiator at work, putting pressure on partners in breach of their part of a deal. Maybe, but Trump is playing a dangerous game. Deterrence must be credible. Any suggestion that America would not protect a vulnerable Nato ally increases the chance that Putin might be tempted to try his luck. This only underlines the importance of Trump’s security and diplomatic hires. For Trump to pick hawks, like, say, John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN, or former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, would send one message; recruiting former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (who has described Estonia as “a place in the suburbs of St Petersburg”) quite another.

But Russia’s leader is more cautious than often understood. Much has, rightly, been made both of Trump’s need to win and — how shall I put this — poor anger management skills. Putin is unlikely to want to provoke The Donald, and, contrary to the fears of some critics, he can only go so far in wooing him. Yes, both men have strong authoritarian streaks (under Trump, America will be grateful for the checks and balances still built into its system), both see themselves as tough guys and both reject the attempt to create a supranationalist world order — in Putin’s case, by word and deed; in Trump’s, so far, only by word. “Americanism”, he has declared, “not globalism, will be our credo.” But these similarities will not be enough to transform Trump into Putin’s patsy. Trump evidently (and not unreasonably) doubts that Russia poses an existential threat to the US — he seems ready to co-operate with Moscow in Syria — but if Putin pushes Trump in ways that Trump thinks matter, Trump will push back.

But what Trump thinks matters will differ from what the US has thought mattered in the past. There is some point, he has said, beyond which America “cannot be the policeman of the world”, a line that resonates with those communities, many of them in regions that voted for Trump, who have lost so many of their own in wars where the US was doing just that. 

One corollary of Trump’s more modest view of America’s role is that US allies will — if they are serious about it — have to assume more responsibility for their own defence than in the past. Another is the implicit recognition that the global political system is multi-polar, something that Putin has long claimed and the Chinese have not even had to bother mentioning. That, in turn, may well imply a return to realpolitik that is closer to Nixon/Kissinger than Reagan’s loftier vision, let alone George H.W. Bush’s nutty “new world order”. The debate — and the pushing — will not be over the existence of spheres of interest, but over the location of their boundaries, something that may have grim implications for borderlands such as Ukraine.

Trump insists he is not an isolationist, and I don’t think that he is. He is planning a major increase in defence spending. Where he sees threats, whether it’s the Iran deal or IS, he does not wish them away. That said, he does not appear to have learned enough from seeing what Obama’s leading from behind has led to. When the US withdraws, the vacuum can be filled in dangerous ways. Trump is correct that America’s allies ought to pay more for their own defence, but an overly forceful insistence on this will lead to a fraying of both the transatlantic alliance and America’s partnerships in Asia. The consequences are hard to predict, but will inevitably involve a dilution of America’s ability to control what happens next.  That’s unlikely to end happily.

These consequences will be worsened by the new administration’s policies on trade and the environment, which, whatever their merits, will be seen as further evidence that the US is going its own way. And in Europe, at least, the more hard-edged side of Trump’s domestic agenda, not to speak of the spectacle of, to some, an ugly American beyond all caricature taking up residence in the White House, will do even more to stoke up the anti-Americanism forever soiling the continent’s intellectual and political life.

That won’t deter Trump. The president-elect has already appointed Myron Ebell, a leading climate change sceptic from the Competitive Enterprise Institute think tank, to oversee his environmental transition team. Reversing Obama’s climate change regulation, much of which he introduced by executive order (and what was brought to life by the pen can be killed by the pen) while initiating America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord (legally, a more complex process) are obviously, so to speak, in the pipeline. It’ll mean  yet more international opprobrium, so add it to the pile. Domestically it will enrage those who are already enraged by the prospect of a Trump presidency, but it will reassure many of his supporters — who are in for quite a few let-downs in the years to come — and, as a gesture of support to Team Trump’s symbolically important coal miners, will go down well with the Donald’s crucial blue-collar supporters. 

When in 2012 Trump tweeted that global warming was, in essence, a hoax (he later said that he was joking), he blamed the Chinese: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” Conspiracies, always conspiracies, trade, always trade: when, 30 years ago, Trump was attacking the way the US paid so much towards the defence of its allies in the Far East, much of his focus was on the way that the money saved had helped build up economies that, he implied, had got too strong for America’s good. Asked in 2016 by the New York Times for his view on previous presidents, he replied that one he “really liked” was Ronald Reagan but  he had “never felt on trade we did great” in the Reagan era. 

Reagan was neither a purist nor naive (he believed in trade that was free and fair). He was not above pushing “voluntary” restraint on importers and imposing tariffs when he felt had to, but protectionism, he argued, was “almost always self-destructive”. He proposed a free trade pact with Mexico  in 1980, a forerunner of sorts for the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) passed a decade and a half later. Trump recently described Nafta as “the worst trade deal maybe ever signed  anywhere”. He had opposed it even before it was approved, reportedly on the grounds that US negotiators had cut a bad deal. What Trump actually meant was that he could have handled everything so much better. 

Trump has been harping on about trade for a long time and often in a way that, reflecting his zero-sum approach to negotiation, focuses on the failure to cut a better deal. This approach slips easily into a preference for mercantilism over free trade, a choice that fits neatly under the umbrella of America First, and helped deliver the voters who had found themselves on the wrong side of globalisation, voters, particularly in the Midwest, who took Trump over the top on election day.

Trump’s victory will finish off the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the EU, a deal already struggling even to be stillborn. The Trans-Pacific Partnership seems set for the knacker’s yard too. No new free-trade deals can be expected soon — even, I suspect with Brexit Britain. Reversing those large agreements that are already in place will be more difficult, however. Trump’s talk of imposing a 45 per cent tariff on Chinese imports if the People’s Republic doesn’t ease up on subsidies and other practices he views as unfair, would lead to higher prices in America and, eventually, slower growth, something he must understand. That 45 per cent should be seen as an opening bid in a long negotiation.

Similarly, Trump’s threat to pull the US out of Nafta (a move a president could make on his own) and impose a 35 per cent tariff on some Mexican imports risks major disruption to the supply chains of American companies, and could trigger a trade war, higher prices in the US, and, if the Mexican economy falters, a fresh surge of illegal immigration into a certain country to the north with an as yet unbuilt wall. Once again, sabre-rattling today is likely to be no more than the beginning of a negotiation that may be noisy, but will change relatively little.

But trying to rein in globalisation is to fight a war that is largely lost and, so far as the workplace is concerned, increasingly irrelevant. US manufacturing output stands at an all-time high, but manufacturing employment has declined to levels last seen in the late 1940s. Quite a number of Trump’s “forgotten men and women” (a phrase with Depression era echoes) lost good jobs and good pay, not to the Chinese, but to automation — to the robots. Many, many others will suffer the same fate, and no politician, left or right, establishment or populist, really knows what to do about it. This time round, Trump benefited from these fresh additions to the ranks of the early 21st-century’s left-behinds, but if he cannot come to their rescue (he can’t) they will look for help elsewhere, quite possibly to a Democratic party shifting rapidly to the Left.

Meanwhile, Trump’s answer to the economy’s woes is to propose what chancellors of the exchequer once called a dash for growth, combining Reagan-style tax-cutting and deregulation with a $1 trillion infrastructure package, much of which would be financed by the private sector, incentivised in turn by tax credits. As with a great deal of Trump’s programme the details are vague, but it’s a reminder that, even if Trump is again a Republican, he is attached to no one wing of the party. If tax-cutting and deregulation is Reaganesque, upgrading the country’s dilapidated infrastructure harks back to Eisenhower, architect, among other grands projets, of the Interstate Highway System and, as National Review’s Reihan Salam has argued, to Nixon, who (unlike Eisenhower) posed as an opponent of the elite, but, like the general, saw a role for big government. Similarly, Trump will defend the big entitlement programmes — from Social Security (pensions), to Medicare (health care for the elderly) to, perhaps with some tweaks, Medicaid (healthcare for the poor). He knows what his voters want, which is why he is already signalling that his repeal of Obamacare may not be quite as comprehensive as he has promised in the past. The way that Obamacare is structured may be unloved, and the way that it functions is flawed (sharp increases in Obamacare premiums probably played a part in Clinton’s defeat), but chipping away at its benefits will be a hard sell, unless the GOP can find a more credible replacement than it has managed to so far.  

How will all this be paid for? Trump is hoping for a supply-side miracle, with another boost coming, fingers crossed, from the repatriation of corporate funds stashed overseas after the sharp cuts in America’s corporate tax rate (on some measures amongst the highest in the world) that he has in mind. On the other hand, the GOP’s green eyeshade wing, headed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, will be less than convinced by Trump’s maths and with worries over the federal government’s nearly $20 trillion debt likely to increase as interest rates move up, there will be battles to come, battles that will be a reminder of deeper fractures that Trump has opened up on the right, battles in which Democrats, at least on the infrastructure plan, may find themselves in a very strange place, by Trump’s side.

That won’t be the case on immigration. Even if Trump is already backtracking on that wall of his (some of it will be fence, apparently), a much tougher immigration regime will be put in place. The president-elect has already announced that he would like to see the deportation of 2-3 million illegal aliens with “criminal records”, an exaggerated number, which also makes no distinction between different types of criminal past. Americans are uncomfortable with the thought of mass deportations and they are unlikely to approve of breaking up a family over a minor conviction from decades ago. If Trump’s immigration plans are not to be swept away by a tide of revulsion, he may have to go more carefully than he thinks, and not just in this respect.

Nevertheless, immigration, both in its own right and as a proxy for wider ethnic and demographic unease, goes a long way to explaining why The Donald will be moving into the White House. If the country can finally assert control over its borders (and the wall is not the best way of doing so), it can regularise the position of those illegals who remain (there are currently estimated to be a little over 11 million of them in the US). Then a long-overdue serious debate over immigration can begin.

November’s election result would only have been possible in a troubled, deeply-divided nation. Time will tell whether Trump’s victory is another symptom of what ails the country, or the beginning of a cure. I’m not optimistic. Then again, Newt Gingrich (after a job?) exults that “a Trump administration is going to be among the most extraordinary, creative, inventive, exciting periods in all of American political history.”

It’s going to have to be.

British libel laws: No model for the United States

Daily News, November 3, 2016

Union Station, Washington DC, August 2016 ©  Andrew Stuttaford

Even though Princess Diana is no longer with us, there is still quite a lot that Donald Trump appreciates from across the pond. There's that Scottish golf course of his, there's Brexit, and, judging by a recent interview he gave to Miami's CBS 4, there are England's libel laws.

Trump, claiming to be a "tremendous believer (in) the freedom of the press," is significantly less enthusiastic about the news media's ability, as he sees it, to get away with "terrible, terrible mistakes," mistakes made "on purpose" and intended to "injure people." If he's been wronged, he said, he should be able to sue and so should "anyone else."

In England, maintained Trump, "they have a system where you can actually sue if someone says something wrong." And: "You have a good chance of winning. And deals are made and apologies are made," deals (with Trump it's always deals) and apologies that the U.S. media do not have to make.

I'm British-born and usually pretty chuffed when I hear my native land praised for the way that it manages its affairs, but this time not so much. To be clear about one thing first: Trump is not really talking about "anyone" being able to win damages for defamation by the media. What's bugging him is that in America it's very difficult for a "public figure" (and, trust me, Donald Trump counts as a public figure) to do so.

Under U.S. law and well-established precedent affirmed by the Supreme Court, where public figures are concerned, it's not enough to show carelessness, inaccuracy and damage.

Public figures also have to prove that "actual malice" was involved. That means that the statement was either published by someone who knew it was false or, assuming it turned out to be false, didn't care one way or the other. That can be tough to prove.

Over in England, public figures have it quite a bit easier, although not quite as much easier as Trump, not always known for keeping up with what goes on in the world, may think. In fact, a year or so back, English defamation law, which can be rougher on the press than on those complaining about it, was modified in ways that will make it harder for plaintiffs to use litigation or the threat of litigation to muzzle the media.

Changes included adding the requirement that a statement is not defamatory unless plaintiffs can show "serious harm" (or the danger of serious harm) to their reputations. For businesses, that now means demonstrating that they have suffered, or face the prospect of, "serious financial loss." Additionally, most cases will now be decided by a judge rather than a jury, which ought to reduce costs and, probably, damages.

The press should also benefit from the fact that a still somewhat hazy "public interest" defense has been given statutory force (thereby reinforcing the principle that it's OK to publish something that is — or might reasonably be thought to be — a matter of public interest). But a public interest defense would be far less of an obstacle to litigation by public figures in England than they could, to Trump's obvious irritation, expect to face in the U.S.

Despite these reforms, England's new law retains one key difference with American practice that will appeal to The Donald. In the U.S., it's the plaintiff who has to demonstrate that he or she has been defamed. But in England, it's the defendant who has to prove that what was published isn't defamatory, an obligation that comes with a degree of risk that some editors, journalists and publishers won't relish taking, a risk that helps explain, to take one notorious example, why the sex crimes — crimes that stretched over decades — of the disk jockey Jimmy Savile, a major celebrity in the U.K., went unreported until after his death in 2011.

This chilling effect on what will be published has, as a more recent controversy over a book on Vladimir Putin's finances shows, survived the new law, at least to a certain extent. It's an effect that, I suspect, Trump would be delighted to see spread to the U.S., a country blessed — up to now — with far greater protections for free speech than my homeland.

That mustn't happen. The case can be made that public figures in the U.S. are forced to climb too high a hurdle to defend their reputations, but that is a part of the price that preserving free expression demands.

Donald Trump: always crashing in the same car

Prospect, October 20, 2016

Trump Tower, New York City, September 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

Hillary and Donald didn’t shake hands. And nor did Melania and Bill. Expectations of a mudfight had been whipped up by Team Trump’s decision to bring along a number of guests designed to spook Team Clinton. These included four mothers of people killed by illegal aliens, the former fiancée (from the 1990s) of the US ambassador butchered in Libya, the (allegedly estranged) mother of another of the Benghazi victims, the wholly estranged half-brother of the current president of the United States, and a former TV reporter from Arkansas who has emerged in recent days to assert that she was sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton in the 1980s. Adding to the goodwill in the air, Trump had suggested last weekend that the two candidates should submit to a drug test beforehand. Hillary, he maintained, had been “all pumped up” at the beginning of the previous debate, but had appeared curiously drained by the end of it (“She could barely reach her car”).

But (slightly) less mud flew than anticipated last night and it was The Donald who did not seem quite himself. And this was not just because he came across as somewhat more prepared than usual. Uncharacteristically sotto, he gave an impression of being gently sedated, or at least of having listened to his more sensible advisers, except, of course, when he didn’t. He made the moderator (Fox News’ Chris Wallace, unquestionably the most accomplished performer of the evening) look like an accomplice by thanking him for asking Clinton a tough question. He probably irritated yet more of the female voters he desperately needs—against all the odds—to win over by referring to his opponent as “such a nasty woman.” He won’t have made a lot of new friends with his remark that there were “some bad hombres” among the illegal alien population. Mathematically (“some”) that must, I suppose, be an accurate enough observation, but, in just the latest of countless own goals, Trump managed to phrase it in a way that hinted at a racial animus not only disturbing to Latinos (like just about every minority group a largely lost constituency by now) but to many whites too. On some calculations, Trump will need the support of nearly two-thirds of white voters to win (compared with Romney’s 59 per cent in 2012). Good luck with that.

And then there was the way he dealt with questioning over his willingness to accept the result in November. Lest we forget, he has been complaining that the election is being rigged. After some toing and froing with Trump on this topic, Wallace asked this:

“There is a tradition in this country—in fact, one of the prides of this country—is the peaceful transition of power and that no matter how hard-fought a campaign…that at [its] end… the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying that you’re necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and that the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?”

Trump: “What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense. OK?”

That answer (“horrifying”, declared Clinton) became the talking point of the night among the commentariat, and, I suspect, not just among the commentariat. It was, to put it mildly, a remarkable thing for a major party nominee to say ahead of the election. Voting fraud is not exactly unknown in the US, and some grumbling by the unsuccessful candidate—even after a presidential vote— about dodgy doings at the polls, sometimes legitimately (Nixon in 1960), sometimes rather less so (Kerry and those Ohio voting machines in 2004) is another American tradition, but a formal challenge by the loser to the result is not: The Florida debacle in 2000 was a genuinely exceptional state of affairs.

Clinton: “You know, President Obama said the other day when you’re whining before the game is even finished…”

Looked at one way, Trump’s allegation that the election might be rigged (a term he has defined in different ways: it has, for example, included his argument that media bias has distorted the process) against him fits neatly into his outsider narrative and adds to his outsider appeal. Looked at another way, it will have reinforced the impression of many Americans that (as Clinton was not slow to argue) Trump is “not up to doing the job.” It also sounded like the prexcuse of a man who cannot cope with defeat. As Clinton jeered, “There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged.”

Trump couldn’t contain himself: “Should have gotten it!”

“Always crashing in the same car,” as someone once sang.

To be fair, Trump acquitted himself better in this debate than in the first two—low bar—but he did little to avert what looks like a clobbering next month. According to a CNN/ORC poll, 52 per cent of viewers thought that Clinton prevailed, as opposed to the 39 per cent who judged Trump the victor. It says something for the debating skills of a man who prides himself on his ability to close a deal that that was his highest score so far. The best that he can hope for is that his performance will not have cost him too many votes. Best guess: It didn’t. Between them, both Trump and Clinton said enough last night on a wide range of issues including immigration, gun rights, trade, terrorism and abortion to assure Trump’s core supporters that they were in the right place. His problem is that those core supporters are not numerous enough to propel him to the White House.

To attract additional voters last night, Trump needed either to clean up his own image or to make more of a mess of Hillary’s. He didn’t try too hard at the former. Judging by the laughter that greeted his claim that “nobody has more respect for women,” that was, in all probability, wise. Instead he concentrated on trying to drag Clinton down, something that would be very much easier were he not Trump. He attacked the Clinton Foundation (“a criminal enterprise”). She countered with the Trump Foundation (“bought a six-foot portrait of Donald”). He raised sleaze. She talked about his taxes. He complained about the foreign policy fiascoes of recent years. She brought up Putin. He threw in Bill Clinton. She threw back Donald Trump. Yes, Trump landed some blows (those errant emails, allegedly evidence of dirty tricks) but not enough, judging by that poll, to make much of a difference.

And so today Trump tweeted this: “Why didn’t Hillary Clinton announce that she was inappropriately given the debate questions—she secretly used them! Crooked Hillary.”

Always crashing in the same car.

Trump has maxed out—but he will plug on nonetheless

Prospect, October 10, 2016

New York City, September 2016 ©  Andrew Stuttaford

The most significant words in last night’s US presidential debate came right towards the end, and they will have ended any hopes in what passes for the Republican leadership that Donald Trump might somehow magically, marvellously just go away.

The two candidates were asked to pick out something that they respected about the other. Hillary Clinton replied that the talents of Trump’s “incredibly able and devoted” children “[say] a lot about Donald” (implication: there was nothing she respected about The Donald himself). Trump framed his response as a compliment to Clinton, but, as usual, he was really talking about himself:

“I will say this about Hillary… she does fight hard and she doesn’t quit and she doesn’t give up and I consider that to be a very good trait.”

It was never likely that Trump, a man unable to contemplate losing at anything, would stand down and it was never certain what would happen if he did, but with that observation he made it clear that, despite the worst week or so that any Republican or Democratic nominee for the presidency has ever endured, The Donald will plug on.

Following as it did a press conference (of sorts) that Trump had arranged for a number of women who had allegedly been seriously wronged by one Clinton or the other, expectations were that the debate would be a roughhouse. And, from the moment that the two contestants declined to shake hands at the bout’s beginning, expectations were not disappointed. The commentariat, a prim lot in America, were duly appalled. I, on the other hand, enjoyed it immensely. Titus Andronicus beats Hamlet any day.

Neither candidate made any attempt to conceal their mutual disdain, but in case any viewers hadn’t got the message, Trump described Clinton as incompetent, the devil, married to a bad man, in hock to special interests and as someone with “tremendous hate in her heart,” someone—his inner authoritarian never far away—he appeared to believe should be jailed over those errant emails. And, oh yes, Clinton is a liar.

For her part, Clinton hit out at the contempt Trump has shown for women “and the very brutal kinds of comments he has made about not just women, but all Americans, all kinds of Americans.” The Donald, she said, is not fit to be president (except, we were left to assume, in the eyes of Vladimir Putin). Not only that, he was responsible for an increase in bullying in schools (“teachers and parents are calling it the Trump Effect”), a hard to verify accusation that will resonate most helpfully—and at several levels—with the distaff side of the electorate. And, oh yes, Donald is a liar.

Even the duo’s behaviour on stage showed the depth of their loathing. His jaw busily doing the Mussolini, Trump prowled around, sometimes looming up behind his opponent in a vaguely menacing manner that, along with an occasionally badgering style, won’t have done him many favours with female voters, especially with his videotaped talk (exaggerated “locker-room” bragging or otherwise) of grabbing women “by the p***y” undoubtedly still fresh on their minds. Meanwhile as The Donald spoke, the look on Clinton’s face shifted between anger, unconvincing impassivity, icy amusement and the condescension that explains why so many Americans find it impossible to warm to her. To lose to Hillary will take some doing, but in selecting Donald Trump as their champion, Republican primary voters appear to have found the right man for the job.

Last night did nothing to change that fact. Prior to the first debate on 26th September, Trump was enjoying an unexpected surge, and the first “what ifs” could be heard in the land. Then came the second self-destructive half of the first debate and, after that, a few days dominated by Miss Universe kamikaze. Clinton pulled back into a comfortable lead and that was according to polls taken before the release of one of the most politically destructive tapes since Richard Nixon’s effort way back when, a tape that was, interestingly, no less destructive for being all too predictable. Last night Clinton described the Trump campaign as “exploding.” That was a stretch, but not by too much.

Trump needed to reverse that slump, but failed. To be fair, when it came to the substance of the debate, such as it was (not much), he did better than anticipated, admittedly a low bar after the debacle first time round. The advantage of mounting an outsider challenge is that little is expected in the way of detailed policy. And indeed when it came to proposing an alternative to, say, Obamacare or the fight against ISIS, very little was all that Trump had to offer. But that won’t matter, at least to his supporters. What they want most now is an echo and an amplifier of their (not always unjustified) resentment and in Trump that is what they’ve got.

However incongruous it may be coming from the man in the penthouse apartment, Trump knows how to play the outsider very well:

“[Hillary] used the power of her office to make a lot of money… [W]hy aren’t you putting money into your own campaign? Just curious.”

Just curious. Just brilliant.

Then, of course, there are those emails. Using a private server in the way that Secretary Clinton did was irresponsible—and possibly sinister—enough, but the signs of a cover-up may prove more damaging, and, in an anti-establishment year (Trump took care to throw in a few references to Bernie Sanders), the suggestion that Clinton benefited from favourable treatment is political poison:

“33,000 e-mails deleted and now she’s saying there wasn’t anything wrong. And more importantly, that was after getting a subpoena. That wasn’t before. That was after. She got it from the United States Congress, and I will be honest. I am so disappointed in congressmen, including Republicans, for allowing this to happen. Our Justice Department where her husband goes on to the back of an airplane for 39 minutes, talks to the Attorney General days before a ruling has to be made on her case… if a member of the private sector did that, they’d be in jail. Let alone, after getting a subpoena from the United States Congress.”

It’s right to feel queasy about the seeming relish with which Trump, a vindictive man and, as I mentioned earlier, someone with obvious authoritarian tendencies, talks about Hillary in jail, but it’s also understandable why so many Americans might be angered by the notion (albeit still disputed) that this ultimate insider has benefited from far more favourable treatment from the authorities than they could ever hope for.

But Trump’s problem is that he has already riled up just about anyone he can. In delivering his best lines last night he was singing to a choir too small to take him to victory, and he didn’t make it any larger. According to a CNN poll, 57 per cent of viewers thought that Hillary won the debate. With November drawing close, the election remains hers to lose.

Race To The White House Through The Looking Glass

Standpoint, October 1, 2016

East Anglia is not, perhaps, an obvious place to assess the American vote this autumn, but back in the UK on a brief trip, I noticed that the small section in a Norwich bookshop dedicated to the US presidential election featured almost nothing on Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump was represented by a series of biographies, exposés, comics and even colouring books. Few, if any, were admiring, but they crowded the Clintonware out. As so often, Hillary had been reduced to a grey blur (to borrow one Menshevik’s unwise description of Stalin), barely visible against the madcap backdrop of Trump’s trickster parade.

An election to decide who becomes the world’s most powerful man (or woman) is inevitably intensely focused on the character of the contenders. Even their running-mates, appointed amid brief, synthetic excitement, are speedily hauled away from the limelight, demoted to surrogates deployed to savage the opposing team in a manner that a presidential candidate cannot, or, more positively, to throw a sprinkling of low-wattage stardust over small crowds in small states.

That’s in a normal year. It’s symbolic of this campaign, dominated by the personality of one man, that few running-mates have been pushed quite so quickly into the background as Trump’s choice, Indiana governor Mike Pence. Adding respectability and good hair to a campaign with little of either, Pence is a stolid reminder that the GOP is traditionally the “daddy party”, a quality that risks being drowned out by the playground taunts of its presidential nominee.

From the tweets of Donald Trump: “@SenJohnMcCain should be defeated in the primaries. Graduated last in his class at Annapolis — dummy!”

For the record, McCain, a bright but truculent student, came not last but 894th out of 899, not quite ignominious enough for The Donald. Reducing the senator still further in the rankings was an example of Trump’s use of “truthful hyperbole,” a clever term (dreamt up by his ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal) for a clever idea. It goes a long way to explaining Trump’s success as a salesman of buildings, of stories, of conspiracies and of himself. What matters is not what is true, but what is remembered, and how.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

Many voters seem less disturbed by Trump’s abusive relationship with fact than they should be. They understand that Trump is true to himself if not to the truth, a proof of his authenticity even when based on lies.

But back to Mike Pence. He has been married for decades to one woman and has a surname with one syllable (something Trump reportedly believes “conveys strength”). Earlier this year, he endorsed Ted Cruz and had been said to “loathe” Trump. Trump’s Hoosier is, it turns out, not only respectable, but flexible, helpful given his role as a kind of “ambassador” to sceptical elements in the Republican establishment.

The Pence pick was muttered rather than proclaimed. He was introduced from a podium on which the Trump name was present, but the Pence name was not. The same could, for the most part, be said about the speech by Trump that followed, a typically Trump talk about Trump — with added terrorism, law and order, industrial decline, “crooked Hillary”, taxes, over-regulation, the Nafta disaster, that wall, Brexit, the building of a hotel in Washington DC (“under budget and ahead of schedule”), and triumph over the Republican party hierarchy.

From time to time, Trump remembered why he was meant to be there, and dragged his speech “back to Mike Pence” with a shout-out or two to the Indianan’s achievements, before reverting again to Donald J. Trump. 

Pence had been chosen partly for reasons of “party unity”, but The Donald’s signal was clear: this was still his campaign. And so it has proved. The election has been dominated by this most unexpected candidate, a shape-shifting, eccentric reminder of America’s infinite capacity to surprise, a narcissistic, poorly-informed, sometimes tin-eared, sometimes astoundingly intuitive post-political politician, a fantasist, a chancer who looks in the mirror and sees the future. His opponent — dull, exhausted Hillary — has been reduced to a supporting role, with the twist that is she who will limp off with the prize.

Trump’s most interesting observation in that speech was that he was “a messenger”, a humblebrag but accurate enough. His startling ascendancy in the Republican primaries, even if helped by the fact that he was taking on a divided field of rivals far weaker than the GOP leadership has ever been prepared to admit, sent a message about unhappiness on the Right.

The fact that Trump is, as I write, for all his flaws and gaffes, still very much in contention for the top job sends a broader, even gloomier message: America is not at ease with itself, a message echoed by those millions of Democrats who voted for Bernie Sanders, a grouchy Marxist lost in ancient delusion.

But it’s Trump who appears to be the messenger of those who are unhappiest of all. Early analyses of his rise emphasised the support he was winning among the embattled white working class, left behind by globalisation, job-destroying automation and sweeping demographic change (support swollen by the more traditional politics of racial resentment in his Southern and Appalachian redoubts) and reinforced by feelings of voicelessness and the suspicion that the country no longer had much room for them. It’s not only the poorest that feel this way. Read enough elite exultation, particularly in the media, at the prospect of an older, whiter America on its way to the grave, and it’s not hard to understand why some whites fear they are, in the sinister old Soviet phrase, “former people” in the making. 

Trump’s tax-cutting agenda (the numbers don’t add up, but Trump is hardly alone in being guilty of that) will only be of limited appeal to many of these voters. But they do appreciate much of the rest of what their champion has to say, both for its specifics, however implausible, and, no less, for how it feels. “Make America great again” is more than patriotic swagger. It’s a reproach and a promise, a wild, exhilarating swing against contemporary orthodoxy — on immigration, on free trade, on multiculturalism, on bearing too great a burden abroad and on much, much more besides. The Wall Street bashing, however incongruous from a millionaire/billionaire/whatever in his tower, plays well with this crowd too.

Whatever some alarmists might say, this is not fascism (as that term is properly construed) or anything like it. Despite Trump’s fondness for jutting his jaw like Il Duce, his rise is better understood by looking not at the Europe of nearly a century ago but at its current populist surge — of Left, Right and something of both: Syriza, UKIP, the Finns Party and all the rest. It was no coincidence that Nigel Farage shared a platform with Trump in Mississippi in August. Trumpism (yes, it’s a word, even if no one, including Trump, quite knows what it means) is part of a wider revolt against ruling establishments, on either side of the Atlantic, affluent, post-national and condescending, and not as competent as they like to assume.

While the Trump campaign is defined and often overwhelmed by the man at its centre (thus its chaos), the personality cult on which it is, if only partly, built comes with a wink. For all the towers, hotels, casinos, headlines, women and bankruptcies, Trump would not be where he is today without his decade (and more) in reality TV, something that has propelled him to the rostrum while subtly undermining his place there. He takes himself seriously — very seriously — and yet there is more than a trace of self-parody about his performance, which the fans and followers (in Trump’s case, often interchangeable categories) who have watched the evolution of his media image over the years, understand very well. It helps explain why they hold him to a lower standard than they would a more mainstream candidate. As Trump draws closer to the White House, that’s not a comforting thought. There are good reasons to believe that this thin-skinned, occasionally vindictive man might attempt to abuse the powers of the presidency to an even greater extent than some of his predecessors.

But if Trump tried to overreach, he would almost certainly be stopped. Whatever else can be forecast about this election (full disclosure: my predictions have not proved exactly infallible so far), we can be sure Trump is not going to win by a landslide. The electoral twists that might take him to victory would also secure a GOP-controlled Congress, but one where many of the Republicans who sat there disapproved of their man in the White House. Many more would be profoundly worried by what Trumpgate could mean for their political future. The elections that followed Nixon’s disgrace were not kind to his party. Historical memories in America are short, but not that short.

Much of the electorate, including a good percentage of those who had voted, noses held tight, for Trump, would be watchful and on edge, the financial markets — already nervous about what Trumpenomics might mean — would be twitchy, the judiciary would be on its guard and business would be suspicious. The bureaucracy would be uncooperative and, often, outright hostile. America’s defence chiefs would fret about what Trump could mean for the country’s security, their apprehensions fuelled by the useful idiocy of Trump’s footsie with Putin, his undermining of Nato and those fabled tiny fingers coming too close to the nuclear button. As for the media, well, what do you think?

One prominent conservative journalist, no never-Trumper, told me that impeachment proceedings against a President Trump would be a matter not of if, but when. It wouldn’t altogether surprise me. And in that respect, not only Trump’s future conduct, but also his past could possibly make for difficulty. He has, after all, spent years making and losing money in construction and casinos, two businesses not known for their spotless reputation. And he still has to contend with litigation over Trump University, an institution that allegedly preyed on just the sort of regular folks he has pledged to defend. Then there’s the matter of what might be lurking in Trump’s still mysterious tax returns. Meanwhile, doing his bit for the cause, New York’s (Democratic) attorney general has announced an investigation into Trump’s charitable foundation. If there are any skeletons to be dragged out of Trump Cupboard, they will be.

On the other hand, there are legitimate questions about the extent to which the checks and balances (explicit and implicit) built into the American system would act as a brake on President Hillary Clinton, an authoritarian herself and dogged by questions about her integrity that stretch all the way back to her improbably successful cattle futures trading as first lady of Arkansas.

She’s an establishment figure and the establishment would be more inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, not least out of gratitude that it had dodged the Trump fusillade. There’s also a decent chance that the Senate, if not the House, would be under Democratic control in the event of a Clinton win. What’s more, the behaviour of the civil service in recent years suggests it wouldn’t be too keen to push back against misbehaviour by a Democratic president. Writing in USA Today, University of Tennessee law professor and influential blogger Glenn (“Instapundit”) Reynolds argued that “Federal employees overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, donate to Democrats, and, by all appearances, cover for Democrats as a routine part of doing their job.” That’s not so much of an exaggeration as it should be.

As for scrutiny by the media, well, what do you think? Whining by the Washington Post, the paper of Watergate no less, that “the Hillary Clinton email story is out of control” signals what lies ahead.

As a reminder, that story revolves round Clinton’s decision, while Secretary of State, to use a private email server on official business. This was against the rules and had potentially (and quite possibly not just potentially: was the server hacked?) damaging security implications: The FBI grumbled about “extreme carelessness” in the “handling of very sensitive, highly classified information”, but found no criminal intent. Other Clinton critics asked whether she had arranged matters in this way because — this did not take a major imaginative leap — she had something to hide, questions not made any easier to answer by the fact that thousands of “private” emails had been erased. The affair, which has contributed — and continues to contribute — to Clinton’s perceived lack of trustworthiness with voters, rumbles on, but even the Justice Department’s eventual decision not to pursue criminal charges against her has come at a cost: it bolstered the impression that the Clintons are above the law, not a reputation to celebrate in an anti-establishment year.

Nevertheless, for all Clinton’s stumbles, both literal (we’ll come to that) and figurative, barring a major extraneous event (a massive terrorist attack, say, or some suitably embarrassing leaks via interestingly connected hackers) the best bet is, to repeat myself, that, despite some turbulence in the polls, she will be taking the oath of office in January. Trump’s core problem is that there simply are not enough white working-class voters (a group that amounted to some two-thirds of the electorate in 1980, but barely more than a third today), a problem reinforced by the fact that the rhetoric that wins them over to his side alienates their more upmarket counterparts. Mitt Romney won the support of 59 per cent of white voters in 2012, but he still lost the election. Continuing demographic change (whites are forecast to cast around 69 per cent of the votes this year) and Trump’s even greater unpopularity with minorities will mean that he would have to beat Romney’s 59 per cent by some margin to have any realistic chance of victory (on some estimates he would need to reach 65 per cent). That would involve scoring very well indeed with college-educated whites, but an early September poll showed that Clinton was beating Trump among such voters in 31 states.

This was, I suspect, the constituency at which Clinton was aiming when, in during a speech at a fundraiser in Manhattan in early September she divided Trump’s voters into two “baskets” of roughly equal sizes. The first “contained people who feel that government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them . . . They are just desperate for change . . . they don’t buy everything [Trump] says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different.” The second was a “basket of deplorables . . . Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.” They were, she said, “irredeemable”, an unsettling choice of adjective.

Clinton sometimes says what she believes and on this occasion that’s what she did, although in a later sorry-not-sorry comment she conceded that she had dumped too high a percentage of Trump supporters into the deplorables basket. But the message she wanted to deliver will have survived. Voting for Trump was the mark either of a loser or, worse still, of a racist/sexist/homophobe/xenophobe/Islamophobe. By contrast, ran the subtext, a vote for Hillary was proof of being none of those things, an attractive pitch to some suburbanites, not least because of the way it chimes with the misgivings that they already have about those who have jumped onto the Trump train. Clinton’s comment was widely seen as a gaffe — insulting voters is not normally seen as a good idea — and angered many, but it may play well with the decisive few at whom, I reckon, it was really directed.

It was widely assumed that, once Trump won the Republican nomination, he would — to use the fashionable term — pivot. He would, it was thought, reach out to centrists and minorities and, more generally, just make an effort to come across as rather more presidential, all shifts likely to appeal to those college-educated whites. Occasionally that’s what happened, even if some of those pivots have, in the words of Republican Senator Jeff Flake (who has, at the time of writing, refused to endorse Trump) been “360-degree pivots”: “He pivots and then pivots right back.”

Nevertheless, there have been signs of a more sophisticated and even conciliatory approach, especially since Trump’s appointment of Kellyanne Conway, a veteran pollster well-known in Republican circles, as his latest campaign manager. It could be seen in Trump’s nuanced and clever response to Clinton’s baskets. He picked up on its unmistakably authoritarian tone (“She divided people into baskets as though they were objects not human beings”) and the sneer that accompanied it (“You can’t lead this nation if you have such a low opinion for its citizens”), while deftly playing his class card (Hillary “mocks and demeans hard-working Americans” while living a “sequestered life behind gates and walls and guards”), a reflection of his ability to, so to speak, descend from his penthouse. Trump’s wealth is a badge of success, spent without pretension. It’s Clinton’s, a grandee of a governing class that disdains money while somehow managing to amass it, that is resented. Shortly after Clinton’s remarks, Trump announced a, by Republican standards, generous maternity leave plan. Populists of the Right know when to lean left, and when to appeal to women, a constituency that needs some convincing to vote for Trump.

Trump also made a well-received visit to Louisiana, hit by massive flooding and (strangely, given Hurricane Katrina) neglected by Clinton and, initially, President Obama. He flew to meet Mexico’s president and has appeared (it’s complicated) to refine his immigration agenda: more emphasis on enforcement and border security (complete with that wall), less talk of mass deportation of those already in the country, a notion that makes many Americans very uneasy. Trump also showed up in Detroit to visit his “brothers and sisters” in an African-American church, a gesture that will be unlikely to win him many black recruits (most polls show him scoring in the low single digits with black voters, although there have been some intriguing outliers), but may play well with whites understandably turned off by some of the rougher edges of Trump’s rhetoric and, for that matter, support.

Trump will score somewhat better among other minorities (it would be hard to do much worse), but dismal polling, as at the time of writing, among Latinos (19 per cent, according to an early-September poll: Romney managed 27 per cent at the last presidential election) hint at the immensity of the challenge that faces him, a challenge reinforced by the suspicion that prejudice against one is a prejudice against all. Shortly after Trump had — on essentially ethnic grounds — attacked the impartiality of a Mexican-American judge presiding over some of the Trump University litigation, a Chinese-American acquaintance, no leftist, told me that this was the last straw — another vote lost. One April poll found that 40 per cent of registered Asian-American voters would not vote for a candidate “with strongly anti-immigrant views” even if “they agreed with him or her on other issues”.

If this emphasis on ethnicity rather than policy as a basis for voting for one party or another sounds ominous, so it should. Over the last half-century, America has combined acceptance of mass immigration from all over the world with a rejection of its earlier assimilationist approach to new arrivals. The insistence on assimilation had worked very well. It has been replaced with a multiculturalism that works nowhere. The result is Balkanising the nation, changing unum into pluribus, a transformation that, if history is any judge, or the divisive identity politics of the country’s universities any foretaste, leads nowhere that America should want to go.

American attitudes to immigration are complex and conflicted and made more so by the way that, in often unacknowledged ways, they overlap with attitudes to race and, now, multi-culturalism. That said, when Trump looked at the challenge he faced in the primaries, he saw the opportunity presented by the failure of his Republican rivals, for the most part products of a lazily (or in Jeb Bush’s case, enthusiastically) immigration-friendly GOP establishment, to respond to the unease felt by many of their voters over this topic. In his own crude fashion, Trump then made immigration his issue, a brilliant — and calculated — move that took him to the head of the pack. The paradox, however, is that The Donald’s aggressive and often obnoxious stance on this question will buttress the Democrats’ gains from the demographic changes that mass immigration has brought in its wake. As a result, they will be even more determined to persevere with the immigration policies and identity politics that could, in the worst case, eventually culminate in some sort of Yugoslavia.

Turning to the more immediate future, Republicans will be (quietly) hoping that, without Obama at the top of the Democratic ticket, minority turnout will be down. It might, and that would be troubling for Clinton, but the Democrats and the media will hype the dangers of a Republican candidate, who can even now be relied upon to help the hype with suitably incendiary gaffes. His handlers can only do so much. As Trump could discover to his cost, casting a vote against can be almost as good a reason to show up at the polls as a vote for.

Then again, voting against crooked Hillary will be a pleasant task for many on the Right (and for quite a few, far easier than voting for Trump). But Clinton, who was first lady before some of today’s voters were born, has been on the political scene for a long time. Some of the fury she used to attract has subsided. Even the conspiracy theorists have seemed weary (how many murders was it, anyway?), at least until persistent rumours about her health began to gather pace, a worrying development for a candidate for a job on which so much rests on one pair of shoulders.

In early September the National Enquirer, a disreputable if enjoyable supermarket scandal-sheet and one of the few publications to have endorsed Trump, “revealed” that the 68-year-old Hillary, “frail” and “overweight” is “infected with a crippling killer virus, suffers from alcoholism, has been devastated by three strokes and is battling severe mental disorders”, as well as, possibly — Job in a trouser suit — multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy. Were that to be true, it would be testimony to Hillary’s resilience that she was so quickly back on her feet after her fainting episode (first blamed on the heat, then on pneumonia) at New York’s 9/11 memorial, the incident that took speculation about her health away from the checkout lane and into the headlines.

Her return to the campaign trail may have been speeded along by comments by former Ohio governor Ted Strickland (a Democrat now running for the Senate) just two days later. Clinton’s running-mate, Virginia senator Tim Kaine, was, noted Strickland, “a wonderfully prepared person to be . . . the president if that ever became necessary”. Strickland knows what many people know: Senator Kaine, a mainstream Democrat and a former governor of his state, would run better against Trump than Clinton does.

Making matters worse, Clinton’s perceived evasiveness over what was ailing her sharpened questions about her honesty. According to one poll roughly half of all voters believed that she had “given the public false information about her health”. To David Axelrod, a former senior Obama adviser, this was an own goal. “Antibiotics,” he tweeted “can take care of pneumonia. What’s the cure for an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems?” Unnecessary? I wonder.  But voters’ familiarity with the Clinton style has bred complacency: The email mess has hurt Hillary, but it has not proved to be the cancer on her candidacy that it once might have been, and the genuinely disturbing murk that surrounds yet another source of controversy, the Clinton Foundation — a nest of actual and potential conflicts of interest with a stink of pay-to-play about it — has yet to seriously disturb an electorate too jaded to care overmuch.

It’s not all gloom for Trump — far from it. Traditional loyalties, a widening gulf between the parties, the belief that The Donald is the lesser of two evils, and the manner in which the election process has “normalised” the idea of a Trump candidacy have all led to a far larger proportion of Republican-leaning voters rallying behind their party’s nominee than once was thought possible (the same is not true of the divided right-wing commentariat). Even so, in a contest where Trump will need to haul in every voter who could conceivably be his, quite a few will make their excuses and leave.

Some will defect to Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico now running as the Libertarian candidate with another former Republican governor as his running mate. By repositioning the Libertarian party in an unaccustomed role as a “sane” (to use, as Johnson does, that infuriatingly smug term for centrist) alternative to Trump and Clinton, Johnson will take votes (in greater numbers probably than any third party for two decades) from both, perhaps more from Clinton than Trump, but it is unlikely to be so many as to make a difference, although his seeming appeal to young voters may be a sign that Hillary is not doing so well with this key Obama constituency as she should. On a more reassuring note for the Democrats, it doesn’t look as if Clinton need worry greatly about the threat to her left from Jill Stein’s Greens, a party in no hurry to re-label itself as sane.

Put everything together, add in the way that the maths of the electoral college favours the Democrats and then throw in her campaign’s superior organisation, and the odds, despite some wobbles, still favour Clinton, a candidate described by a possibly demob-happy Barack Obama as the “most qualified” candidate ever to run for the presidency — leaving, therefore, predecessors such as Thomas Jefferson (principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Governor of Virginia, ambassador to France and, ahem, Secretary of State) behind in the dust.

The defining achievement of Clinton’s time as First Lady — other than sticking with Bill and polarising the nation — was a failed healthcare reform. Despite courageous efforts to tackle the video game menace, she achieved very little in her eight years as senator, and her time as Secretary of State is remembered mainly for the unsuccessful “reset” with Russia and the slaughter of four Americans in Benghazi, including the US ambassador to Libya. She also, it’s noted on Wikipedia, “greatly expanded the State Department’s use of social media, including Facebook and Twitter”.

There is very little excitement over Clinton’s candidacy. At the end of August Trump was recording extraordinarily high (63 per cent) unfavourables in the polls, but so was Hillary (56 per cent). It took something to pick a candidate who could actually lose to Clinton, but that’s what the GOP’s primary voters did. That said, Trump’s core supporters seem more passionate, more involved, and more likely to vote. In a thought-provoking reprise of the Sanders campaign, he has been attracting impressive amounts of money from an impressive number of small donors, a phenomenon worth watching if it continues. The GOP’s voter registration drive has being going surprisingly well in some key states.

By contrast, efforts to whip up some enthusiasm over the prospect of the election to the presidency of a rich, entitled grande dame as a feminist milestone are falling, like her speeches, just a little bit flat. With her metallic voice and weirdly forced facial expressions, there is something robotic about Clinton. Trump’s wild talk is often alarming, but rarely dull. To watch Hillary is to be left with a vague sense that a mechanic will need to be called in.

To be fair, it’s not easy to generate a lot of excitement when running for what will inevitably be seen as the third term (always a political challenge) of a sitting administration, and, to a degree, of a past one — her husband’s — too. And that’s what she’s doing. Broadly speaking, a Hillary presidency will build on the status quo, with additional shifts to the left on regulation, tax, climate change bossiness, immigration and (albeit in a move likely to find considerable bipartisan support) trade: The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the EU will, to steal a phrase from Obama, go “to the back of the queue”. After Trump and Sanders, the votes for a further extension of free trade are not there. On the other hand, she is likely to be more assertive than Obama — a low bar — internationally, and, unlike what Trump appears to have in mind, no dangerous games will be played with Nato.

Her freedom to act will be constrained if the Republicans manage to hang on to the Congress. At the time of writing, earlier fears that Trump would cost the GOP its majorities appear overdone. The Republicans seem well-placed to hang on to the House and they are still in with a chance of retaining the Senate. But however well or badly they do, the questions posed by the rise of Trump, a candidate who seems set to cost them a presidential election that they should have won, are not going away. Trump himself is a one-off, 70 years old, and, if some recent Senate primaries are any indication, not yet in a position to remake the GOP in his own image. But the changes to which his rise is a response, changes which are only going to accelerate, will have to be confronted by a party that has no clue how to do so.

Seen from 2020, 2016 may look pretty good.