This is a true story. As a colleague and I finished interviewing Donald Trump before his first presidential visit to Britain in July 2018, we were accosted by a tall man with a military air and a pen and notebook in hand. He’d been waiting for us outside the grand drawing room of the US Embassy in Brussels where the interview had just taken place. “Hi. John Kelly, White House Chief of Staff,” he introduced himself. “May I ask what the President said to you?”
We reeled off the highlights of the news-rich past half hour as the retired US Marine Corps general made copious notes. How Trump had insulted then British PM Theresa May, how he would have got a far better Brexit deal from the EU, why May’s bête noire Boris Johnson would make a great PM. “He said that? Oh right. I see. Uh huh, hmm …” Kelly grunted as we spoke, which he punctuated with gentle eye rolls.
And that’s how Trump governs. Spewing forth instinctively like a divine monarch, while aides scramble to implement his electric utterances, or (in our case) clear up the diplomatic mess.
It’s also how the US President spun the international markets into a fresh nosedive on Tuesday with his latest confrontation with the chair of the US Federal Reserve.
Trump branded the fiercely independent Jerome Powell “a major loser” for his refusal to cut interest rates, deepening market fears that the President would try to remove him and thereby trigger a full blown financial crisis.
Another week, another explosive shot from the hip. On a bad week, Trump fires off two or three. It’s his well-honed trademark and also how he got himself to the White House, twice.
Trump is an election campaigning genius, perhaps the best America has ever seen. He has a brilliantly instinctive understanding of today’s voters’ likes and dislikes and craving for authenticity, and he knows exactly how to indulge them. He shocks and entertains with sweeping and bold gestures because he also knows they guarantee him maximum attention. And he insists on total control to give him maximum room for manoeuvre.
Believe it or not, Trump only marks the 100th day of his presidency next Wednesday
“Only Trump speaks for Trump, no matter what anyone else tells you, and that’s a fact,” one of his own national security officials admitted to a visiting British team recently. It might be hard work for his staff, but for the world it’s exhausting. It feels like a decade has passed since Trump’s inauguration on January 20.
Since then, among other things, he has: invited a Russian dictator in from the cold, plunged Ukraine’s sovereign future into doubt, ripped up the international trading system, crumbled long trusted pillars of global security and put Greenland, Panama and Canada on watch to be colonised. And yet, believe it or not, Trump only marks the 100th day of his presidency next Wednesday. It all prompts the question, how much longer can it all go on for? Some commentators say it’s only just beginning.
We have three and a half years more of unconstrained Trumpism before this rollercoaster presidency finishes. That’s if it even finishes then. Trump has started to hint that he may try to bend the US constitution to destruction and run for a third term.
If he doesn’t, JD Vance will stand in 2028 and extend Trumpism by a further eight years all the way to January 2037 — and imagine what they’ll have done to the world then, the commentators ask.
I disagree. Some elements of Trumpism pre-date him and will also live on beyond his rule, such as America’s slow withdrawal from the role of global policeman. The truth is the US isn’t the all-dominant superpower it once was and it can no longer afford to do the job.
The rest of it? The shock and awe governing that is at the heart of Trumpism is already dying, along with Trumpism itself. Why? Because the Trump method, those instinctive shots from the hip that make him such a brilliant election campaigner, is precisely what also makes him a hopeless president.
Trump’s great failing is his inability to understand that campaigning isn’t governing. Running the world’s richest country isn’t about 24/7 attention seeking. It’s about making complex and difficult decisions and coming up with good ideas that actually work.
But Trump has no interest in policy. Anyone who has previously worked for him says he’s bored by it and seldom reads any of his briefs. It’s why time and again he’s seduced by cranks who offer him glitzy and simple ideas instead. And that’s where he is now coming up hard against the real world, because simple populist ideas don’t work. They’ve never worked anywhere they’ve been tried, and they’re not working in America now.
As Liz Truss discovered, you can never beat the markets
The cracks are getting bigger by the day. His trade tariffs have been rejected by the US stock markets, which are now down by between
11 per cent (the Dow Jones) and 18 per cent (the Nasdaq) since January 20. Investors think tariffs will bring economic disaster. And as Liz Truss discovered, you can never beat the markets.
The same goes for Trump’s much-promised peace deals. The peace in Ukraine that he pledged to deliver “on Day 1”, and then by Easter when that was missed, looks ever further away this week. In Gaza, Israel and Hamas are already back at war. And Trump’s flagship immigrant deportation plans? Most of them blocked by the courts, having been deemed illegal.
So what happens next? Trump will take one of two different paths. He’ll either pivot by sacking his maverick advisers and govern more like a regular tax-cutting Republican, or he’ll double down, target scapegoats for the blame, and keep riding the populist shark to ever greater personal and national destruction.
Which is the more Trumpy path of the two? The corpse of Trumpism may have a few spasms left in it yet before it finally expires.
Tom Newton Dunn is a broadcaster and political commentator
