There Is Nothing for You Here, page 27
Others went to greater, formal lengths. King Salman of Saudi Arabia splashed out millions of dollars and pulled out all the stops for Trump’s first foreign trip, in May 2017. The trip consisted of an extravagant series of one-off events that combined public flattery with over-the-top luxury and absurdly lavish displays. At one point the Saudis invited the president to commune with a giant glowing golden orb. Trump was thoroughly delighted with all the attention. President Emmanuel Macron of France invited Trump to Bastille Day events in July 2017 and to a special, exclusive, “just for you, Donald” dinner at the top of the Eiffel Tower, which President Trump talked about endlessly afterward. Prime Minister Abe of Japan repeatedly invited President Trump to extra-special occasions that had never been extended to other foreign visitors, like a sumo wrestling tournament with a “Trump Trophy” award in May 2019. Again Trump commented on how pleased he was with the very personal nature of all these events. Leaders were paying tribute to him, not to the country.
Conversely, Trump was so sensitive to slights that we were instructed to scour the pronouncements of world leaders for anything harsh they might have said, at any point in the past or present. But it was impossible to catch everything. I found myself in trouble after an incident with visiting Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras during an October 2017 press conference in the Rose Garden. At the end of their respective remarks, Fox News reporter John Roberts asked Tsipras if he still stood by his comments from March 2016 that Trump was “evil.” A dark cloud came over the president’s face. He glared at both Roberts and Tsipras. “I wish I had known that before my remarks!” he said.
I wished I had too. I was sitting near the front of the press conference. Up until this point I had been preoccupied by a bee, which was hovering around both Trump’s and Tsipras’s heads instead of taking in the flowers. I was hoping it wouldn’t sting one of them. Roberts’s question immediately got my attention. We had missed these comments entirely. The Fox News team must have thoroughly searched all the Greek-language press for something derogatory, which we had not.
Tsipras looked distinctly uncomfortable—no wonder, at being caught in such an awkward moment—but he managed to dodge the question by praising the United States and Greek-American solidarity. I didn’t get off so easily. I got yelled at by one of White House deputy press secretaries. How had we missed this comment?
After the Rose Garden episode, all U.S. embassies and the respective country offices at the State Department were directed to keep tabs on anything “bad” a foreign official said about Trump. We had to compile this material before a visit as part of the briefing package. When someone was caught in the act of making some negative comment, he or she would end up on Trump’s “nasty list.” We were instructed to exclude them from meetings during foreign trips.
At first I found President Trump’s fragility perplexing. Given his highly privileged upbringing, he seemed to have had unbridled access to opportunity. I often questioned why he was perpetually aggrieved when everything had so obviously been handed to him since birth. And I wondered how he would cope if someone dropped him alone on a random street in a faraway town like Bishop Auckland or on the Keen family farm in South Dakota to fend for himself. I concluded, not well at all.
Trump needed to have everything done for him. At times he seemed helpless when little things went wrong. He was thin-skinned and quick to anger, with little hint of self-reflection or consideration of other options. Trump would never take any responsibility for a problem of his own making; someone in his entourage would always have to fix things or take the fall. He was also obsessed with performances of presidential power that would validate his ego. Nowhere was this made clearer to me than in his theatrics surrounding the prospect of a state visit to England, which the British government had dangled in front of his nose from the very start of his administration.
Tea with the Queen
UK prime minister Theresa May was the first world leader to visit the White House, in January 2017, just days after the president’s inauguration. She immediately invited President Trump for a state visit to cement the so-called special relationship between the U.S. and the UK. As soon as Prime Minister May arrived home there was a backlash. In December 2015, during his first presidential campaign, Trump and his oldest son, Donald Jr., had initiated an often bitter, long-running Twitter feud with Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, sparked by Trump Sr.’s pledge to “ban Muslims from the U.S.” The mayor made it clear that from his perspective Trump would not be a welcome guest in his city. For the next year or so, the Brits tried to put the visit off—never formally extending the invitation, coming up with various excuses about timing—as the president grew increasingly frustrated with the delay. It was an impressive exercise in exquisitely polite obfuscation.
The Brits benefited in their delaying tactics from the fact that there were very few notes from the earliest meetings with foreign visitors at the White House. The notetaking systems were not fully in place, and some of the original participants on the U.S. side, like national security adviser Mike Flynn, had resigned or been removed in the following weeks. In my first month at the NSC, I was asked to review a bare-bones account of the May-Trump meeting. There was scant detail on what had been discussed and almost nothing on the invitation for Trump to visit the UK. One of the names on the list of attendees was Fiona Hill. The Executive Secretariat wanted to know if I “still had notes and could flesh things out.” This was not me. The Fiona Hill mentioned in the transcript was Theresa May’s personal adviser. This caused confusion and consternation for some time, until she left her position at Number 10 Downing Street later in 2017. In the meantime, press and online commentators fused us together as one Fiona Hill, simultaneously working for the UK prime minister and the American president.
The absence of detailed notes on our side meant that the UK could interpret what had been offered in different ways. The president, for his part, was very clear that he had been invited for a state visit to the United Kingdom with all the bells and whistles. He was hoping it would be one of his first major visits. When it wasn’t, he obsessed about it. Going to Buckingham Palace was supposed to be a highlight of his presidency.
Meeting Queen Elizabeth II was particularly important to President Trump. He often referred in conversation to his mother, Mary Anne Mac-Leod, who was originally from Scotland, and her admiration for Queen Elizabeth. Trump was clearly an admirer himself and was always slightly awestruck when he talked about her—his voice and his face would soften. A meeting with the Queen of England was the ultimate sign that he, Trump, had made it in life.
Trump had two golf courses in Scotland, in Aberdeen and Turnberry, which gave him a personal foothold in the UK. Turnberry was one of the international properties he was most proud of owning. He always found a way to bring it into conversation. He rhetorically supported Brexit while golfing there in 2016. Later, when a European leader suggested to him that Brexit might lead to Scottish independence and the breakup of the UK, President Trump was taken aback. He immediately thought about the implications for his golf courses—how could you have the British Open if there was no more Great Britain? What a disaster. The somewhat surprised leader agreed that “they might have to rename it.” Trump always said his mother was born in “real Scotland”—in the Outer Hebrides, the remote and windswept islands off the northern coast where people spoke Gaelic—but he saw himself as rooted in the United Kingdom or Queendom.
In every encounter with Theresa May and British officials after January 2017, including at various international summits, Trump would drop not-so-subtle hints about his state visit. In the middle of a meeting or in an obvious tangent at the end, he would, apropos of nothing in particular, suddenly talk about his desire to golf once more at Turnberry. May and her colleagues would pretend not to understand the conversational thrust and change the subject.
Behind the scenes they made it clear to us that the president’s visit would be a huge political headache for them. When it became too embarrassing to keep putting it off, they floated the idea of a lesser working visit as a face-saver. It would be part of a larger presidential trip to Europe in 2018 that would also include a NATO summit in Brussels and the president’s first stand-alone summit meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. Ten Downing Street evidently hoped that the UK portion of the visit would somehow get lost in the mix if it was sandwiched in between some inevitable blowup over NATO and an overly anticipated and hyped-up encounter between Trump and Putin. President Trump could visit Queen Elizabeth for tea at Windsor Castle, just outside London; there would be a dinner at Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of the Dukes of Marlborough and Winston Churchill, to commemorate U.S.-UK relations; and then Trump could have his golf weekend in Turnberry. If Sadiq Khan and others on the president’s UK “nasty list” said something negative, or protested—which people did in the tens of thousands, under the shadow of a large balloon effigy depicting the president as an angry orange baby dressed in a diaper and holding a smartphone—then at least the president would be away from the maddened crowd.
A Family Affair
President Trump’s “working visit” to the UK took place in July 2018. He was assuaged but not fully satisfied. Eventually the Brits relented on the actual state visit, which they appropriately tied to the seventy-fifth anniversary of the D-Day and Normandy landings, in June 2019. The visit would begin with a presidential program in London. Then the president and the Queen would decamp to Portsmouth and from there over to France to join other leaders in commemorating the events of World War II.
When we finally got to the planning stages, Trump was mostly going through the motions on the political aspects of the trip. Prime Minister May was due to step down, to be replaced by Boris Johnson. The state visit was her last act, fulfilling her original promise from January 2017. Trump evinced no desire to have a formal agenda for discussion at the last meeting in 10 Downing Street. Instead he wanted events that would put his family at the center of attention. All his adult children would travel with him to London.
In our planning sessions, it was apparent that the main purpose of the state visit was to introduce one dynasty (his) to another (the Queen’s family), not to celebrate U.S.-UK ties. The West Wing staff was perpetually fearful that Trump was not getting the same treatment as previous American presidents or other world leaders whenever he traveled, so the level of pomp and circumstance in the UK was critical for them. Some leaders had a ceremonial golden carriage ride through London with the Queen; Bill Clinton had attended a joint session of Parliament; George W. Bush had given a public speech and visited Prime Minister Tony Blair in County Durham; Barack Obama had stayed overnight in Buckingham Palace; several leaders had visited the Queen at one of her other residences. Back in the day, the Queen had ridden on horseback with Ronald Reagan around the grounds of Windsor Castle. We had to compile charts.
In this case, the president didn’t want to give any speeches, the golden carriage and Buckingham Palace’s guest rooms were undergoing repairs, and President Trump had already had tea at Windsor in 2018, so these were not viable options. He was clearly disappointed about missing out on staying at Buckingham Palace, although the state dinner would be held there.
On substance, we organized a meeting for the president at Kensington Palace with a group of top UK and London-based U.S. business leaders, one of his favorite types of meetings. The intent was to showcase the close economic ties between the two countries and areas of innovation and potential future growth in relations, including in the pharmaceutical, financial technology, and large-scale construction sectors. Queen Elizabeth’s son Prince Andrew, who at that point was an envoy for British business, was also in attendance. We presumed that the meeting would maintain the president’s attention on substantive issues. But instead of engaging with the business leaders, President Trump focused on his daughter Ivanka.
Trump had taken Ivanka along to the meeting. Now he made her the centerpiece, pushing some of the key staff from the table to seats along the wall. Acting like the proverbial proud parent, the president continually brought the discussion back to what Ivanka was doing with her various White House projects. Praising her for signing up businesses for training schemes to bring women into the workplace, he claimed that Ivanka had single-handedly created thousands of jobs and encouraged the others at the table to praise her too. He paid perfunctory attention to the issues the UK and U.S. business leaders wanted to raise. This was a Trump family show.
Me, Me, Me
Most of Trump’s meetings with foreign business leaders that I attended were, like the episode in Kensington Palace, more about holding court than holding forth on issues of concern for American workers. Sometimes the president took bizarre turns into rambling monologues completely lacking in substance. It was becoming clear that this was how the man who had ridden into the White House on the grievances of ordinary Americans was going to fritter away his time in office—forcing captive audiences to indulge him as he went off on personal tangents.
During one encounter with Sweden’s most prominent business leaders in March 2018, the discussion quickly veered off onto the subject of the Nobel Peace Prize and medal. Although Nobel Peace Prizes are awarded by a Norwegian committee in Oslo, the founder of the prizes, Alfred Nobel, was a Swedish-born industrialist, and the committee for all the other prizes is in Stockholm. The meeting was, like many, in the Roosevelt Room, across from the Oval Office. President Teddy Roosevelt had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for brokering the Portsmouth Peace Treaty ending the 1905 Russo-Japanese war. President Roosevelt’s medal hung on the wall. President Trump stared at it balefully. He was aggrieved that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize at the very beginning of his tenure, “without even doing anything.” Trump had frequently complained about this publicly, and now, privately, he was complaining again because of the location in full sight of the offending medal itself and a captive audience of Swedes, who would surely relay his complaint back to the Nobel committee.
Discussions with world leaders similarly became “me, me, me” sessions. Trump rarely talked about U.S. policy, and never really bothered to read the briefing materials that laid out the policy points in the first instance. He would refer to things happening on “my watch,” offer his views on topics, which were often based on a conversation he had had with a personal friend (which he would actually say directly), or repeat something he had heard on Fox News. Whenever he could, Trump would turn the discussion around to some of his pet peeves to get them off his chest—windmills and the advent of wind power was one that always came up. The president was not a fan of most renewable energy projects, except for hydropower. He would go on at length about how huge wind turbines marred the view and reduced property values or decimated migratory birds.
During the July 2019 state visit, the Brits had wanted to talk about climate change. They tried to put the issue on the formal agenda for the meeting at Number 10. The president refused. It was not an issue he wanted to talk about after pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement. He hated Europeans’ trying to raise it again and put him on the spot. So the Brits deputized Queen Elizabeth’s eldest son and heir, Prince Charles, to discuss the subject at the U.S. ambassador’s dinner. That way Trump had to at least listen to the prince’s points, even though he was not enthused (and said so to the press after the dinner). Trump’s favorite topics were golf or other sporting events and related analogies, and his personal or family’s business success. Many times, taking notes and having to write them up again for the record, I would be tempted to summarize rather than relate all the little details. I got to the point where I could have just scripted the dialogue myself. I knew all the stories by heart, including the variations and embellishments.
When cabinet members, ambassadors, or NSC staff would try to interject to offer thoughts on policy issues during prep sessions, Trump would push back: “I know this better than all of you . . . What do you have to tell me? I have been doing deals all my life. I don’t need to learn anything from you.” He was also always playing hardball on policy issues with counterparts to cajole or intimidate them into doing something. It was rarely a measured discussion. He often set out extreme possibilities, like threatening to leave NATO if Germany, France, and other countries didn’t increase their defense spending in line with alliance commitments. If someone around him cautioned about the foreign policy risks of even raising these threats, he would immediately shoot back: “Fellas, you’re currying my play . . . You are ruining my leverage.” Everything was framed like a hard-nosed business deal. Eventually foreign leaders like German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron started to call him out on it in their exchanges. Clearly they had given up trying to work constructively with Trump. And as his presidency wore on, Trump seemed to have given up on doing much substantive work of his own, too. As was becoming clear, he had other plans.
11
The Price of Populism
It was an easy slide from Donald Trump’s sometimes perverse machismo and personalization of the presidency into something more malign than benign. His time in office would come to mark not only the contours of the rise of populism in the United States but also the emergence of a definite authoritarian streak in American executive power. Although his behavior sometimes seemed more malevolent than it actually was, his penchant for strongman tactics—and for strongmen themselves—cast a pall over America, diminishing its standing on the world stage and foreclosing the possibility that some good could come out of his administration in addition to all the chaos and strife.
