Even with climate change and political unrest roiling the planet, a recent White House memoir, published anonymously as “A Warning”, would easily make any shortlist of the year’s most worrying news. Authored by a senior official who has long observed Trump at close quarters, it confirms earlier accounts of the president’s dysfunctional behaviour and vividly illustrates how his emotional volatility, vengefulness and paranoia have contributed to his likely impeachment.
“We have had incurious presidents,” writes the unnamed official: “We have had inexperienced presidents. We have had amoral presidents. Rarely if ever before have we had them all at once.” Perhaps the clearest proof of this is Trump’s language, especially the way it “feeds hateful groupthink”. Consider, for instance, one of many troubling moments at a Trump rally, when the president raises the issue of how to treat illegal immigrants and someone in the audience shouts “Shoot them!” Instead of condemning, Trump laughingly responds, “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement.”
The book’s analysis of this moment is worth quoting at length: “Defenders have scoffed at the idea that the president incites clannish hatred …they say, he prefaced his question by actually clarifying that the United States couldn’t use weapons to fend off immigrant caravans. ‘We can’t. I would never do that,’ Trump conceded, but those are the types of tongue-in-cheek statements he makes when he actually does want to do something.”
In fact, Trump had explicitly encouraged the US military to shoot illegal immigrants just the year before. (“[i]f they want to throw rocks at our military … I told them to consider it a rifle.”) Generously, the author glosses this opinion thus: “Trump didn’t want to murder innocent people, but he thought injuring a few immigrants would serve as a warning to others. ‘Why not?’ he asked advisors.” When officials in the Defense Department learned of these statements: “…in full panic, [they] picked up the phone to forcefully remind the White House about the actual rules of engagement for our troops, which did not include opening fire on unarmed civilians.”
According to “A Warning” this is typical. Trump governs like a mob boss, constantly using hints to signal his intentions – usually with an eye to retaining plausible deniability if mistakes, or crimes, are subsequently exposed. This certainly seems true of his conduct in Ukraine. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times report that when Trump learned of the whistleblower, he quickly unfroze the aid to Ukraine and phoned his EU ambassador to deny any ‘quid pro quo’ — apparently unaware that the sudden reversal was more incriminating than anything which preceded it.
The anonymous author alleges that less than halfway through his current term Trump’s senior staff considered a mass resignation – like the ‘midnight massacre’ which preceded Nixon’s departure. They abandoned the idea “out of fear that it would make a bad situation worse.” But: “It got worse anyway.” Finally, after Trump had dismissed yet another adviser, the author decided to chronicle the chaos within the administration, and give voice to the misgivings of the president’s senior staff.
One thing that sets “A Warning” apart from other critiques of Trump is its calm assessment of his impact and its faith in the corrective power of democracy. Citing Alexander Hamilton’s opinion that the only constraint on a president’s “continuance in office” should be the people themselves, the author concludes: “The democratic process exists for this very purpose, and we rely on transparent public debate and the popular will to keep leaders in check. The voters must review the president’s conduct and decide whether Donald Trump is fit for office, whether he embodies the American spirit, and whether we will allow the behavior of one man to define us as a whole.” Surely this is proof, were any needed, that even in a moment of crisis rumours of democracy’s demise, at least in the United States, have been greatly exaggerated.
