Eight years ago, it became the laziest of Washington aphorisms to say that the presidency would change Donald Trump; Donald Trump would not change the presidency.
Given the snowmageddon blizzard of announcements, it would be tempting to argue that it is now totally the other way round. But maybe that doesn’t quite do it – is it possible, given the hugely significant announcements of the past few days, that the presidency is being shaped by those around him and not by Trump himself?
Let’s agree on one thing from the outset that I think everyone can sign up to: Donald Trump represents a break with “politics as normal”. If we want to point to one visual symbol of that, it was – surely – Donald Trump sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office with Elon Musk by his side and a small child on his head, pushing his black Maga cap down over his eyes, while Dad was explaining that he had got it wrong over hundreds of millions of condoms being sent to Hamas fighters. They’d gone to Mozambique instead to tackle Aids. Easy mistake to make, I guess.
We’ll return to X a little later – no, not the social media platform; the little chap on Musk’s head. His name is X, too. Please try and keep up.
But here was Musk, doing something that few are permitted to do. He was upstaging Donald Trump. The cameras were on Musk as he sought to explain his work in Doge – the department of government efficiency. As Musk argued this was all about democratic accountability, my irony meter went straight to 11.
Musk, who has been elected by no one – who has faced no confirmation hearing as his post is not a cabinet position, and whose department is not a government department, meaning his work cannot be scrutinised by Congress – was providing a lecture on democratic accountability.
His fear, he said, was America had ceased to be a democracy and had become a bureaucracy, run by a deep state whose only goal is self-preservation. To deal with this, Musk can go into the US Treasury or the Pentagon and look at who has been awarded government contracts. But his own SpaceX company has contracts worth billions from the US government. So too have his rivals. Is he really the man to judge what is fair government spending and what is not?
At the end of last week, the White House press secretary was asked who would police any conflict of interests arising from Musk’s own business interests and his work inside Doge. Can you guess the answer? Why, of course, Musk will be left to police them himself.
Does Donald Trump know what he has unleashed?
Or take another hugely significant announcement of the past week – and I am not talking about the return to plastic straws after the joke and scandal of paper ones. No, I’m talking about that minor foreign policy intervention over the future of Gaza and turning it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
It probably takes quite a bit to leave Benjamin Netanyahu looking slack-jawed, but the astonishment on his face as Trump set out his plan for Gaza was quite something. Did anyone in the administration know this was coming? It didn’t seem so. And yet Donald Trump had run with an idea that was entirely his son-in-law’s. Jared Kushner had floated it a few months ago. Like Trump, his background is in real estate. And this could be the development of all developments. Bulldoze Gaza, tell the 1.8 million Palestinians to bugger off somewhere else and leave this prime sight to be redeveloped – from the Riviera to the sea, anyone?
To be generous, it looked like this – perhaps – hadn’t been completely thought through, or had the buy-in from the key stakeholders who would be needed to make this happen.
And then we come to Ukraine, where the great deal maker and negotiator had apparently given Russia more or less all that it wanted before discussions over the future of the country had even begun. Ukraine would have to give up land, and wouldn’t be allowed to join Nato. Vladimir will have had few better Valentine’s.
In all three of these examples, Trump has been a defiant messenger – but it is not clear he’s delivering his own message. Musk, Kushner and Putin all have reason to believe – with some justification – that they have played Donald rather well.
In 2018, I attended the news conference held between Trump and Putin in Helsinki. Putin gave Trump a football for his son Barron; and Trump gave Putin everything (again). He told reporters that he had taken the Russian president at his word that he hadn’t interfered in Trump’s 2016 election victory, contradicting the unanimous view of every US intelligence agency.
The quote is variously attributed to David Lloyd George and the First World War general, field marshal Douglas Haig – but it is that “he bears the impression of the last person who sat on him”.
It is a notion that runs entirely counter to the image of strength and resolve that Trump likes to project. He wants to be seen as a tough guy – just like Putin – or Erdogan, Xi, Orban – but is he actually much more biddable – and too willing to let others around him influence policy? There is an argument others are making him look a fool.
Which brings us back to X and his priceless cameo appearance in the Oval. Now off his father’s shoulders, he is fidgeting next to the Resolute Desk and Donald Trump’s face is turning ever more into a scowl. Above Musk’s voice, you can see the little chap looking at Trump apparently saying: “You’re not the president. You need to go away.”
One can only wonder where he picked that up from.
