There Is Nothing for You Here, page 23
Similarly, in the United States, workers believed the Democratic Party had abandoned them. They saw Trump as a businessman who could get things done. As far as they were concerned, he had launched big construction projects. He knew how to create jobs. My U.S. relatives in the Midwest complained constantly about “establishment elites” and “professional politicians” who had no idea how to create jobs or run a business and were out of touch with the average American worker. In 2016 they complained about how Hillary Clinton was paid thousands of dollars to give corporate speeches and palled around with celebrities during her campaign, drinking champagne instead of coming to the American heartland to hear what they had to say about the state of the country. It was no matter that Trump was rich and had a lifestyle that could not have been more different from theirs, or that he had inherited his company from his father.
For struggling Americans, the new president was both a relatable and an aspirational figure. Trump personified success. He ran his own company. He was his own man. No one gave him orders. He didn’t report to anyone at all—no middle or upper management to tell him what to do. And, most importantly, even though he had lots of money, he seemed like everyone else. He talked like an ordinary American. He liked fast food, not fancy restaurant food that most people couldn’t afford. He didn’t talk down to people. He was blunt and direct, the same in public and private. As a real estate mogul, Trump also epitomized the aspiration that transcends race and class in the United States. He not only owned a house, he built houses, and many other things besides. Trump put his name on every property. He was the brander of the bricks and mortar of the American dream. Many of the people who voted for Trump would have loved to have as much money as he did, be their own boss, and pass on wealth and property to their children.
Stories about Trump’s frequent bankruptcies and unscrupulous business practices were dismissed by his supporters as efforts to defame or discredit him. Trump’s outsider status was another major part of his appeal in 2016—the fact that he was not accepted by the upper classes and political elites, including within the Republican Party. When Trump announced his candidacy, he was mocked and disrespected, especially as he later recounted it in his campaign rallies and in public appearances. “No politician in history [ . . .] has been treated worse or more unfairly,” he said. He was going to show everyone up by winning. His candidacy and presidency were a giant middle finger directed at all those who doubted him. Trump stiffed the privileged world that excluded him. This gave him crossover appeal for the large swath of middle-class workers in the heartland without a college degree, who felt that they were also judged by East and West Coast elites for taking or wanting a good, stable full-time job rather than going to college.
Throughout history and internationally, populism emerges from the sense of illegitimate and unfair transfers of wealth in society from the bottom to the top. Populists like Trump say they are the people’s champion. They will fight corruption (“drain the swamp”) and redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom. Trump said he would share America’s wealth by creating jobs, but not by giving, in his words, “something for nothing” through increased welfare payments for the poor and unemployed. This was “socialism” and unfair to the American worker. Trump’s plan to deliver jobs for voters involved people like himself—other billionaires being freed up to do business—rather than elaborate plans for a new U.S. industrial policy. He saw himself as leading an American billionaires’ club that would “bestow” jobs on America.
In Trump’s view, as under Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s, government deregulation and tax breaks would ease the way for billionaires and other businesses to expand their operations. Trump also talked about training schemes linking local community colleges to America’s big businesses to prepare workers for jobs requiring new technical skills. The billionaires would help foot the bill. As in the case of his claims about coal and steel, Trump continually bragged about the jobs and training schemes he created or had instructed businesses to create with his top-down approach and executive orders.
It was certainly the case that unemployment dropped during Trump’s time in office, including for Black Americans and other minorities, but many of the new jobs created during the first three years of his administration turned out to be ephemeral once the U.S. was put under lockdown conditions in 2020. And the new jobs lacked security. At the same time that Trump focused on “unleashing” billionaires and big business, he also launched efforts to weaken American workers’ protections and benefits—just as Margaret Thatcher had targeted the UK “nanny state” in the 1980s. Trump went after trade unions’ efforts to deploy collective bargaining for pay raises and the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, which had expanded access to health insurance for millions of Americans, and he rolled back environmental standards and health and safety codes. His antiunion attitude was well documented. He was always railing against unions in meetings, expressing his opposition to organized labor and employees, rather than shareholders, who wanted stakes in companies.
Donald Trump, like Nigel Farage across the Atlantic, may have been an improbable figurehead for the American working class, yet the grievances that motivated UK and U.S. voters to go to the polls in 2016 in support of both Brexit and Trump were genuine. They were the product of internal fissures that were real and long-standing. There are political costs when places and the people who live in them are effectively written off and their most basic needs neglected. Their unhappiness eventually shows up as dissent at the ballot box—even if in some cases, as in Bishop Auckland, it takes thirty years.
As it turned out, I had not been the only one for whom an outsider’s or foreign perspective helped illuminate the dangerous course that the United States was on. Russian leaders in the Kremlin had seen the grievances too. And they had resolved to take advantage of them.
Back to the Future
As a former intelligence operative, Vladimir Putin had determined over the years that Russia and the United States were really not so different. The two countries were essentially subject to the same larger economic and social forces, and their populations were equally susceptible to political manipulation.
Over the course of successive terms in office as both president and prime minister, Putin had figured out how to channel, if not completely control, the populist forces at home. When he decided to intervene in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, he unleashed the Russian security services to use tactics abroad that they had already successfully deployed to quash Russia’s opposition and keep domestic political dissent and social protests in check.
Russia’s intervention came right out of a Cold War “active measures” textbook of the kind I had studied since the 1980s. Russian operatives employed propaganda, disinformation, and deception. As later American government public and independent press reports would reveal, the Russians used a sophisticated combination of new cybertools, alongside the state-backed media, to hack the email messages of prominent American political figures, disseminate leaked documents, and amplify inflammatory news items. The Russian government set up “private” proxies to spearhead some of the most brazen operations and distance the Kremlin from direct responsibility.
One of these proxies, the innocuously named Internet Research Agency (IRA), was headed by the former director of a Kremlin catering company, Evgeny Prigozhin—who had, in a strange coincidence, been in charge of the Valdai Discussion Club dinner where I sat beside Putin in November 2011. Since then Mr. Prigozhin had branched out in less savory directions, including setting up the IRA and providing paramilitary forces for clandestine Russian operations in the Middle East and Africa. The IRA analyzed U.S. public opinion and social divisions, scrutinized U.S. polling, and hired droves of young Russians with English-language skills to pose as Americans on internet platforms like Facebook and Twitter. There, these “Americans” opined on contentious issues like race, religion, and gun control. The agency also bought online ads to target American voters on both sides of the ever-growing partisan Democratic and Republican Party divide.
As Putin and the Russian security services had suspected, the United States was vulnerable to its own 1990s Russia-style political upheaval in 2016. Ahead of the election, opinion polls showed that American voters were divided by red/blue, Republican/Democratic affiliations, whether they lived in rural or urban areas and in terms of educational attainment, income, race, religion, and gender as well as a whole range of preferences and perceptions about the extent of state intervention in the economy, globalization, trade, immigration, and social and cultural mores.
The 2016 presidential race was also uniquely vitriolic. Both parties were split in their support of the candidates: First Lady, senator, and secretary of state Hillary Clinton for the Democrats, and insurgent political newcomer, reality TV star, and real estate mogul Donald Trump for the Republicans. Clinton had engaged in a bitter primary competition with a self-declared socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who usually functioned as an independent in Congress and was something of a populist himself. Donald Trump had never been part of the Republican Party and had once been registered as a Democrat in New York. He was the last man standing from a huge field of seventeen candidates representing the Republican Party’s mainstream. They successively knocked each other out over the course of the primaries. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats imagined Donald Trump would ultimately be the candidate.
The Kremlin anticipated that Hillary Clinton would win the election and seek to constrain Russia’s room for maneuver. As secretary of state under President Obama, Clinton was particularly outspoken about Russian foreign and domestic policy and critical of Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 after a four-year term as prime minister. Russia’s operation sought to weaken her. Russian propaganda efforts promoted both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as well as third-party candidates like Jill Stein of the Green Party. Russian operatives from the military intelligence services, the GRU, were later revealed to be behind efforts to penetrate Clinton’s personal emails and the “hack and release” of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) emails. These operations were particularly damaging to Clinton’s campaign. They represented a new level of dirty tricks, even by Cold War standards. In the end Clinton lost to Trump by an extremely narrow margin in the Electoral College. She won the popular vote by almost three million votes. The election turned on 79,646 votes from only three counties in three U.S. states—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The 2016 election was both a fluke and a perfect storm in its strange confluence of events.
Russia’s efforts to exploit U.S. homegrown resentments, push American political buttons, and interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign provoked a seemingly endless domestic crisis. In 2000 a similar discrepancy between the popular vote and the Electoral College had played out in the election of Republican president George W. Bush, who had been in a tight race with his Democratic opponent, former vice president Al Gore. But in 2016 the votes on the margins were so tight that American politicians and pundits credited the Russian intervention with affecting public opinion. Some commentators went so far as to declare Trump “illegitimate” and assert that President Putin and the Russian security services had “elected” him.
To be sure, Trump had long-standing business interests in Russia, as well as ties to a number of businessmen there who moved in Kremlin circles. There were also Russian investors in some of his U.S. properties. And without a doubt Trump invited the charges of his illegitimacy by openly and not so openly courting Russian assistance in the election that sent him to the White House.
During the campaign, members of Trump’s inner circle, including his son Donald Jr. and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had met with politically connected Russians who promised potentially damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Trump himself had openly welcomed the hack and release of Clinton’s and the DNC’s emails. Trump’s longtime associate Roger Stone had also bragged of contacts with Wikileaks, the internet platform that posted the emails. These actions in themselves stoked plenty of suspicion and public outrage.
In May 2017, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein authorized an official probe into possible links between the Kremlin and Trump’s campaign ahead of the election. He appointed a special prosecutor, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Robert Mueller, to oversee the inquiry, and also to figure out the full extent of Russia’s efforts to interfere. True to populist form, Trump dubbed the claims of “collusion” between his campaign and the Russians a “witch hunt” and the Mueller investigation into the Russian security services’ election interference “the Russia hoax.”
The investigation wrapped up in March 2019, without conclusive evidence of direct collusion. It did, however, highlight the fact that Trump and his campaign team had been willing to use whatever information came their way from whatever source, including Russia, for their own political ends. In seeking to defeat Hillary Clinton, Trump’s and the Kremlin’s objectives had aligned. The final report from Mueller and his team provided considerable detail about the extent of the Russian intervention, and it made the case for indicting several Russian actors and entities, including Evgeny Prigozhin and the IRA.
With the Mueller investigation ongoing behind the scenes, Democrats and Republicans in Congress constantly fought over the outcome of the election and Russia’s role in it. As a result of focusing on the Russians, they generally ignored the genesis of the domestic political divisions that had shaped such a contentious election in the first place and propelled Trump to the presidency. This was a major mistake as far as the country’s future was concerned.
Both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump were a distraction from the real crisis at hand inside the United States—a crisis that mirrored the one sweeping the United Kingdom at the same time, and which shared many of its underlying causes. Donald Trump’s insurgent presidential candidacy and election and the UK’s decision to hold a referendum on withdrawing from the European Union in 2016 became part of the same phenomenon. In the voting booths of both countries, low-income and working-class voters had lashed out in protest. My family members in the UK and the U.S. voted for Brexit and Trump for similar reasons—establishment political elites weren’t paying attention to what was happening to them. In circumstances where millions of people feel marginalized and mainstream political parties have no evident solutions, populists fill the vacuum.
The Big Show
President Trump, who oversaw a family business, not a multinational corporation, was now running a country for the first time. Essentially, he saw this as the same enterprise, at home and abroad, just scaled up. As a businessman Trump had focused on maximizing his family’s profits, which meant holding on to as much money as possible and paying others less if he could get away with it. He was infamous for finding ways to avoid reimbursing contractors on his big real estate projects and for not fully compensating his workers. He often called people “losers” for giving things away. When it came to America’s European allies, Trump was especially cynical and scathing. He viewed the world just like he viewed his real estate business and simply applied the same approach to foreign policy as he did to everything else.
There were no allies or permanent partners in cutthroat New York business circles. If you were at the head of a family business, you and you alone could protect your interests. You had to be strong and push back against others, who might be trying to “play us like suckers” or “rip us off.” This was the way Trump talked about U.S. allies in my presence in meetings—and not just behind their backs. They weren’t strong or sovereign if they needed something from the United States and couldn’t take care of their own defense, for example. They were more like supplicants. They were weak. Trump also couldn’t believe that anyone would genuinely do something out of altruism. From his perspective, postwar European ideas of trying to create a more just and equal society must be rooted in something more pernicious and ideological, like “socialism.” In Trump’s worldview, everyone was self-serving. People always did something for a reason—power, money, lust, fame. And countries, by extension, operated in the same way. They should put themselves first, like he did.
Of course, when it came to the home front, President Trump was careful to give the impression that he was always putting his voters first and looking out for their interests. Like any politician, he knew he should not take his voter base for granted. They had given their votes to him, and they could just as easily take them somewhere else if he didn’t deliver. So he always looked like he was delivering—making good on the surface. In his public speeches, Trump always favored workers, not billionaires or businesses. He spoke directly to workers, not past them. He went to his voters in person, by holding mass rallies all around the country. He invited workers’ representatives to the White House. And if there was no opportunity for a face-to-face, then his voters could follow him every day and all day on Twitter or watch him on Fox News, where he would endlessly entertain them. Trump clearly derived personal, not just political, energy from his encounters with workers and the crowds at his rallies. West Wing staff, such as Nick Luna, the president’s “body man,” and the military staff frequently talked about it when we were all together on presidential trips. They described him as the “Energizer Bunny,” always on the go, always wanting to wade in and greet “his people.”
Having watched a lot of boxing on TV with Dad back in the UK, I often thought of President Trump as more the pugilist entertainer than politician on those occasions. He spoke to the crowd like a bare-knuckle boxer, revving everyone up before he jumped into the ring for a sparring match. Boxing, wrestling, all forms of fighting, were classic working-class sports. Trump often used the language of a fight, “the big smack-down,” in his rallies, most notably and ominously at the January 6, 2021, rally when he told his supporters to go out and “fight like hell” for him. Trump also played up his ties with the U.S. boxing and wrestling entertainment industries throughout his time in office. He highlighted his connections with boxing promoters from his days running casinos and showed up at wrestling matches to solicit political and financial endorsements from industry owners. He even appointed former professional wrestling executive Linda McMahon to his cabinet to head the Small Business Administration in 2017. People generally like someone who will “talk trash” and fight for them and not take them for granted. They respond when someone focuses on them and speaks their language.
