We can laugh about him now, but at the time he was terrible. Or can we? Or should we? Trump may be gone but he's not been disowned by a vast majority of Republicans whose craven self-interest prevented him from being found guilty for incitement of insurrection relating to the events at the Capitol Building on January 6th this year and even when he is, finally, gone for the good, either imprisoned or dead, the stench of Trump, and Trumpism, will linger in the American air like a stale fart in a trapped lift.
The three part series Trump Takes On The World (BBC2/iPlayer) set out to try and make sense of four years of insanity in the USA. But the trouble with insanity is, it's often hard to make sense of. It is, by its very nature, nonsensical. In some ways, Trump Takes On The World takes the approach that Donald Trump had some kind of vision or at least some vaguely coherent policy rather than blatant self-interest at heart and, for me, ends up being less hard hitting than it could, and should, have been because of this.
Norma Percy and Brian Lapping are brilliant documentary makers (their Death of Yugoslavia from 1995 is essential viewing) and, as ever, they've pulled together a collection of talking heads that is both relevant to the story and heavily involved and invested in it. In some cases, at the very top levels. Steve Bannon, Rex Tillerson, H.R.McMaster, John Bolton, Malcolm Turnbull, Francois Hollande, Jeremy Hunt, Kim Darroch, and Fiona McLeod-Hill may not be people you'd want to be stuck on a desert island with but they are all high ranking public figures and all have personal experience of dealing with Trump.
As do many of the advisers, ambassadors, assistant secretaries of defence, trade representatives, and under secretary generals that make up this show. This, and the scenes of NATO or G7 leaders watching obligatory entertainment at various conferences, can mean the series ends up a little dry in place. It's hard not to imagine the footage of Justin Trudeau, Shinzo Abe, and Angela Merkel watching acrobats, saxophonists, and close harmony groups perform won't, sooner rather than later, be repurposed for an Adam Curtis production. No doubt with the music of William Basinski or Burial playing in the background.
The action, if you can call it that, begins with Trump's inauguration. When he announces that from now on it will be "only America first, America first", some observers think it's all bluff but they soon come to realise that the US has not elected merely an outsider. They have chosen a disruptor to lead their nation, and if there's one things disruptors tend to do, it's disrupt.
The first foreign leader to visit Trump in the White House was our own Theresa May. Apart from an unsolicited grab of May's hand, Trump managed to be polite enough to her but his mind was on other things. He had a hand for May but he only had eyes for Vladimir Putin. When, during May's visit, he finds out that a call from Putin has not been put through to him he is furious.
He does, at least, tell May and French president Hollande that he is committed to NATO (although doesn't miss a chance to complain that he believes the US shouldn't be footing so many of NATO's bills - even though the only time NATO has gone to war was, ostensibly, in defence of the US, post 9/11). In a highly irregular breach of protocol, Trump even asks Hollande who he should appoint to his cabinet.
Trump was dismissive of the likes of Jim Mattis (US secretary of defense) and H.R.McMaster (National Security Advisor) because they were favourable to the EU. Trump's dislike of the EU is, I suspect, because it is a formidable trading competitor - a UK free of the EU would be much easier to screw over. But it's not just the EU Trump's not keen on.
He didn't seem very keen on most international bodies or agreements and soon he withdraws America from the Paris Climate Accord in an act that is described as a kind of mini-Brexit, a reclamation of sovereignty. In a statement which reveals Trump's wilful ignorance, he claims he was elected to represent the people of Pittsburgh, not the people of Paris.
He seems to think that because the Paris Agreement was made in France it only applies there and not to all of the nearly two hundred nations who signed up to it. As he moves to distance himself from other Western democracies, there is one country that just won't seem to go away. Stories of Russian interference in the 2016 election of Trump can't be sidelined as easily as Trump would like so, eventually, he meets with Putin in Helsinki.
Putin does most of the talking. Trump likes to talk over most people, women especially, but he's strangely quiet when Putin talks. When asked about Putin, Trump says, first, that if Putin says he didn't interfere with the US election then that's good enough for him. He says he trusts Putin. Then, a few days later, he claims he doesn't trust him. Trump's opinion on this, and many other things, changes depending on the audience.
When Trump visits Emmanuel Macron in Paris, Macron puts on an impressive Bastille Day parade with Trump as guest of honour. Trump loved it and wondered if they could do the same sort of thing back in the US. Feeling high and mighty, he told Macron that he believed that Theresa May and Angela Merkel are, his favourite word and now one that applies to him, "losers".
Well they're not alpha males. They're not even males. A problem in itself in the twisted worldview of Donald Trump, a man who made a point of arriving twenty minutes late to a gender equality talk. Who wants to hear that shit? Merkel, specifically, irked Trump. She was the ice to his fire and while he came from vast inherited wealth, she grew up in the former East Germany.
A powerful woman is bad enough for Trump but a powerful foreign woman who doesn't know her place. That's never gonna go down well with him. Feeling outnumbered in the G7, Trump makes the suggestion that Russia, against the background of the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury, be readmitted to make it a G8. While, admittedly, there are big problems with the way the major European powers deal with Putin's Russia, Trump is certainly not the man to make that case.
His own position is far too compromised and, even more so, he's simply too ignorant. When he visits the UK (Blenheim Palace and his golf course in Scotland), it is clear he is unaware that Britain has nuclear capability, he describes the Iran deal as a "dumb deal", he arranges to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and he gives his son-in-law, Jared Kushner - completely unqualified for the position, the task of securing peace in the Middle East.
Many of these actions come, solely, from a place of vanity. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a hypothetical cognitive bias which states that people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. Trump is the globe's most obvious proof that the Dunning-Kruger effect is a real thing. He's the smoking gun. But soon he was presented with a moral dilemma and how does a man who has no concept of morality deal with a moral dilemma?
On the 4th April 2017, the reprehensible and murderous dictator of Syria, Bashar al-Assad dropped a barrel bomb on his own people in the town of Khan Shayhun and followed it by releasing chemical weapons resulting in the deaths of around one hundred people. Trump had pledged he would no longer allow the US to be dragged into wars in the Middle East but he still retaliates with a missile strike.
It's a thorny one. Assad is vile, he's a clear and present danger to the Syrian people, but is further violence the way out? I really don't know. The last time Assad had pulled a trick like this Obama had been unable to get the European powers to back him in military action so Trump decided not to even consult them. Not to even tell them.
Depressing through the whole episode is, it's about the only time I can understand Trump's actions. They'd be more understandable, still, if Trump was equally critical of another destabilising, bellicose, and murderous regime in the region. But Saudi Arabia is richer than Syria so they receive markedly different treatment. Trump even makes his first foreign trip to Saudi Arabia where Kushner, in his new role as supposed peace envoy, has already negotiated billions of dollars worth of arms deals.
Thankfully, Biden has pulled back from arming the Saudis in their war on Yemen (the UK have been much more circumspect about doing so, they pay good money those Saudis) but the footage of Trump sword dancing with sheikhs still disturbs. This is the regime overseen by a man (Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman) who ordered that the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi be hacked to death by bone saws in Istanbul.
A crime he has never, and may never, be punished for. Unlike General Qasem Soleimani who, on 3rd January 2020, was assassinated in a Donald Trump ordered drone strike in Baghdad. Hailed by some Iraqis as a national hero but believed by others to be nothing better than a brutal murderer, Soleimani had been long branded a terrorist by the US and though I'll shed no tears for the man, it does seem as if Trump ordered the extrajudicial killing to help launch his election campaign.
It looked like going on to be one of the biggest news stories of 2020 until the activities of bats and pangolins in a wet market in Wuhan found a novel way of attracting the attention of the world's media - and the world. For all his dealings with Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia though, it was China, along with Russia, that commandeered most of Trump's attention.
Trump felt that China had taken factories, jobs, and money from America (and he would go on to endlessly blame China for Covid-19 - when he wasn't pretending it wasn't real) but Chinese leader and Winnie the Pooh lookalike Xi Jinping was invited to Trump's luxurious Florida resort Mar-a-Lago and Xi returned the favour by making Trump the first ever foreign leader to be treated to dinner inside Beijing's Forbidden City.
But these actions resulted in very little policy or even co-operation. They were, put simply, power moves, or optics, on the part of both Trump and Xi. As was Trump's famous meeting with North Korean leader, and likely owner of a minuscule penis, Kim Jong-un. The owner of the world's least rock'n'roll flat-top.
Obama had warned Trump that a crisis was potentially brewing with Kim and North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons. A pursuit that had begun with Kim's grandfather Kim Il-sung and passed through his father Kim Jong-il, North Korea were now carrying out nuclear tests which resulted in Trump coining the insult 'Rocket Man' for Kim.
"Rocket Man", Trump said, was on a "suicide mission" but North Korea boasted of having nuclear weapons powerful enough to reach Seattle as well as being ready and prepared to use them. With North Korea's unpredictability, and Trump's, the fear of an accidental nuclear war became a genuine concern until, confounding many, Trump and Kim met for what appears to have been little more than a photo opportunity and a bit of PR for both of them.
As with Xi, it was a case of style (not a very stylish style either) over substance but, at time of writing, neither North Korea or the US have sent a nuclear weapon each other's way so we live in hope. In truth, Trump's actions in Asia (see also the struggles with Huawei, the horrendous Uighur concentration camps in Xinjiang - the true horror of which is still to be revealed, and the umbrella protests in Hong Kong) haven't really made any difference in Asian countries or in the US. They have, as with everything Trump has been involved in, been all about him and him only.
It's never America first, it's always Trump first and it's because of this that Trump has always shown more affinity towards dictators (Putin, Xi, Kim) than he has to democratic leaders like Merkel and May. When he claimed that people were saying he should have a third term (against the American constitution), the people saying that were him and his family.
When, from Wuhan, a killer virus appeared in America, Trump, initially, appeared to be taking it seriously before making a conscious decision, a political decision, not to do so and, instead, use it to attack China with in an attempt to make him look like a strong leader and a patriot and to help him get re-elected again last year.
The ploy failed for Trump, he was roundly and legally beaten by Joe Biden in November, but it failed far more lethally for the people of the USA. The USA, mostly directly due to Trump and his enablers, has the highest Covid death toll on the planet. 519,735, more than half a million people, have succumbed to the disease. That's more than double the next highest (Brazil, ran by Jair Bolsonaro, a man who styles himself as the Trump of the Tropics).
In China, where the disease originated but where it was taken seriously from the start, the death toll is 4,636. A tragedy of course but the US death toll is more than one hundred and twelve times as high as the Chinese one. If you factor in population, the picture is even grimmer. In the US, 1.57% of the entire population has died with Covid, in China the death rate is less than 0.004%. The likelihood of dying of Covid in the US is more than four thousand, three hundred and sixty times higher than in China.
Covid has been a global tragedy - and it's not over yet - but one thing it has done to make the world a better place is to finally help rid us, albeit perhaps only temporarily - it's not over yet, of Donald Trump. Donald Trump was the most dangerous leader in American history and his negligence and vanity allowed a killer virus to infect his country and the world to a far more deadly effect than it should have done.
Trump Takes on the World would have done well to remember just how much damage Trump did to the world, both with regards to Covid and to his other lunatic and divisive behaviours, and less try to make sense of them. It was an interesting and thoughtful watch but with a man this dangerous, there can be no excuses for not going in much much harder.
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