A Year At The Circus Read online

  “I have been critical about the way the UK and Prime Minister Theresa May have handled Brexit. What a mess she and her representatives have created. I told her how it should be done, but she decided to go another way. I do not know the Ambassador, but he is not liked or well thought of within the US. We will no longer deal with him.”

  No longer deal with him? Wasn’t that in effect declaring Sir Kim persona non grata? Wasn’t that the US more or less telling the UK who it could have as an ambassador? As the head of the Foreign Office, Sir Simon McDonald told MPs he knew of no precedent – even from unfriendly countries at difficult times to say such a thing. So much for the endlessly vaunted ‘special relationship’; so much for the laying out of the red carpet, the piling on of royal charm; the ingratiating. It counted for nothing.

  Sir Kim had been invited to a dinner that evening that the president would be at; he was promptly disinvited. Liam Fox was in the city. A meeting with Ivanka Trump that the Ambassador would normally have attended too, Sir Kim stayed away from. The calculation was – let the storm pass, and steer the ship into calmer waters. But Donald Trump wasn’t done. He followed his first broadside with another. Sir Kim was ‘wacky’, ‘pompous’, and ‘very stupid’.

  When Boris Johnson, at that stage the runaway favourite to become Britain’s next prime-minister failed to back Sir Kim, despite being asked four times to do so in a TV Conservative Party leadership debate, Britain’s ambassador threw in the towel. A man who had served his country for over four decades, operating under governments of all political stripes, arguing against Brexit when it was British government policy to stay in the EU, and presenting the case for Theresa May’s deal to leave once it had been negotiated had been ousted by a US president who wouldn’t or couldn’t turn the other cheek.

  And then with an insouciance that you can only marvel at, Donald Trump, two days after he had brought about Sir Kim’s demise said to reporters ‘I wish the British Ambassador well. Someone just told me [that he had resigned] – too bad – but they said he actually said very good things about me.’

  Not only is Donald Trump changing the way that America is governed, he is challenging the liberal democratic institutions (American and foreign) that have been built up over decades, and which depend on certain norms of behaviour. He is the norm shatterer par excellence – thrilling his supporters and terrifying opponents. Won’t any ambassador to the US now think twice before committing unvarnished thoughts to paper about what is happening in the US, and about the way Donald Trump is governing? It’s not just that he is behaving differently from any president who has gone before him, he is forcing other governments to wonder, to fret about how they need to behave towards him; whether their institutional apparatuses are any longer fit for purpose.

  He can scent weakness from a mile away, and Britain needing a post-Brexit trade deal was just such an animal. Kim Darroch, a lifelong public servant, was its victim. The old rules are no longer Trump’s rules.

  This is a tale of two Kims, and it is instructive on a wider level. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, the leader of one of the most brutal regimes in the world today, with the worst human rights record, where citizens have been starved to death, is venerated for his toughness and wiliness; Kim Darroch, lifelong public servant, drawing a government salary from Europe’s most enduring democracy, is to be torn to shreds. Leaders from the old democracies and America’s historic partners and allies seem to fare a lot worse under this president than strong-men dictators and tyrants.

  The chaos, the dysfunction, the totally unexpected, the endless bareknuckle fights and the unorthodox behaviour are what is the norm. When I was a child I loved watching Batman, where it always ended with the caped crusader and Robin facing imminent death – and you came away thinking there’s no way they could escape from this, but miraculously in the next episode they somehow wriggle away. It often feels like that with this president. Or maybe if I am going back through my television watching childhood it is more the Wacky Races. The Dick Dastardly de nos jours careering along some mountain road, crashing into other vehicles, brakes failing, the wheels about to fall off, body parts crumpled, the engine about to seize, black smoke belching out of the exhaust pipe – but somehow not only does the vehicle keep going, it often emerges as the winner, and out steps Donald Trump, hair unruffled and that half smile, half smirk firmly in place.

  It is noisy and unrelenting, defying norms and convention, and paying no heed to history. And with seemingly implausible plot lines, all played out as if a made for TV spectacular. John F. Kennedy was described as the first president of the television age. Donald Trump is his own television director. And, make no mistake, he likes any drama that he is at the centre of. For this is a president who revels in the column inches and headlines devoted to him. The only thing worse than being talked about, it seems, is not being talked about.

  Whether – like me – you are reporting on this president, or you are working within the administration to make a success of his term in office, or working to speed his downfall, or just an interested observer, it feels like we are halfway through the second season of a six series box set. But without any idea how the show can possibly go on for another four and a half seasons. I mean, what plot twists are left? ‘Surely it can’t carry on like this?’ is the repeated refrain at Washington cocktail parties. But it does. And, in all likelihood, it will.

  When speaking at a literary festival a little while ago, I was amused by a question from a young man who was the president of his students’ union. (Many moons ago I had been the president of mine.) He wanted to know whether anything I had done then as a student politician had prepared me for covering the Trump administration today. I replied – only half jokingly – that nothing in 35-plus years in journalism had prepared me for what we were seeing and reporting on.

  And like any well-staged drama, there are a series of intriguing, complex characters, and a series of locations – rooms and buildings and places where the drama unfolds: the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, the Briefing Room, the East Wing, on Air Force One, the Supreme Court – and most critically the Federal building where the publicity averse Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, went about his investigation into the president. As a BBC reporter my focus is on the main story, the one event that stands out above the others. Invariably, it is all about the President – the latest thing he has said or done. But every day there are intriguing sub-plots and twists, with a cast of characters that is every bit as unbelievable as the President himself. The former governor of New Jersey and confidant of the President, Chris Christie, wrote in a memoir that Trump has a ‘revolving door of deeply flawed individuals – amateurs, grifters, weaklings, convicted and unconvicted felons’.

  In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s masterpiece Hamilton – a rap musical about the Founding Fathers of the US and the jostling for power within the fledgeling republic – one of the songs in the second act is ‘The Room Where It Happens’. It is an ode to power: of the fear of being an outsider, of the need always to be in the room where the action is happening, where decisions are being made. This book will take you into the key rooms in the White House and buildings in Washington where power is fought for, bargained away and occasionally squandered; where the battles have raged, where his inner circle have pushed back against this unique president, and where sometimes they have conspired to circumvent him and thwart him too. And the terrible attrition rate of those in this administration who have been chewed up and spat out. As the refrain from the song goes: ‘You’ve got to be in the room where it happens.’

  Chapter 1

  The Oval Office

  Donald Trump loves the Oval Office. It satisfies him on every level: its storied history; its familiarity; its unmistakable symbolism as the epicentre of power – world power. We know that the British prime minister works out of Number 10, and the French president the Elysée Palace, and that Vladimir Putin has the Kremlin – but in any of those cases do we know where in those buildings they work? In Was
hington we know the exact bit of the floorplan where the president is based – his offices are the West Wing, and the name of the room he occupies: ‘the Oval Office’. And in January 2017, improbably, it became Donald Trump’s. For a man who is big on being given due respect, it says ‘I’ve made it.’ For a man who never likes to lose, it also says ‘I won. I beat her.’ And for the property man from Queen’s – who always had to prove himself to his demanding and difficult father, and who, among the Manhattan elite was never quite accepted – it said ‘Look at me now.’ All of this is encapsulated in a story I heard from a senior aide. He had been with Trump in New York soon after he took office. They were sitting in ‘the Beast’, the President’s armoured Cadillac. The only vehicles on the normally heavily congested West Side Highway, that runs up along the Hudson river, were part of his motorcade. A path had been cleared for the President. Trump turns to his senior aide and says, ‘Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t get this.’ The brash, braggadocious outsider now had a four-year tenancy agreement – which, who knows, may be extendable to an eight-year one – on the Oval Office, the most famous piece of real estate in the whole of the United States, and perhaps the world.

  The Oval Office first became oval in 1909. Until then it had been a round office, used by the secretary to the president (the position now referred to as Chief of Staff). The president had tended to work out of the residence – in the room that is now the Lincoln Bedroom. The first president to install himself in the West Wing was Theodore Roosevelt. But it was the 27th president, William Taft, who brought in the builders to turn it into an oval shape. It measures approximately 34 feet by 27.

  Anyway, to press the fast forward button, fire ravaged the West Wing in 1929, gutting the original Oval Office – and much of the rest of the building. Franklin Delano Roosevelt oversaw renovations and he moved the Oval Office to the south-east corner – building on what was the laundry drying yard. History doesn’t recall where the presidential underwear and damask tablecloths billowed in the breeze after that. The advantage of placing the Oval Office there was that it had much better light – looking out onto the Rose Garden – with windows facing to the east as well as south. And when your staff were driving you mad, it was easy to walk back to the residence in the East Wing.

  Since its completion in 1934 the office has changed very little. Except in the way it is furnished, the room is the same. There are three large windows looking out onto the gardens at one end of the room and a door which opens onto the Colonnade linking the East and West Wings. At the far end of the room, opposite the presidential desk, is the fireplace. And that is where you will see the two armchairs, in one of which sits the president and in the other a visiting head of state as they chat in a somewhat stilted manner with the cameras clicking and a mass of microphones seeking to record the conversation between the two. We call this a ‘pool spray’. Either side of the fireplace there are two doors, linking to outer offices. Set into the ceiling is the Presidential Seal.

  An incoming president can choose the curtains and the oval rug, and what paintings to hang. Even what desk to use. John F. Kennedy’s new décor was just being installed on the day he was assassinated. Barack Obama caused controversy with the British when he had a Jacob Epstein bust of Winston Churchill removed, to be replaced with one of Martin Luther King Jr.

  When Donald Trump moved into the White House, the Churchill bust was restored to the Oval Office. Also moving in, at Donald Trump’s insistence, was a portrait of the 17th president of the United States, Andrew Jackson – someone the 45th president seems to have an affinity with. When the remark is made that politics has never been so dirty, those making that assertion would do well to look back at the 1828 presidential election, in which Jackson defeated the incumbent, John Quincy Adams. ‘Old Hickory’, as Jackson was known, was described at the time as bullish, defensive, quick-tempered, thin-skinned, a populist and unfit to govern. He felt that the world was against him, and that he was looked down on by the ruling élites. Jackson would talk about putting American interests first and warned against ‘alien enemies’. Sound familiar? That said, so far (at time of writing!) Donald Trump hasn’t killed anyone in a duel – as Jackson did.

  The 45th president has replaced the carpet and brought in the rug designed by Nancy Reagan when her husband was president; the curtains now hanging were first used by Bill Clinton, and Mr Trump hasn’t yet changed the beige and cream stripy wallpaper that Obama had installed. And the President is still sitting behind the Resolute desk, a gift to the American people from Queen Victoria – it is made from the timbers of HMS Resolute, which once upon a time patrolled the Arctic. Behind the desk on an occasional table are two photographs. One is of his mother, Mary, who came to the US from Scotland – and the other is of his father Fred. Aside from that – for the first year or so – there were few personal touches. A far cry from his cluttered office in Trump Tower, piled high with papers and walls decorated with magazine covers – all of which have one thing in common: they all have photographs of him on the front.

  The other thing about the room – and it might sound counter-intuitive to say so given the grave global crises that have played out from the Oval Office over the decades – is that it feels like a place of serenity. Obviously more so when it is empty. Light streams in through the windows and you look out onto the wonderfully landscaped gardens with mature magnolia and crab apple trees, and beautiful lawns that go down to the ellipse and then on to the Washington Monument. It can feel more like the elegant drawing room of an upscale country house than the crackling nerve centre of global power.

  One former aide to George W. Bush told me that one of the really intimidating things about the room was the imposing grandfather clock – a Seymour long case clock, built at the end of the eighteenth century – which ticks very loudly. If you are there presenting some argument on why the president should do this or that, and you know your time is extremely limited, that clock had a way of unsettling you. Not helped by President Bush being an impatient man. When you were in a meeting with him, and Marine One, the presidential helicopter, landed on the lawn he was wont to say with a twinkle in his eye, ‘My ride’s waiting for me. You’d better hurry.’

  When Donald Trump speaks to acquaintances on the phone, or meets new people he wants to impress, one of the first things he will ask is, ‘Have you visited the Oval Office?’ If your answer is no, he will invite you. And who doesn’t want to go to the Oval Office? One well-known American CEO who received the invitation, told me that when he was arranging the visit a White House staffer advised him to bring someone else along with him. The counsel was unusual – better to have a witness with you who can back up your account of the meeting, in case the President makes claims about it you don’t recognise. Another corporate titan told me how the President was almost childlike in his excitement at showing him his new office. ‘Can you believe I’m here?’ he asked his guest in wide-eyed wonderment.

  He also likes to show off the power that is at the fingertips of the Commander in Chief. On one occasion when the press was allowed in, the President had been due to take a call from the then Mexican president, Enrique Pena Nieto. We had been called in to witness what was meant to herald the start of a new chapter in trade between the US and Mexico. The cameras rolled, the President looked at the speakerphone, and this happened.

  President Trump presses a button on his phone, and after waiting a moment, says ‘Enrique?’ There’s more silence, followed by Trump telling someone off camera, ‘You can hook him up.’ That is then followed by more dead air – Trump says ‘Tell me when’ to the mysterious, out-of-vision person – and then more awkward silence. ‘It’s a big thing, a lot of people waiting,’ Trump says. More buttons are pressed. He says ‘Hello?’ multiple times. Eventually he suggests people ‘be helpful’. And then someone comes over to help, who, miraculously, is able to properly set up the speakerphone and the call begins. As these things tend to, it went viral on the internet.

  The one button
that Donald Trump knows how to work is housed in a small wooden box on the Resolute desk. It is the red button. And as he has noted wryly, it can cause guests some anxiety when he moves to press it. However, this is not an order to launch nuclear Armageddon. It is a call to one of the White House butlers that the Commander in Chief is in need of another Diet Coke. The President is famously teetotal, having seen the damage that booze did to his brother, who died an alcoholic in 1981. And he is also famously un-famous for being self-deprecating, but he did crack a joke over what his relationship might have been with alcohol: ‘I’m not a drinker. I can honestly say I never had a beer in my life. OK? It’s one of my only good traits. I don’t drink. Whenever they’re looking for something good, I say, “I never had a glass of alcohol.” I’ve never had alcohol … Can you imagine if I had, what a mess I’d be?’ But Diet Coke he can’t get enough of – apparently drinking up to 12 cans a day.

  Something else that I have picked up from any number is how well he treats the foot soldiers who work at the White House. Not so much his generals. There was a telling moment when the President was doing an interview with one of the US networks in the Oval Office,. His acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, has a cough, and out of vision he splutters a few times. It is barely picked up by the microphones. But Trump stops the recording and berates Mulvaney, telling him to get out. “I don’t like that you know,” says the President. “If you’re going to cough, please leave the room. You just can’t. You just can’t cough.” And shaking his head adds “boy oh boy.” The most senior official in the White House skulks off, tail between his legs, publicly reproached and humiliated. It was a vivid example of what it must be like to serve this President.

  But the lowlier staff? Well they can’t speak highly enough of the Trumps. He remembers people’s names, is appreciative when things are done for him, asks how they’re doing – and I have heard from ordinary household staff that he and the First Lady are much easier to work for than the Obamas, who were apparently never at ease with all the flunkies around. The most junior staff, the housekeepers and gardeners get the politeness and the respect that his most senior officials don’t.