America’s Deep State wakes up to the realities of Trump after Putin summit
The most surprising thing to have come out of Monday’s summit meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin was the extent of the shock and disappointment that greeted Trump’s performance back home in America.
What did they expect? Trump is a coward as well as a bully. Just as he knows how to use the bully-pulpit, so he has learned the coward’s way out of threatening situations. Anyone who has been through school or worked in an office knows how this goes.
The one who exudes the most confidence and swagger, who knows how to use his fists and how to exploit the weaknesses of those around him, is also the one who knows instinctively when he has met his match. Put a bully up against a bigger man, with bigger fists, and he will cave in without a fight. The thought of receiving a beating in full view of his public is unbearable. Better to smile and flatter and do what you’re told – and then go home and take it out on the little guys.
Trump likes to believe that he is the supreme deal-maker. He knows how to throw money at a problem and how to bounce a cheque. Putin, on the other hand, knows how to torture a man. Literally. As he reminded us yesterday, he was a lieutenant-colonel in the KGB, operating in East Germany at the height of the Cold War.
If you want to know how the Russian President thinks, summon the image of Karla in John Le Carré’s Smiley novels. We catch only glimpses of the spymaster. He rarely speaks. But he is always at the heart of the action. The most revealing fact we learn about him is that, having once fallen foul of his masters, he returned to Moscow, where he somehow turned the tables on his accusers, resulting in their execution and his own appointment in their place.
That is Putin in a nutshell.
Not a book-reader, Trump would probably fancy himself more as Harry Lime, with the proviso that he makes it out of the sewers alive. More aptly, he is Citizen Kane without a brain.
So … what were Republican senators John McCain and Bob Corker on about when they condemned Trump’s performance in Helsinki? Did they really think that their four-times-bankrupt President – one of the few men not to have made a success out of running casinos – was going to stand up to Vladimir Putin, a proven war-leader with a track-record in murder across international frontiers and a private fortune worth, it is said, in excess of $200 billion?
That was never on the cards.
And how on earth did the American intelligence community manage to look aghast as, once again, their commander-in-chief threw them under a bus? Trump has already sacked one FBI director for daring to investigate his team’s links to the Kremlin, and threatened to dismiss Special Counsel Robert Mueller after he took up the case, accusing him of “driving a wedge” between the U.S. and Russia. For Trump, under the direct and steely gaze of the master of Russia, the issue was not “How can I stop this guy?” but “How do I keep these assholes’ noses out of my private business?”
I am forced to conclude that it was the sheer scale and audacity of Trump’s betrayal that finally caused the Deep State to break cover – that and the fact that he was now screwing them over in plain sight. Only in the aftermath of Helsinki are they waking up to what should have been obvious to them from the start.
“Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to and exceeds the threshold of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” was the verdict of former CIA director John Brennan. “It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin.”
Really, Mr Brennan? Did you seriously expect Trump to behave any differently? Did you honestly think he would go toe to toe with Putin and denounce him before an audience of millions as the new Stalin? If so, you fatally overestimate your man. But patriotism can do that even to the most cynical among us. If your whole professional life has been spent protecting a certain idea of the Republic, with the President as the ultimate symbol of America, it must indeed be shocking to discover that he has feet of clay and a head filled with much the same material.
Even televison’s late-night hosts were stumped. Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers and Trevor Noah are consummate comedians. Their writing teams regularly run rings round the communications chiefs of the White House. But though they and their audiences routinely laugh themselves silly at the antics of the so-called Leader of the Free World, there was no disguising the depths of their dismay and disgust last night that America has ended up in the hands of a man like Donald J. Trump.
Meyers, straight out, accused Trump of “selling out our democracy”. Noah said he had come across as the cheerleader for Putin. On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert, who could find humour in Armageddon, dropped his comedy mask to say that the Helsinki summit was “so weird, so disturbing, that it’s really upset people across the partisan divide in ways I have not seen in years.”
And yet, on and on it goes. It is the sense of ongoing astonishment that is the truest measure of Trump’s chaotic destruction of all the norms of government.
The one remaining mystery, of course, lies in what was said by the two leaders – the one more led than leading – during their two hours of private talks. It is difficult to believe that at any stage Putin was given a hard time. Much more probably, he gave the American a lesson in statecraft à la Russe, laying out for him the realities of power in respect of Ukraine, Crimea, Syria and just about anywhere else that Moscow regards as its backyard. Either that, or he simply read him his orders.
Does Putin know where the bodies are buried? Will he one day repay Trump and his family for their cooperation in the form of hotels, resorts and golf courses? Who knows? Anything is possible. All that can be said for the moment is that the American President looks to be court jester of the leader of the Russian Federation. And that is no joke.