What is Europe’s plan B if Trump wins?
This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.
It was unnerving to hear Donald Trump talk on Friday morning in that strange, man-child manner about how he has four indictments already and, like, the totally greatest police mugshot of all time. The former president claimed to have more support than ever because he is, he says brazenly, ridiculously, fighting a battle against election interference.
The excitement in his voice – he never knew much about mugshots until now, he said – demonstrated again that the former President is best understood as a product of the American fame machine.
Yes, he won the presidency in 2016 because he was the perfect vehicle for all those voters angry and hurting after America followed up Iraq with the financial crisis and an opioid epidemic. He appealed to those who wanted to annoy, infuriate and punish the political class and the mainstream media, and he spoke to those who hated the Clintons and the left. Yet, at the heart of his appeal was his ease with the fame game, and the dexterity with which he moved between reality TV (the ultimate early 21st century American entertainment form) and politics, using the same interchangeable props and rhetorical devices to shock and discombobulate his critics.
He’s still got it, he’s still box office, in his monstrous way. As Andrew Neil put it on Twitter: “Well, that Trump mugshot can’t be what his enemies hoped for. Looks more like a pic from GQ photoshoot than from basement of Fulton County courthouse. He’ll use it as campaign illustration. Does he have friends in Georgia law enforcement?”
Mugshots are the picture taken for the record in custody by an officer, of course. In the Georgia mugshot, Trump looks out from under that mop of blond hair and straight at the camera, his eyes are narrowed, the gaze is piercing. It is one for the annals of history, a photograph that may become the defining image of the man.
Sometimes a good mugshot adds to the appeal, especially in America, where the entertainment complex is so huge and the lines are blurred between notoriety and allure.
Within a few hours of the release of the image, the Washington Post and other outlets had pieces running on the greatest American mugshots of all time. In the Post story, the Trump shot is squeezed between Jane Fonda’s mugshot and that of Al Capone.
Online, a blizzard of pieces and familiar images appeared when I searched famous mugshots on Google. There’s Hugh Grant, following his Hollywood arrest. There’s Martin Luther King. There’s David Bowie, arrested in 1976 in Rochester for smoking weed with Iggy Pop. That arrest helped prompt the pair to leave the US and go to Berlin for several years, to clean up and make a new type of music. Bowie’s Berlin work is among his best.
After a while spent looking at these celebrity images, it becomes difficult to work out what is a real mugshot and what has been wrongly attributed or even faked. Had Frank Sinatra been arrested? I had forgotten he had been, for seduction. In the image he looks at his most menacing, hair slicked back and a scowl on his face.
And then Elvis. Was he ever arrested? Having read Peter Guralnick’s classic two part biography of the singer several times I remember something about a fight in a gas station and a speeding offence. Was there a mugshot taken? I don’t know. The shot that shows up with Google and is sometimes labelled erroneously is not a law enforcement image. It’s Presley taken just before he left the US Army in 1960, as a record of his demobilisation.
Going down the rabbit hole of American history and popular culture for a few minutes on Friday reminded me that this is back where we’re headed with Trump. Back to that permanently unsettling place. What has he said or tweeted now? What is true? Why does he talk like that, boasting, and telling obvious falsehoods? Even when he got policy right – and there are numerous areas where he did – it was hard to work out whether he knew he had done it or people in the administration had done it despite him. Those four years were consistently unnerving. As it stands, there are another four years of it straight ahead.
The televised debate between his Republican rivals last week underlined that no-one else, barring a freak event, will be the Republican nominee. Up against an ailing Biden, visibly declining, Trump could win. Democrat assurances of a year ago that American women voters would never allow Trump to be president again look misplaced when the Democrats are in such a mess. If Biden falls, they cannot run Kamala Harris because of her straightforward unpopularity.
Who then? The Washington rumour is that Gavin Newsom, governor of California, will be parachuted in at the Democratic convention next summer if the Biden family can be persuaded to stand down their man. The party needs to avoid an open primary season, during which all manner of far left characters could make a run, so perhaps the best outcome is that at the convention someone emerges. Newsom has his troubles, though. As a former Mayor of San Francisco, he is being dragged back into trying as Governor to sort out the city’s chronic drugs, crime and homeless epidemics. It’s not the greatest of looks.
Amid the chaos, a Trump win now looks plausible, likely perhaps, even if he is on trial in the run up to the election or incarcerated.
If this happens, and a vengeful Trump returns to the White House, Europe is going to need a plan B when it comes to security. I’ve asked this question before, several months ago – what is the plan B? – but with little more than a year to go there is no sign of one.
NATO relies on the US and the European Union has no meaningful capacity for organising practical defence, beyond what it is trying to do on coordinating the restocking of munitions across the continent.
Britain and France are operationally close, thanks to the defence treaties but their leaderships are not always in the same place on Ukraine.
Countries such as Poland are, sensibly, massively increasing their own spending, in part as insurance in case the US goes isolationist or there is a distracting prolonged fight between isolationists and internationalists in Washington.
The best hope is the US Congress, and its intensely close relationship with the Pentagon and the intelligence machine, through its network of committees and control of funding. Despite Trump’s anti-NATO rhetoric last time, spending and deployments increased during his presidency. But we cannot rely on a repeat this time. Europe needs to talk about its security, urgently.
The Reaction podcast returns
The Reaction podcast is back next week. Recording it with the team used to be one of my favourite parts of the week, then post-pandemic it got crowded out and we all became sick of Zoom conversations.
So, we’ve switched to a studio and the first of the new episodes is out this Wednesday.
It’s now a highly unusual podcast in that it is exclusively for subscribers. Although there will be a few snippets out there for free, and sometimes a free short on the latest political drama, of which there will be a lot next year, the only way to listen to the whole episodes will be to be a subscriber. If you’re reading this, then you are already a Reaction subscriber. For which, thank you.
My first guest of the new run is my colleague and friend Daniel Finkelstein. We’ll be discussing his extraordinary new book – Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad: A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival.
You’ll be sent a link next week and a note from the team showing how to access our subscriber only podcast on Spotify or wherever else you like to listen.
If Russia implodes
According to one of my favourite geopolitical analysts, one of the most under-priced outcomes of the Ukraine war and the infighting in Moscow is a sudden Russian implosion in the next year. As in, the gangsters and generals are killing each other. Once the smoke from all the gunfire and plane crashes has cleared, who will be left in charge?
For all the talk of Ukraine’s offensive stalling, although there are signs this weekend of some progress on the frontline, Russia could go to war with itself. There would then be a battle for power between the military, intelligence agencies, and oligarch factions, all within a nuclear armed state that is geographically vast with the potential for breakaway movements.
If it happens, the West will have to avoid the mistakes of the 1990s, when leaders hoped they could influence or steer events. Standing well back and keeping a hotline open to the Russian military to avoid accidents will be the only option while they fight it out internally.
Build water infrastructure, fast
“Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.”
(The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.)
In Britain we are surrounded by the stuff. Water, water, everywhere. But when it comes to fresh water, there is a problem. Demand is surging and about a fifth of the stuff supplied is lost.
This is not a problem unique to the United Kingdom, before anyone thinks of blaming it on Brexit. An in-depth report in the Financial Times this weekend shows that EU countries are in just as bad a position as temperatures rise, and in some cases the situation is way worse than it is here. Food production is being hit in Italy and Spain.
According to the industry body EurEau, 25% of water is lost in the EU. There have been decades of under-investment in water infrastructure in most countries on the continent, and bills were kept down to please consumers. In Britain we haven’t built a new reservoir since the early 1990s.
This is another of those fascinating stories that intersects with the climate story and isn’t quite as it initially appears. As you know, I’m obsessed with how little attention we pay to the fundamentals of supply and security of supply when it comes to energy, industrial production and, now, water.
Going green will somehow solve the water problem in Europe, won’t it? That feels plausible, doesn’t it? Green technology comes from the air and the sun and the water, doesn’t it? Let’s not mention all the mining involved. We’re going green, so being kind to the planet will sort this. Won’t it?
Well, I’m sorry to say, it’s more complicated than that.
As the FT’s reporters point out, “clean, green technologies” are thirsty too: “The Energy Transitions Commission, an industry coalition, has said water for power generation, hydrogen electrolysis, cooling nuclear power stations and carbon capture could amount to 58bn cubic meters per year by 2050 – roughly double Europe’s current drinking water consumption.”
So, by the hallowed date of 2050, in theory net zero utopia, green technologies will be using double Europe’s current drinking water consumption.
Mining for the minerals needed for turbines and electric cars could add more. Data centres and servers need ever more water for cooling too.
Just as with energy, we need policymakers to be calm and hardheaded, to avoid angst and melodrama and level with consumers about what is required.
There are three parts to a solution: 1) Build more reservoirs and better infrastructure. 2) Encourage us to conserve the supplies we already have and use it more sparingly. 3) Technology used by businesses in a free market is our friend. The FT cites a farmer in Spain who tripled his wheat production with half the amount of water, using apps to monitor moisture and avoid waste. It can be done.
What I’m watching
Oppenheimer. Did anyone mention it is too long? No. It’s an actual film, as opposed to a Netflix series with 12 episodes and five series coming in at 60 hours in total.
I won’t add much to the endless analysis of director Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
Upsides? It evokes the period and American power pretty much perfectly. It looks as good as you would expect, especially on IMAX. Those saying the final half hour is superfluous are missing the point. The final half hour is essential. It’s where we get closest to understanding the main character’s flaws, the interplay with politics, and the point of the film.
Downsides? The music is sometimes too loud and insistent, although the director is clearly trying to create a contrast with the key moment of silence, when the bomb goes off in the test, codenamed Trinity. Some of the dialogue is too heavy on exposition, flagging historical events – damn it, if we don’t get this done by the Potsdam conference in Germany starting in July 1945, where the Allied leaders meet to tie up the war, then that means… and so on.
Other than that, I loved it, if love is the right word for the subject. It’s a big, meaningful film about existence.
Nolan is obsessed with time and, clearly, its passing means I’m getting old. My first comment on exiting the BFI Imax on London’s Southbank was to point out how good Leonardo DiCaprio had been playing General Groves, director of the Manhattan Project. Mate, I was told by my friend of 40 years, DiCaprio wasn’t in it. That was Matt Damon.