America’s frontier: The end of the myth

The Washington Memorial in Washington DC as seen from the Jefferson Memorial. Photo: Author’s collection

The seductive idea of America’s frontier was that it was never ending. As historian William Appleman Williams wrote in 1966, American expansion exhilarated because it could be projected to infinity. From George Washington to Barack Obama, the American political class steadily upped the ante pushing global engagement as a moral imperative. Then came Donald Trump. “I want to build a wall,” he said, and America’s racism and extremism had nowhere else to go. Trump was not America’s first racist president. Andrew Jackson drove a slave coffle and oversaw ethnic cleansing on a grand scale. Woodrow Wilson cultivated the Ku Klux Klan in his electoral coalition, while Nixon won the Neo-Confederate vote in 1968 thanks to his “southern strategy”. But the country no longer has a “divine, messianic” crusade to hold it together. America, says Greg Grandin, in his 2020 book of that title, is at The End of the Myth.

Grandin says British North America was conceived in expansion from Europe’s religious wars. Native Americans had to get out of the way or be murdered or enslaved. As Benjamin Franklin said, America’s vastness allowed for endless expansion and markets growing with supply. “We are scouring our planet,” Franklin said, “by clearing America of woods.” Then came the first worldwide war, not of 1914 but of the 1750s when Britain and France fought for control of India, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Americas. In North America both countries deployed standing armies, settler militias and indigenous allies. British rangers learned to live, dress and kill “like the Indians”.

Britain won the war and inherited an enormous swathe of forest land from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi. But it could not reconcile local interests. Britain issued a 1763 proclamation prohibiting European settlement west of the Appalachians, which suited indigenous allies. But settlers like the rangers saw it as a violation of their right to move west. As authorities dithered, settlers moved west anyway, forming militias and terrorising Native Americans in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. The 1776 Declaration of Independence was the settlers’ ultimate rebuke to the crown. Jefferson claimed they were the inheritors of Saxon freemen finding new lands. The 1783 Treaty of Paris laid down the borders of the new nation at the Mississippi River and Americans moved swiftly across the Appalachians.

Jefferson negotiated the right for US ships to moor on the Spanish bank of the Mississippi and demanded access to Florida’s waterways. Southern states claimed their territories ran all the way to the Pacific and settlers and war veterans purchased land west of the Mississippi. They were following James Madison’s 1787 Federalist paper advice on how to avoid an aristocracy. Madison’s solution was “extend the sphere” to dilute the threat of political conflict and factionalism.

South America took a different tack. In the 1820s Spain’s former colonies had won independence setting their borders along the old colonial boundaries, based on the old Roman law uti possidetis, “as you possess”. This self-containment became the guiding principle of 20th century decolonising nations and modern Africa remains mostly aligned on colonial boundaries. In contrast, the US thought it was one of a kind, “the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom,” said Jefferson. Its constitution transformed western lands into territories which in time could become states. America doubled in size thanks to the 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France (which had obtained the territory from Spain). The new frontier was the Rockies and once again Americans poured into new lands. These lands were not empty, but Jefferson wanted Native Americans to be assimilated into settler life and give up valuable hunting lands. If mass murder was required, then it was Britain’s fault having seduced the tribes “to take up the hatchet against us.” Settlers executed “removal” operations to drive Native Americans further west towards “the frontier”.

Wealthy Tennessee businessman Andrew Jackson flouted laws to enter Indian territory. Jackson believed liberty was the freedom to do whatever he wanted and led a militia to exterminate Tennessee’s Creek Nation, ordering his men to cut noses off corpses to more easily tally the dead, paying off tribal leaders, and concluding a punitive treaty with survivors. He subdued Florida’s Seminoles and Tennessee’s Chickasaws using the same tactics of “terrorise, bribe and legalise.” Jackson became a national hero by defeating the British at the 1815 Battle of New Orleans and now wanted to make all of North America white. In 1829 the aristocratic Founding Fathers lost control of the presidency to the outsider Jackson and his mandate to remove Indians, wage war on Mexico, and extend slavery.

Jackson was a believer in “small government” but ensured his government would enforce enterprise and property rights, including the right to own human property. The Age of Jackson was a radical empowerment of white men at the expense of black men who were denied the vote they had in some northern states since colonial times. Jackson also signed the Indian Removal Act pushing Native Americans beyond the Mississippi and extinguishing their land rights. Settlers poured into Indian country, demanding military protection and prompting repeated cycles of forced removals. Indians must die out, said New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. “God has given the earth to those who will subdue and cultivate it,” Greeley said. In practice, speculators, railroads, ranchers and corporations claimed the best land for themselves.

By the 1830s attention turned to Texas, the northernmost part of Mexico. Spain founded Texas as a “slaver’s utopia” for Anglo settlers in the hope they would become a loyal buffer against American encroachment. But Mexico abolished slavery when it won independence in 1821 and the Anglo Tejanos revolted. In its time as a short-lived republic, Texas enshrined slavery in perpetuity and Galveston was the largest slave market west of New Orleans. Texans wanted to join the United States but its admittance would tip the balance of power to the slave states. Jackson protege and slaveholder James Polk won the presidency in 1844 promising to annex Texas to secure the frontier. In 1846 Polk declared war on Catholic Mexico, at the same time that “manifest destiny” was coined to described the belief Providence was guiding Anglo-Saxon Protestants across the continent. Migration west was a messianic mission.

In the war that followed, America’s armed superiority was overwhelming. They took Mexico City in 1847 and the following year the two countries signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferring not just Texas but Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah, western Colorado and southwest Wyoming to the US, some 100 million people in a half million square miles. The Jacksonian consensus kept together slave and free states as the border moved south and west. Settlers to Oregon, which also joined the union in 1848, didn’t want slavery or free blacks, passing laws to exclude them from the territory. But tensions over slavery could not be resolved and America waged war on itself in the 1860s. Millions of slaves were released in 1865 and Lincoln’s final legacy, his Freedmen’s Bureau, was a repudiation of Jacksonian politics as a federal initiative to resettle refugees, redistribute confiscated lands, levy taxes and regulate labour and the minimum wage. But new president Andrew Johnson hated it and believed ex-slaves should help themselves. Johnson ensured the southern planter class regained power and restored the Jacksonian myth of a minimal state and individualism. Thanks to more Lincoln legislation like the Homestead Act, which promised lots for working the soil, Americans looked west again. Native Americans were pacified in the 30 years following the civil war, and southerners were re-integrated into the federal army while Jim Crow laws were instituted across the south. The frontier, said late-1800s historian Frederick Jackson Turner, “was a magic fountain of youth in which America continually bathed and was rejuvenated.”

Turner’s thesis held that America’s unique individualism gained strength “each time it touched a new frontier”. The frontier was not a physical border but a way of life. The American west encouraged an idea of political equality that seemed to go on forever, at least for white Anglo-Saxons. Turner ignored the removal of Native Americans and the invasion of Mexico and dismissed slavery as “an incident”. As America stood on the verge of global power, Turner’s ideas were expanded on by historians, economists, novelists and future presidents. Theodore Roosevelt celebrated frontier vigilantism and rough justice as “healthy for the community” while Woodrow Wilson justified the invasions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and Philippines as “a new revolution”. The myth of rugged individualism was used to define socialists and unionists as un-American. But it could only be maintained through ceaseless expansion.

Confederate and union flags flew together as the cotton-growing states enthusiastically supported the invasion of Cuba in search of new tariff-free markets. Grandin said that 1898 war transformed the south’s “Lost Cause” of slavery preservation into humanity’s cause for world freedom. President McKinley, who served the union in the civil war, wore a Confederate badge on his lapel in a victory tour of the south after Spain was defeated. The dormant Ku Klux Klan reemerged led by 1898 veterans who draped themselves in high ideals of reconciled national history. Resurgent racists formed “rifle clubs” which were fronts for white terrorist organisations and got away with lynchings, property confiscation, disenfranchisement, arbitrary prosecutions and chain gangs. Wilson won his second presidency in 1916 on the white southern vote, purging blacks from federal jobs, re-segregating Washington and legitimising the KKK.

America’s move across the Mexican frontier took a new form. Capital replaced settlers as American investors took over the Mexican economy dominating oil production, railroads, agriculture and ports. Thousands of Mexicans were deported from their homelands and forced to work on large plantations. American courts sanctioned vigilantes like the Texas Rangers who killed thousands more in mass executions in border regions. When the First World War came, the Rangers, now an official branch of law enforcement, defined anti-war activity as anything from organising a union to trying to vote, and rounded up and deported thousands of strikers. After the war the rejuvenated KKK fixated on many threats besides African Americans, including jazz, immorality, high taxes, and increasingly Mexicans. Border clans infiltrated church groups, school boards, police and national guards and suppressed the Mexican vote to reinforce minority rule. The New York Times worried it was “open season for shooting Mexicans” along the Rio Grande. America’s growing xenophobia was encoded in the 1924 Immigration Act which favoured Anglo-Saxon migrants. Though Mexico was exempted due to the need for its cheap labour force, white supremacists took control of the new US Border Patrol and turned it into a “vanguard of race vigilantism.”

Not everyone was intoxicated by America’s limitless power. Socialist editor of the New Republic, Walter Weyl, blamed the frontier for American ills such as racism, class domination and corruption. American individualism was doomed to defeat itself, said Weyl, “as the boundless opportunism which gave it birth became at last circumscribed.” The Great Depression seemed to do exactly that and Franklin Roosevelt said in 1932 that America had reached “its last frontier”. It was facing an economic and ecological disaster with intensive strip mining farming practices leading to dust storms, forcing many to leave the land. Roosevelt’s New Deal was the government’s biggest intervention since the Freedmen’s Bureau, resettling families, offering work, planting forests and expanding national parks. Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture Henry Wallace said what was needed was “not a new continent but a new state of heart”. But Roosevelt appeased southern planters by ensuring that rural workers, mostly black or Mexican, were excluded from laws allowing workers to unionise so agriculturalists would keep their supply of low wage farmworkers. Mexicans who weren’t illegal and subject to imprisonment were unprotected by labour laws. As one sugar planter said, “We used to own slaves, now we just rent them.”

With the coming of the Cold War, leaders moved the frontier to new geographies. Life magazine said the frontier was on the Elbe between East and West Germany. It was also between the two Koreas, the two Chinas and increasingly, up the Persian Gulf. Defence budgets soared as did profits for US capital. Truman integrated the military and the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation. Libertarians worried about expanding government bureaucracy and harked back to the Jacksonian “frontiersmen” who broke loose from the economic controls “that restricted their energies.” Nobel winning economist James Buchanan hailed the role of the frontier in breaking up collective identities of “the nanny state”.

Martin Luther King had different concerns. He believed rugged individualism was a faulty foundation for national identity and America was indeed socialist, only its wealth redistribution was upwards. “There is,” King said, “an individualism that destroys the individual.” He said the Vietnam War would exacerbate America’s worst sentiments including racism while diverting funds from progressive legislation. Sure enough, the war strengthened the position of southern segregationists in Congress who threatened to withhold military funding to veto civil rights laws. In 1967 King looked “beyond Vietnam” to see America’s “giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism” and a political culture where profit and property were more important than people. The LA Times attacked King for “linking these hard, complex problems” which would lead not to solutions, but “a deeper confusion”. Angry soldiers displayed Confederate symbols at every opportunity in South East Asia while at home pro-war demonstrations marched on Pittsburgh with a large Rebel flag, now the banner of those that felt “stabbed in the back” as America tried to wind back white supremacy. When Floridian William Calley was convicted for his role in the My Lai massacre, Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign transformed him from a war criminal to a cultural wedge to weaponise southern grievances. Even in the 21st century Iraqi war, the Rebel flag remained a banner of “free-floating resentment” as Grandin calls it, hanging in the tent of Bagram torturers.

Nixon opened the floodgates to polarise the electorate, and following presidents would help create a permanent state of disequilibrium. None expressed the right to American limitlessness better than Ronald Reagan. His energy policy was “more, more, more” when it came to oil and gas, but the sunny sheriff of Washington also removed Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the White House roof. His state department eschewed human rights in favour of individual rights which could be deployed on behalf of people trampled by tyranny but also act as a racist dog whistle. Reagan pushed through deregulation, privatisation and tax cuts, and granted free speech rights to corporations. His Cold War revival and support for anti-Communist insurgents kept his base happy while his libertarian government chipped away at welfare, public education and weakened unions. “There are no limits to growth,” Reagan said. “Nothing is impossible.”

So it seemed to a triumphant America as the Berlin Wall and the USSR fell. Democrat Bill Clinton beat Reagan’s successor George H.W. Bush in 1992 by channelling Reagan’s folksy optimism and outdoing the Republicans. Clinton supported free trade agreements, kept Wall Street unfenced, and increased military presence in the Gulf. While NAFTA destroyed Mexican small farms, American agribusiness kept their subsidies. Mexico’s vibrant dairy industry was destroyed as the country was overrun by American junk food, increasing obesity and malnutrition in tandem. Refugees eked out a living in the drug trade or migrated illegally across the border. They were joined by Central Americans whose economies were destroyed by American mining and biofuel corporations. NAFTA didn’t allow for freedom of movement of people and Clinton beefed up border operations with punitive immigration measures. Border patrol became the second largest law enforcement agency behind the FBI. Alarmed Republicans swung even further right spurred on by the growing power of Fox News, worried about undocumented migrants and “anchor babies”.

After 9/11 George W. Bush pledged to “extend the frontiers of freedom”. But Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were disasters leaving America with huge military spending at a time of deep tax cuts. The long years of individualism led to increased racism and poverty, and war revanchism led to increasing fears around America’s borders. Violence against Latinos surged as vigilante groups like the Minutemen hunted for illegal immigrants in New York and other northern cities. “The border is no longer in the desert,” one Minuteman said, “It is all over America.” Backed by Fox News, they demanded a wall across the entire length of the border.

The rage of Nativists increased with the GFC followed by Barack Obama’s election. While the first black president packed “an emotional wallop”, his policies were moderate and he refused to think beyond 1990s-style Free Trade. Even that was too much for the growing Tea Party movement which merged with Minutemen in contempt for the political establishment while maintaining dominance over immigrants. The overseas wars raged on, and were mirrored at home by escalating massacres, school shootings and white supremacist rampages. The collapse of America’s military authority and the moral bankruptcy of the free trade growth model left Obama no outlet to rise above the polarisation. Nativists combined a “psychotropic hatred” of Obama with grievances over health care, taxes, war and especially migrants. As one border protest put it in 2014, “We can’t take care of others if we can’t take care of ourselves.” Two years later this community would vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.

Trump won in 2016 by running a Jacksonian outsider campaign against the entire legacy of the postwar order. His border wall became a stick with which to demonise migrants. The wall offers the illusion of simultaneously recognising and refusing limits. Trumpism feeds resentment that America has been too generous while encouraging a petulant hedonism expressed in the right to own guns or “rolling coal” where truck engines are modified to burn extraordinary amounts of diesel as “a brazen show of American freedom” targetted against enemies like walkers, joggers, cyclists, and hybrid and Asian cars. America was becoming defined by what it hated.

According to Grandin, Trump’s point was not to build the wall, but to constantly announce it. The frontier is closed and Madison’s sphere can no longer be extended. America is at the end of its myth, but instead of a critical, resilient and progressive citizenry, it has ended up with conspiratorial nihilism, rejection of reason and dread of change. Life expectancy is declining while infant mortality is increasing. Only the super-rich are emancipated from the rules and still dream of new frontiers, with billionaires creating floating villages beyond government control and plans to industrialise space. Grandin says nothing will change until America accepts there are limits to growth. The choice he says, is between barbarism and social democracy. As Trump remains a good chance to win back power in 2024, it’s far from clear which way America will go.

Surviving autocracy

The Trump era appears to be coming to its logical end with a massive defeat followed by a well-publicised by spectacularly inept coup at the US Capitol building. While Trump’s footsoldiers ran rampant in the Capitol taking selfies their beloved president reluctantly told them to go home telling they were “very special“. The only surprise was that he told them to go home and and not stay and set fire to the building.

Writing in “Surviving Autocracy” about Donald Trump in early 2020 before it was obvious he was going to lose the election, Masha Gessen defined Trump’s range as “government by gesture, obfuscation and lying, self-praise, stoking fear and issuing threats”. Gessen’s prologue was written late enough to describe the catastrophic early response to COVID-19 which ultimately led to his downfall. Despite hospitals ill-equipped to face an onslaught of patients, a shortage of PPE, essential information withheld and little testing available, Trump baldly denied any responsibility and instead issued bogus medical advice yet almost half the people believed he was doing a job. To Gessen, who grew up in Russia, it was striking familiar to the USSR’s response to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and showed how far down the path America had gone to autocracy.

Gessen noted Trumpian news was always shocking without being surprising. Though an assault on the senses they are just more of the same of him beating the government, the media and politics itself into a state beyond recognition. When the inconceivable becomes routine, words fail us. Gessen draws on the work of Hungarian sociologist Balint Magyar who realised the language of the media and academia was not up to the task of describing what happened to his country after the fall of Communism. Magyar coined the term “mafia state”as a specific clan-like system in which one man (and it is always a man) distributes money and power to everyone while establishing autocracy and then consolidating it.

The Hungarian model was useful to describe the US. Though the situation has evolved since 2016, Gessen says democratic crackdowns have always been part of the US experience such as the Alien and Sedition Acts of the 18th century, Lincoln suspending habeas corpus, the Sedition Act of 1918, Japanese interment in the Second World War, the McCarthy era, and the Nixon wiretapping era. In the 21st century Bush granted sweeping surveillance powers and Obama suppressed whistleblowers.

But American public officials have largely acted in good faith and even those who lied did so in accordance with sincerely held beliefs and a coherent system of values. Until Trump no powerful political actor had set out to destroy the American political system itself. His campaign slogan “drain the swamp” was a declaration of war against the American system of government. It was a campaign built on disdain for the “other”, immigrants, women, disabled people, people of colour, Muslims, anyone who wasn’t a white straight American-born male or anyone who was, but who was an “elite” who coddled those others. Autocrats like Trump, Putin and Bolsonaro campaign on resentments and continue to traffic in them even after election as though they were still insurgents. Trump denigrated his own departments, issuing humiliating tweets and promoting officials who were opposed to the existence of those departments who lied their way through confirmation hearings taking their lead in contempt for the government from their boss. Trump had no time for the demands of office which annoyed him and he showed no interest in “being presidential”.

His aims were obvious from his inauguration speech which pitched to base emotion and intelligence. Any money spent abroad was money lost and his vision for the future was a fortress under siege and a walled country that put itself first and the rest be damned. He immediately signed an executive order to overturn the Affordable Care Act and scrubbed the White House website of content on climate policy, civil rights and health care while adding a biography of Melania Trump that advertised her mail-order jewelry.

Trump has shown repeated lack of aspiration and a disdain for excellence, common among autocrats. It is as Gessen called it, a kakistocracy, a government of the worst. He showed no interest in filling cabinet positions many of whom he felt should not exist, and when he did, he turned to the military such as Mike Flynn, John Kelly, James Mattis and Mike Pompeo. In April 2017 he admitted being president was harder than he expected but blamed that on his predecessor and the establishment and still felt one person should give orders which should be carried out. But when the pandemic came the vacuum Trump had wilfully created at the top of government translated into deadly inaction.

The corruption of his government is a family business matter. Trump repeated said the president can’t have a conflict of interest and implied that if he did have to draw a line he would have to forego seeing his adult children who worked for him. Within weeks Ivanka moved to the East Wing and then the West Wing and took meetings with Angela Merkel and Trump’s seat at a meeting of G20 leaders. Despite a protest from the Office of Government Ethics, Trump said it was okay because she was not drawing a salary.

The Trump Hotels were doing business in synergy with their owner. The RNC held its Christmas party at Trunp Washington while Saudi lobbyists booked out floors at a time. On the phone call that led to the impeachment inquiry, Ukrainian president Zelensky mentioned he stayed at the New York venue. Yet because this was so open, Gessen was loath to call it corruption. Trump is not duplicitous, he acts in the transparent belief political power should produce personal wealth.

Trump’s love of fellow autocrats is well documented. His first trip abroad as president was to Saudi Arabia where he got an honourary gold collar from the King. When Saudi journalist Adnan Khashoggi was murdered inside the Istanbul embassy, Trump issued a statement called “America First!” and reaffirmed his friendship with the Saudis. When Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Washington, protesters at the Turkish embassy were beaten up severely by a group that included Erdogan’s security team. Trump merely said he was “a big fan”.

There was one area of government Trump paid close attention to: the courts. By November 2019 he had set a record for the number of appointees and he had filled a quarter of all appeal judges. Gessen noted he had two Supreme Court justices, later rushed to three in the dying days of his rule. The appointees weren’t just far right, dismissive of civil rights and in favour of deregulation, they were also notably inexperienced, bypassing the American Bar Association vetting process (imitating George W Bush) and more ideologically extreme as time progressed.

One of the great hopes of bringing down Trump was the much-feted Mueller Report into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The 448-page report delivered after 22 months was a comprehensive portrait of Trumpism. The first half told the story of the links between Russia and the Trump campaign. There was no single “gotcha” as shady Russians and Americans set out to swindle each other, everyone lied and no-one got what they wanted. Part 2 was about Trump’s behaviour during the investigation. Trump had instructed White House Counsel Don McGahn to remove Mueller (McGahn ignored the request) and then tried to get McGahn to deny the request happened. Mueller stopped short of saying it was an obstruction of justice, that, he said, was for Congress to decide. When new Attorney General William Barr read the report he told Congress there was no case to answer prompting protest from Mueller. By the time Barr released the redacted report it was reduced to a battle of interpretations depending on party affiliation. Having a liar in the Oval office did not constitute an emergency, or as Gessen said, American political institutions were not equipped to treat it as one.

Gessen notes how an autocratic attempt in the US has a credible chance of succeeding. It build logically on the structures and norms of American government and on the concentration of power in the executive branch and on the marriage of money and politics. “Recovery will be possible only as reinvention,” Gessen writes. “Of institutions, of what politics means to us and what it means to be a democracy, if that is indeed what we choose to be.”

Fear: Trump in the White House

Less than a month out from the US presidential election and the polls are predicting a comfortable win for Joe Biden with a ten point lead and just 25 days to go. There is no precedent for a candidate recovering that much to win in such short time but as 2016 showed us ruling out Donald Trump is fraught with hazard. Maybe COVID can do what Hillary Clinton and bring Trump down with would-be elderly supporters in the key state of Florida deserting him as they watch their friends die and worry about their own survival in the face of federal incompetence. Bob Woodward’s recent book Rage charts how in private Trump knew exactly how bad the pandemic was while ignoring or downplaying it in public.

But I’ve just finished reading Woodward’s earlier book (2018) Fear: Trump in the White House which charts how Trump got elected in 2016 despite seeming in a hopeless position a few months out from the election. Unlike Rage, Trump did not consent to be interviewed for Fear, but Woodward cobbled together a compelling story based on hundreds of hours of interviews with many other key participants, mostly on “deep background” which meant the material could be used but not directly attributed to the source.

In August 2016, three months out from the election, Trump was the Republican nominee but his campaign was in deep trouble 10-20 points behind Clinton with unnamed sources close to him saying he was bewildered, exhausted, sullen, gaffe-prone and in trouble with donors. Trump had called Mexicans “rapists” and the RNC was looking at shutting off funding for Trump to save Senate candidates. Desperate to change tack, Trump turned to Steve Bannon.

Bannon was the chief of right-wing Breitbart News with a strong America First focus and a supporter of Trump from the wings. But now he was front and centre, brought in to replace the hapless campaign manager Paul Manafort. Bannon’s strategy was simple: Forget Trump – put the focus on Hillary Clinton. Bannon’s three main themes would be to stop mass immigration, to bring back manufacturing jobs, and to get America out of endless foreign wars. Bannon said Clinton couldn’t defend against these themes. “Just stick to that,” he advised Trump on their first meeting.

Bannon knew Trump had another advantage – he didn’t sound like a politician. Trump had built a movement – he sounded authentic and angry in comparison to Clinton and the campaign would put up Kellyanne Conway as the feisty front for the daily news. Conway told Trump people wanted specifics and they also wanted assurance the businessman could deliver on his promises. Unlike the RNC but like Bannon, Conway believed Trump could win the election.

Bannon’s first day on the job involved dealing with another scandal, as the New York Times showed $12.7m in payments to Manafort from a pro-Russian Ukrainian party. That was the official end for Manafort and Bannon got to work on RNC chair Reince Preibus who had control of the money. Preibus had learned from Obama to rebuild the RNC into a data-driven organisation staffed with armies of volunteers. They identified hidden Trump voters across the battleground states that would be critical to win the electoral college.

Bannon’s three phase approach was to halve the gap to five points before the first debate, then avoid too much damage in the actual debates against a seasoned debater, and finally use Trump’s own money in the final weeks to sway the swing states: Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. On August 19, 2016 as Manafort left the building, it all seemed like a giant fantasy.

Yet Trump did gradually claw back the lead and Clinton did not land a hammer blow in the first debate. Endless rallies had turned Trump into a rock star. Then on October 7, ahead of the final debate the Washington Post published a hammer blow. “Trump Recorded Having Extremely Lewd Conversation About Women in 2005” The story had audio outtakes from NBC’s Access Hollywood with Trump making crude remarks like “Grab them by the pussy”. Trump issued a brief statement calling it “locker room banter” and said Bill Clinton had said far worse to him on the golf course. But donors dived for cover, VP candidate Pence had distanced himself from the remarks, with prominent Republicans talking of him running for president with Condi Rice as VP. Even Priebus said “it’s over.”

But Bannon refused to bend. “Your supporters will still be with you,” he told Trump. The comparison with Clinton was handy and instead of apologising they needed to go on the attack. Trump took to Twitter (where he called himself the “Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters”) and tweeted: “The media and establishment want me out of the race so badly – I WILL NEVER DROP OUT OF THE RACE, WILL NEVER LET MY SUPPORTERS DOWN! #MAGA” and then at the last minute cancelled an ABC interview ahead of the debate as he refused to read a prepared apology speech written by Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie and instead went off to the debate where four women were present that said they were attacked by Bill Clinton.

Bannon did his bit with Breitbart writing stories about the Clinton accusers all day and Trump dutifully tweeted them all. When asked about the tape in the debate, he again referred to it as “locker room talk” but was nothing compared to ISIS “chopping off heads” and he would deal with them if elected. He pointed out Bill Clinton had done far worse and named two of the former president’s accusers in the audience. “When Hillary…talks about words I said 11 years ago, I think it is disgraceful and she should be ashamed of herself.” The moderator had to interrupt the applause to allow Clinton to speak.

It worked. The religious right vote closed ranks behind Trump. In swing state North Carolina conservative women chartered a bus urging women to vote for him. “The evangelical vote is out. We’ve got this,” Bannon was reassured when he visited the state. They also used Mike Pence well with numerous appearances in the swing states where they urged him to campaign on local issues as if he was running for governor.

Still on election day, the New York Times gave him just a 15pc chance of winning and exit polls suggested a Clinton victory. But all along it seemed as if the US was performing its own version of “shy Tory factor” and people were lying to pollsters about their true voting intentions. Clinton’s problems were exposed quickly as voting came in and African American and Latino turnout was down. Ohio was was called for Trump at 10.36pm, Florida 15 minutes later, then North Carolina and Iowa on midnight.

Obama called Clinton to say another uncertain outcome like 2000 would be bad for America and advised her to concede early. When Wisconsin was called for Trump at 2.29am, he had won the college, and improbably, the presidency. Clinton conceded shortly after. Bannon was convinced Trump was stunned having no idea he would win. “He never thought he would lose, but he didn’t think he would win. There’s a difference.”

That difference was quickly exposed with a total lack of a transition team. They had 4000 jobs to fill in 10 weeks and no one to manage it. If the election was chaotic, then it was only going to get worse. The rest of the book looks at the tensions in the White House between Trump and his family on one side (daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kuschner had free reign of the building and did not report to the chief-of-staff but had direct access to the new president) and the establishment Republican figures they needed to fill positions in the new administration.

The biggest clash was with Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn who Trump appointed head of the White House National Economic Council. Cohn wanted tax reform and less regulation as did Trump but Cohn was a globalist who believed in free trade which Trump hated. Cohn spent most of his time trying to talk Trump out of reneging on NAFTA and the free trade agreement with South Korea. Trump hated trade deficits and and try as Cohn might he couldn’t convince Trump they were good for America. For the first 12 months of his presidency the free traders relied on the fact Trump kept no task list and as long the matter did not land on his desk – or was discussed on the news channels he watched constantly – he would forget about it.

Eventually they ran out of time to convince Trump on trade. He wanted tariffs. Cohn buried him in data showing how tariffs on imported steel would hurt America. He showed him the tiny amount of revenue it raised when George W Bush imposed them for similar reasons. He told him tens of thousands of jobs would be lost in industries that consumed steel. Look, Trump said, if it doesn’t work, we’ll undo it. Cohn said that might not be possible, “it either works or you go bankrupt”. But he knew Trump had gone personally bankrupt six times and bankruptcy was just another business strategy. Walk away, threaten to blow up the deal. Or as Trump himself put it, real power is fear.

Trump’s exasperated advisers had to deal with the back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring and the “fake news” indignation but none of them, nor the media that reported on them, could bring them to say to the president, as Woodward said in his final crude line in the book: “You’re a fucking liar.” Joe Biden didn’t swear but perhaps that was the one line about Trump that did cut through from their chaotic debate. Four years in, everyone knows Trump is a liar.

2019 media person of the year Greta Thunberg

For a decade, I’ve had end of year fun picking my person who has made most impact in media that year. My scope is broad though initially I confined it to Australia. In that first year, 2009, I gave it to ABC boss Mark Scott for plotting a bright digital future for the national broadcaster and generally sticking it up to the Murdochracy and its outsized influence on Australia. I noted Rupert’s China speech about the end of the age of the Internet free ride being over and Scott’s view that News’s “empire” no longer had the power to dictate terms over the cost of the ride. Scott was wrong about that. Ten year later Murdoch is still selling newspaper subscriptions and setting agendas while Scott has disappeared into the bureaucracy of New South Wales government.

In 2010 a remarkable Australian hit the world stage, Julian Assange. As I said then, “with the possible exception of Mark Zuckerberg, no other person has dominated and indeed changed the media landscape with such effect.” I said his Wikileaks “set the gold standard in whistleblowing journalism of international proportions.” True, but perhaps I should have given the award to Zuckerberg, whose Facebook and other products have become ubiquitous in our lives while Wikileaks remains at the margins. Unlike Zuck, Assange couldn’t keep his megalomania in check. Turfed out of the Ecuadorian embassy this year, he threatens once again to become the poster boy of media freedoms as he fights extradition to the US. I would not like to see that happen but it’s hard to feel much sympathy given his propensity for headlines.

Assange’s global impact allowed me to cast the net wider and in 2011 and 2012 I chose British recipients on a familiar theme – fighting Rupert Murdoch. In 2011 I chose Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and journalist Nick Davies for “their disciplined and determined expose of the insidious tactics of the News International empire in illegally hacking phones for dubious journalistic ends.” In 2012 I gave it to Judge Brian Leveson who followed up the Guardian investigations with his inquiry of the “most public and most concentrated look at the press Britain had ever seen.” Murdoch used his own testimony to call it the most humble day of his life but looking back again, he appears to have got away with it.

In 2013 I returned to the whistleblower tradition giving it to Edward Snowden. Following Assange, Snowden leaked top secret National Security Agency documents to world media. The documents showed the extent the surveillance state was willing to go to achieve intelligence dominance. As with all whistleblowers, Snowden has paid a high price and remains in hiding in Russia six years on.

In 2014 I gave the award to Al Jazeera journalists Peter Greste, Mohamed Fadel Fahmy and Basher Mohamed who spent a year in an Egyptian prison for reporting on the overthrow of that country’s Muslim Brotherhood government. They were a reminder that speaking truth to power had dangerous consequences in some countries and were an ominous warning of growing authoritarianism across the world.

A year later I returned to Australia to correct an anomaly in my awards. Up to then no woman had won it. Clementine Ford used her writings to bring attention to that problem of a male-dominated world. It is hard work. Her uncompromising stance in publicly outing misogynist behaviour has attracted praise and vicious abuse in equal measure.

I had intended to give the 2016 award to another woman, Hillary Clinton, who knew more than most what Ford was going through, but on an even bigger scale. But somehow she contrived to lose the US presidential election to Donald Trump. I could not bring myself to give the award to Trump despite his inventive and disruptive use of media so in a sentimental choice I gave to it to my favourite musician, David Bowie, whose unexpected death six days into January gave 2016 a sense of foreboding it never shook off.

In 2017, I gave it to murdered Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. Galizia died in a car bomb explosion after her investigations into official wrongdoings threatened to bring Malta’s government down. She went further than the three Al Jazeera journalists of 2014, a martyr to the cause. As Archbishop Charles Scicluna told journalists at her funeral mass, “never grow weary in your mission to be the eyes, the ears and the mouth of the people … We need people in your profession who are unshackled, who are free, intelligent, inquisitive, honest, serene, safe and protected.” Two years on, protests continue in Valletta with calls for the prime minister to resign. Galizia was my age, and I look up to her as courageous best practice in my industry.

In 2018 I could ignore Donald Trump no longer. Unlike Galizia, I do not aspire to be like Trump. My award was a warning not an honour. But I could not help admiring the way he had upended the rules of political and media engagement. Despite thrashing all norms, he still has a plausible path back to the White House in 2020. Worse still, I noted, were the Trumpian copycats. “There are other authoritarians such as Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in Philippines, Salman in Saudi Arabia, Orban in Hungary all watching and learning Trump’s crafty anarchy at work dismantling democratic checks and balances.” The symbiotic relationship between media and politicians will never be the same again.

So to 2019 where happily I can find an award winner I do admire in young Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg. One of the moments of the year was in September when Thunberg and Trump almost crossed paths at the UN climate summit in New York. She was in the background as Trump hove into view in imperial fashion. It’s not clear if he saw Thunberg but she gave him a look that could have sent him the way of JFK.

Trump didn’t speak at that summit and preferred to talk about religious freedom than listen to Thunberg. In flawless, articulate English the young Swede did not mince her words when she spoke to the world leaders that were there. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” she said. She accused them of ignoring the science behind the climate crisis, saying: ‘We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth”. The next three words were most memorable, “how dare you!”

Climate denialists went into overdrive in an argument summed up as “how dare you say how dare you.”  They made fun of her anger, her mannerisms and her callow youth but had little to say about the truth of her central argument. Plenty of others did, mostly her own age with extinction rebellions and school climate strikes spreading across the globe. They remind us of the biggest contrast between Thunberg and Trump. Trump is 73 while Thunberg will celebrate her 17th birthday on January 3. Trump represents the gerontocracy (and in the next US election his main rivals are equally old: Joe Biden is 77, Bernie Sanders, 78 and Elizabeth Warren, 70).

But it’s not okay, Boomer. Trump will unlikely be alive in 2050, when the UN says all emissions must cease if we are to have a fighting chance of keeping warming below three or four degrees by the end of the century. Thunberg will be there and could likely still be alive aged 98 when 2100 comes around. Given the policies put in place by Trump and others the earth in 2100 is likely to be a grim place without ice sheets, coral reefs, and low lying islands and cities but with deeply unpredictable and violent weather. The dystopian future painted by 2019 UK TV series Years and Years could if anything be optimistic. Thunberg and her generation are right to be angry.

There is hope in Thunberg’s back story. Her mother Malena Ernman is an opera singer who represented Sweden at the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest. Ernman and husband Svante Thunberg toured Europe with their daughters, Greta and Beata. Greta suddenly stopped eating in the fifth grade and was later diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. At school Greta heard about climate change and was deeply shocked. Consumed by the issue she set out to raise awareness beginning with her family. She slowly convinced them to stop eating meat and dairy and to stop flying, which impacted her mother’s career. Greta attributes her persistence to Asperger’s. Without it “I would simply have continued to live and think like everyone else,” she said.

When US children refused to go to school after the Parkland school shootings she wondered “what if children did that for the climate?” After Sweden’s hottest summer on record, she refused to go to school and picketed the Swedish parliament ahead of a September election. The first day she was alone, the second day people joined her. She handed out leaflets reading: “I am doing this because you adults are shitting on my future.” When people told her she should be at school, she said she had her books. “But also I am thinking: what am I missing? What am I going to learn in school? Facts don’t matter any more, politicians aren’t listening to the scientists, so why should I learn?”

When Thunberg posted her strike photo on social media, it went viral. Ingmar Rentzhog, founder of climate change PR group We Don’t Have Time, gave her additional publicity with a video in English and Finnish bank Nordea quoted one of her tweets, then local reporters began to tell her story. After the election she continued to strike every Friday and by end 2018 had inspired copycat actions in 270 towns and cities in countries across the world, including Australia, UK, Belgium, US and Japan.

Greta went global in 2019 with a stroke of genius. Her intention was to go to the Americas for the climate conventions in New York and Santiago however she needed a lift across the Atlantic. A flight to New York would have added 1000 kg of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere while cruise ships leave an even larger carbon footprint. In July the crew of the Malizia II, a monohull 18m round-the-world sailing yacht, offered her passage. It was quick but basic – the boat had no kitchen, toilet, or shower.

The 15-day journey attracted enormous media attention. She was just getting started. Though “how dare you” captured the headlines, there was more to her summit speech. It was the judgement of the young on the old. “Young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you, and if you choose to fail us, I say, we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this.”

Many older people were angry at the temerity of this upstart telling them what to do. She was accused of crimes and misdemeanours: she was a stooge, a Communist, a hypocrite, she was mentally ill, she was manipulated by her parents, she was even a refugee from Children of the Corn. Criticism of Thunberg’s argument is valid but most was sneering ad hominem attack. Donald Trump joined in on the trolling: “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.” There was no sense of irony from Trump that his actions were helping directly lead to the opposite outcome for Thunberg.

When the Santiago COP conference was moved to Spain due to unrest in Chile, Thunberg sailed back to Europe. In Madrid she said the voices of climate strikers were being heard but not enough “concrete action” was taking place. “There is no victory, because the only thing we want to see is real action,” she said. “So we have achieved a lot, but if you look at it from a certain point of view we have achieved nothing.” She was right to be pessimistic. The US, Australia and Brazil stymied meaningful change in COP25.

The science remains on Thunberg’s side. The backsliding of Madrid will only add to the horror people like her will face if they live to 2100. Her message is urgent and potent. She is Cassandra and few like listening to Cassandra. But listen to her we must because our future demands it. For once Time magazine and I agree. She is a deserving winner for 2019.

Woolly Days media person of the year 2018: Donald Trump

A German government photo of leaders at the Group of Seven summit, including Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Donald Trump, in Canada on June 9, 2018.
 Jesco Denzel—EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

This is the tenth annual Woolly Days media person of the year, and the award itself is a bit woolly. Sometimes I give it to journalists or other media professionals who impressed that year and sometimes I give it to people outside the industry who for whatever reason dominated the media that year. A bit like Time’s person of the year, there is no actual award nor does the person have to be admirable – Time gave it to Adolf Hitler in 1938 as a warning not an accolade. “Hitler became the greatest threatening force that the democratic, freedom-loving world faces today,” Time wrote at the time.

This year Time have strayed into my territory giving their person of the year to the admirable guardians. The guardians are four journalists and one news organisation who have courageously brought the truth to the world: Jamal Khashoggi (the Saudi Arabian journalist murdered in the Saudi Istanbul consulate) Maria Ressa (the Filipino journalist who has taken on her murderous regime), Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, (imprisoned by Burma for their journalism) and the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, US (who lost five staff in a mass shooting). Any one of them would have been worthy winners of my award this year. But rather than repeat Time’s work, I take a leaf out of their book and give my media person of the year as a warning not an accolade. US president Donald Trump has thrashed global accords, promoted a neo-Nazi agenda, declared war on the media, has openly lied to advance his agenda, and is inspiring a plethora of authoritarian leaders and would-be leaders across the world. Eighty years on from Hitler in 1938 Trump is the greatest threatening force that “the democratic, freedom-loving world” faces.

Elected in a stunning upset in November 2016, it remains a mystery two years on, how he remains in his job. Barely a day has passed when he hasn’t been embroiled in some controversy. Wikipedia lists 69 pages in its category “Trump administration controversies“, another 33 in “Donald Trump litigation controversies“, 43 pages in “protests against Donald Trump” and 21 in general “Donald Trump controversies” which feature doozies like his links with Russia, his tax affairs, his sexual affairs, the Access Hollywood tape, and Stormy Daniels, just to name an incendiary top five.

Any normal politician would have been destroyed if they were involved in just one or two of those controversies. But Trump is not normal and his scores of controversies appear almost all without consequence. Indeed his strategy is to flood the media with controversies and lies (The Washington Post estimate in 710 days, President Trump has made 7645 false or misleading claims) which all compete for media space. None lasts long enough in the short news cycle to land a mortal blow while each individual attack is dismissed as “fake news”. The real fake news, usually in his favour, is disseminated widely via uncurated, algorithm-driven social media while the truth is still getting its pants on.

It is true that the Mueller investigation hangs over him like a Sword of Damocles threatening imprisonment and impeachment. The US Constitution allows for the impeachment of a president for “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanours.” The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives can vote with a simple majority to impeach a president. But the impeached leader is then tried in the GOP-run Senate and it needs an unlikely two-thirds vote to find him guilty and remove him from office. In the meantime Trump remains in King Lear mode raging against the unnatural elements toying with his fate.

Trump wants to portray the media as enemies. His strategist Steve Bannon blatantly told the New York Times after the election the media was the opposition party, not the wounded Dems. But the media did not want to be the enemy, merely the chroniclers of his presidency.  They wanted to normalise his presidency using existing frames of reference, with outdated notions about “respect for the presidency” and hearing both sides of the argument despite being blatantly manipulated by the White House and its support base.

Media companies have come to rely on Trump, despite his animosity. For ratings-driven news outlets, the always-controversial candidate was the gift that kept giving. As CBS CEO Leslie Moonves admitted: “Trump may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Organisations critical of Trump such as the New York Times have grown their subscription base greatly covering Trump’s ups and downs. But with the American newspaper industry losing over a third of its staff since 2006 the analysis of the downs has not been as thorough as it used to be.

The supposed “adults in the room” have had as little success as the media in managing Trump. Former foreign secretary Rex Tillerson spoke about Trump’s modus operandi. “When the President would say, ‘Here’s what I want to do and here’s how I want to do it.’ And I’d have to say to him, ‘Well Mr President, I understand what you want to do, but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law. It violates treaty,'” Tillerson said in November. “He got really frustrated … I think he grew tired of me being the guy every day that told him you can’t do that and let’s talk about what we can do.” The transactional Trump preferred to move the argument to what he wanted to do, and his supporters followed suit.  .

According to researcher danah boyd, “alt-right and alt-light” trolls, conspiracy theorists, and offensive and outrageous provocateurs, all bathe in the flood of negative publicity, and use the media’s coverage, “particularly its storm of outraged, fact-checking, oppositional coverage” to whip up their base, generate interest in their ideas, and stoke the belief mainstream media was against them.  Trump’s actions mirror his base. In October when a supporter was arrested in October for mailing bombs to Trump opponents and another murdered 11 Jewish worshippers in a Jewish synagogue, Trump put the blame elsewhere: “There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame.”

Trump does not want to put out the flame – he relies on its light and heat. CNN and its White House correspondent Jim Acosta are public enemy number 1. Trump and Acosta’s extraordinary ongoing battle flared up in public in November in extraordinary fashion.  When Acosta asked about the so-called “migrant caravan” and Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Trump shut him down. “You are a rude, terrible person,” Trump said to Acosta, also reprimanding him for “horrible” treatment of White House press secretary Sarah Sanders. Acosta stood his ground but failed to return to fire about Trump’s own terrible rudeness. Here was a golden opportunity to accuse an angry president of being a congenital liar but Acosta did not take it. And neither the underhand way his administration manipulated a video to make Acosta look worse, or the court overturning his decision to deny Acosta a White House pass has made an iota of difference to the way Trump deals with the press gallery, or them with him.

Media educator Jay Rosen has been arguing for years press organisations need to change the way they deal with Trump, who he called the “most significant threat to an informed public in the United States today”. Rosen says normal practice cannot cope with Trump’s political style which incorporates a hate movement against journalists. He says that instead of sending veterans like Acosta, media companies should send in the interns. “Our major news organisations don’t have to cooperate with this. They don’t have to lend talent or prestige to it. They don’t have to be props. They need not televise the spectacle live and they don’t have to send their top people,” Rosen said. “They can ‘switch’ systems: from inside-out, where access to the White House starts the story engines, to outside-in, where the action begins on the rim, in the agencies, around the committees, with the people who are supposed to obey Trump but have doubts… The press has to become less predictable. It has to stop functioning as a hate object. This means giving something up.”

No organisation has yet seen the sense in Rosen’s words and given something up. Instead they are constantly playing catch up while Trump bends or breaks the rules further. He also works around them using social media, especially Twitter. Donald Trump discovered Twitter around February 2013 – at the start of the presidential cycle that led to his extraordinary win in 2016. The @RealDonaldTrump Twitter account had existed since 2009 but for four years broadcast bland promotional fare. A young movie maker Justin McConney who Trump admired for a golf video advised him to transfer his freewheeling approach to the world’s most unregulated public arena. “I wanted the Donald Trump who is on Howard Stern, commenting on anything and everything,” McConney said at the time.

Trump was not immediately sold but after media coverage of his fork-and-knife pizza-eating dinner with Sarah Palin in 2011, McConney convinced him to record a video blog explaining his decision which was about not eating the crust to “keep the weight down”. Not only did it cut out the middle man in getting the message out instantly, it generated a bonus round of coverage of the blog itself. His use of social media grew as he toyed with the idea of a 2012 run and he began to throw in social commentary. When he bought an Android phone in 2013 the shackles came off completely and he tweeted 8000 times that year. When he entered the Republican primary field in 2015, Trump used outrageous tweets to earn traditional media coverage — as better-qualified opponents struggled for attention. Everyone expected it to end once he was elected president but he merely doubled down with his new-found authority, and 45 million followers positive and negative are gripped by his every 280-word rant. He has only gotten worse in 2018. As his public enemy number one CNN says “his tweets read like a stream of consciousness, verbal vomit — always (or almost always) focused on the ongoing special counsel investigation being led by Robert Mueller.”

Even McConney says Trump has gone too far, but who will stop him? Unlikely the American electorate. Trump has a plausible path back to the White House in 2020 because he has not lost the trust of the rust belt states that voted for him in the first place. Certainly not other world leaders as the famous photo taken in June that accompanies this article shows. The unrepentant schoolboy Trump stares up at headmistress Angela Merkel and fellow frustrated teachers Shinzo Abe, Emmanuel Macron and Theresa May as he stonewalled G7 agreement on trade and tariffs, a year after he withdrew from the Paris climate agreement.

Even if he is somehow brought to earth by Mueller’s investigation, there are other authoritarians such as Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in Philippines, Salman in Saudi Arabia, Orban in Hungary all watching and learning Trump’s crafty anarchy at work dismantling democratic checks and balances. The guardians named by Time in those countries are doing a good job but Donald Trump is showing that with the help of state media manipulations the guardians can be depicted as enemies. That is the real media message of 2018. I hope 2019 finds a solution to this problem. Happy New Year.

Woolly Days media person of the year 2009-2017

2009 Mark Scott

2010 Julian Assange (my only other winner I don’t like but even that was later than 2010 when I realised he was a twat)

2011 Alan Rusbridger and Nick Davies

2012 Brian Leveson

2013 Edward Snowden

2014 Peter Greste, Mohamed Fadel Fahmy and Basher Mohamed

2015 Clementine Ford

2016 David Bowie

2017 Daphne Caruana Galizia

Leaked tape shows emptiness at the heart of Australian politics

The leaked tapes of Donald Trump’s first presidential conversations with the leaders of Mexico and Australia show the sausage making of international politics in gory detail. It is unedifying but it is also not unusual and it is important to be able to play cards well in diplomatic negotiation. Many have said Donald Trump comes out badly in these tapes, but while he was typically boastful, I thought he handled both conversations astutely showing he intended to live up to his electoral promises. But there were key differences in the way the two conversations were handled by the other side that show the deep hollowness in the core of Australian democracy.

Imagine you are a world leader and it is your first conversation with the newly elected president of the US, a president who came from left field and a president that has threatened to tear up the world order in his avowed aim to “Make America Great Again”. What would you want to discuss? Maybe you would want to discuss what MAGA means to world trade, what it means to the global climate accord or what it means to international security co-operation, or what it means to the large American military bases and forces on your soil.

Certainly that is how Mexican president Peña Nieto saw that first conversation. Tensions were high over arguments about who would pay for Trump’s proposed border wall and Nieto had cancelled a planned trip to Washington a day earlier. Yet the call was most calm and productive with both sides getting across their messages.

Nieto acknowledged Trump’s mandate about the wall but said it was politically unacceptable and he wanted “to look for ways to save these differences”.  Trump brought up the US $60 billion trade deficit with Mexico saying tariffs were necessary. This proposal “won me the election, along with military and healthcare,” Trump said.

Nieto reminded Trump that changing economic conditions would affect migration between the two countries, to which Trump brought up the Mexican drug lords. “Maybe your military is afraid of them, but our military is not afraid of them,” he said. He said Mexico was beating the US at trade, at the border, and in the drug war. He said Israeli PM Netenyahu told him a wall works and it would be cheaper than the estimated costs. In the meantime, he advised both sides to stop talking about it and say “We will work it out. It will work out in the formula somehow.” The two sides agreed to continue talking and the call ended amiably.

Contrast this with the Malcolm Turnbull call. Australia is not a direct neighbour of the US and unlike Mexico has a trade deficit with the US. But Australia is a major military partner, part of the Five Eyes alliance, home to a large US military presence in Darwin and home to the secretive spy base at Pine Gap. It shares cultural commonality as an English speaking settler country and both countries are among the highest carbon emitters per capita in the world.

But none of this came out in the call. Instead Trump became exasperated as Turnbull pressed him on a matter of domestic politics. The Australian Twitterati have made endless fun of the call particularly around the references to Greg Norman and “local milk people” but Trump twice skewers Turnbull on the one matter he chose to bring up.

That issue was boat people, refugees stranded on Nauru and Manus Island which Australia refuses to house on the mainland. That is a serious issue, but not one Turnbull wanted to resolve. All he wanted was for Trump to honour a grubby deal Australia signed with Obama, and unsurprisingly Trump baulked. In November the outgoing US administration agreed to a refugee swap, taking 1000 refugees from Nauru and Manus in exchange for a similar number of Central American refugees who had escaped violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras and were being held in US-funded facilities in Costa Rica. Turnbull wanted Trump to honour the deal. “This is a very big issue for us, particularly domestically,” he said.

Trump said this deal to take 2000 people would be a bad look for him given he was calling for a ban on immigration from the countries the Australian refugees came from. “It sends such a bad signal,” he said. Turnbull said the US had the right of veto through vetting and none were from the conflict zone. “They are basically economic refugees from Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan…They have been under our supervision for over three years now and we know exactly everything about them,” he said.

So why hadn’t you left them free, asked Trump reasonably. Turnbull blamed the people smugglers – “we had to deprive them of the product.” Australia would not let them in by boat even if “you are the best person in the world”. Turnbull admitted the cruelty of the directive. “If they had arrived by airplane and with a tourist visa then they would be here”. Trump said “Why do you discriminate against boats?” Turnbull said the problem with the boats was it outsourced the immigration program to people smugglers and thousands of people drowned at sea.  Trump had a sneaking admiration for Australia’s hard stance and Turnbull pressed on, suggesting he (Trump) say “we can conform with that deal – we are not obliged to take anybody we do not want, we will go through extreme vetting.”

Trump got angry again saying he would refuse to say that as it made him look “so bad” in his first week in office. “We are not taking anybody in, those days are over,” he said. Turnbull desperately hung on to the deal in a telling exchange:

Trump: Suppose I vet them closely and I do not take any?

Turnbull: That is the point I have been trying to make.

Trump: How does that help you?

Turnbull: we assume that we will act in good faith.

Again Trump reminded him this deal would make him look weak and ineffectual. Turnbull oozed on: “You can certainly say that it was not a deal that you would have done, but you are going to stick with it.” Trump was sick of Turnbull at this stage and said it was the most unpleasant call of the day. “Thank you for your commitment. It is very important to us,” concluded Turnbull sounding like a call centre operator. Trump was having none of it. “It is important to you and it is embarrassing to me. It is an embarrassment to me, but at least I got you off the hook.”

Off the hook. Not only the did phone call end there but Turnbull thought he had wriggled out of a domestic crisis, only for details of the call to be leaked that same day. Turnbull had used precious capital in his few minutes with the president of the United States to press a minor issue, simply to avoid bad headlines back home. Almost 400 people remain in detention in Nauru and another 900 on Manus. Maybe they will be settled in the US but it won’t fix the source of the problem, the wars in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq – both the US and Australia are involved in. People smuggling is a reactive model. Unauthorised travel to Australia is driven by the desperate measures of people fleeing persecution.