Collateral Damage

6

The Rise and Rise of Donald Trump

*

‘Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it’

– presidential candidate Donald Trump’s speech to the Republican Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, 21 July 2016

*

MID-MAY, AND I was hosting a small lunch in the Residence for a combination of visitors from London and some senior Republican Party figures. None of the latter were Trump supporters: some would later sign the ‘Never Trump’ letter. Their biggest concern was around foreign policy: Trump seemed to be a Putin admirer; he saved much of his harshest criticism for America’s allies and partners; and he didn’t believe in free trade. In short, they didn’t think he was really a Republican. I asked whether these could be tactical positions, adopted for the campaign, to be discarded if elected? To my surprise, one of the Brits dissented vigorously, arguing that Trump had always held these views. And he directed me to a YouTube clip as proof.

I tracked down the clip that evening. It was from a BBC TV chat show, hosted by the British equivalent of Johnny Carson, one Terry Wogan. The guests comprised of Donald Trump, his first wife, Ivana, and Dame Edna Everage (the Australian comedian, Barry Humphries, in drag). Trump was there to promote his book Art of the Deal. Dame Edna was there to lampoon the other guests, at one point saying to Trump: ‘The book is wonderful. It’s very entertaining. It’s got lovely photographs of you two adorable young people. I love the one of you standing there caressing your skyscraper.’

Mid-interview, Wogan asked Trump whether there was truth in the rumours that he has political ambitions. Trump said: ‘Well, I hate to see what’s happening to the United States. It’s a great country. But the United States is being taken advantage of by Japan and so many other countries. I mean it’s really a shame. I see what’s happening in terms of our leadership. I mean they are being outplayed and outsmarted by every country. It’s just one of those things.’

The year was 1988. Twenty-seven years later, America ‘being taken advantage of’ would be a central element of the Trump campaign. He would rage about America’s ‘terrible’ trade deals, suggesting that they had caused millions of jobs to be exported overseas. He would also target illegal immigrants, especially Mexicans. And of war hero and elder statesman John McCain, he would say: ‘He’s a war hero because he got captured? I like people that weren’t captured.’

And it worked. As my Republican guests acknowledged, Trump was already the ‘presumptive nominee’, with the withdrawal of the two last remaining competitors, Senator Ted Cruz and Governor of Ohio, John Kasich. On 26 May, Trump would nail down his nomination by securing his 1,238th delegate, and thus a definitive majority of the votes available, leaving the cream of the Republican Party scattered in his wake. Or as one of my guests put it: ‘What the … happened there?’

Having told London, back in February, that Trump would be the nominee, I had spent the intervening months, while reality caught up with prediction, trying to understand the secret of his appeal. I concluded that it was a combination of elements, some unique to the candidate, some reflecting the mood of America. But it started with Trump’s reality TV career. Notwithstanding its global success, not everyone, especially in the business community, was a fan of The Apprentice. But there is no doubt that the CEO, played by Lord (Alan) Sugar in the British version and Trump in the original American version, is a covetable role: a mythical, god-like figure Who Is Never Wrong. Trump fronted The Apprentice for a decade, right up until his run for the presidency. So in those early overstocked primary debates, with sixteen candidates on the stage, Trump would have been, for many TV viewers, the only recognisable face.

Then they liked what they heard. Trump was box office. He didn’t duck and weave; he didn’t hedge, or try to bridge both sides of an argument; he didn’t obey the rules of political correctness. He said what he thought, in strikingly clear and simple terms (one analyst assessed, in a much-quoted article, that Trump’s language would have been understandable to a fourth or fifth grader, 9–11 years old, while the other candidates were speaking at ninth grade level, 14–15 years old). And then there were his speeches. Measured by normal standards, they were shapeless, rambling and policy free; Trump would just stand at the podium and talk. But they were addictive, even at times electrifying. There was no knowing what he would say next.

It wasn’t, however, just about tone and unpredictability. Trump’s messages were resonating to a degree very few had anticipated. America in 2016 seemed in an uncertain mood, anxious about its future and its place in the world. There were still wounds and resentments from the 2008 financial crisis; ordinary people had lost their jobs, but no bankers had gone to jail, and within a year or two, the Wall Street bonuses were as unreal as ever. People were worried about globalisation and the flight of well-paid factory jobs overseas. They hated being told that they had to learn how to code because robots would take over all the blue-collar jobs. They resented the flow of illegal migrants across America’s borders. They couldn’t understand why successive US governments had got bogged down in ‘un-winnable’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They despised the culture of political correctness, which they perceived as being told what to think by the East and West Coast elites. Most of all, they saw themselves as ignored and abandoned by a self-serving Washington.

Donald Trump seemed to be addressing all these concerns. He presented himself as a self-made, successful businessman who could restore economic growth and create jobs. He was a climate change denier. He raged against international trade deals, claiming that they cost American jobs. He asked why American lives were being lost in the ‘sand, blood and death of the Middle East’ and promised to bring the boys home. As he was self-financing his campaign, he could claim to be an outsider, not beholden to corporate America, and not part of the Washington conspiracy. And in the eyes of many Republican voters, he was the only politician to ‘get it’ on illegal immigration. It was an intoxicating mix. In essence he promised a return to better, more secure times, when the factories and the coal mines were working, and when America won its wars. His slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ was really an appeal to sepia-tinged nostalgia: a promise to turn back the clock.

Although it would all go sour later, in these early days of the campaign Trump also used the media brilliantly. He might not have known much about foreign policy (actually, any form of policy); but the art of manipulation he did know. He had reputedly learnt his trade, as a New York man-about-town, in the bare-knuckle world of the New York tabloids. One story from that time was that he had once placed a quote on the front page of the New York Post, supposedly by the woman who became his second wife, Marla Maples, that he had given her ‘the best sex I’ve ever had’. And once campaigning, while other candidates would control their media appearances rigidly, he would appear anywhere, anytime: perfect for the 24-hour news channels trying to fill time and space. One of the leading morning news shows, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, would phone him what felt like daily for his latest thoughts. The news channels also loved his ‘what’s-he-going-to-say-next’ speeches; so much so that they preferred to show an empty podium, with Trump about to perform, to any other of the candidates actually speaking.

I tracked Trump’s march to the nomination from Washington, and sent my political team to schlep around the primary circuit. I used the time to exploit one of the privileges of being British ambassador in America’s capital: the opportunity to learn from some of the great figures of recent American history, and in particular to get their take on the election race. I focused particularly on Republicans: what did they make of this unconventional likely Republican nominee? I called on Donald Rumsfeld, a controversial figure during his time as Secretary for Defense in the George W. Bush administration. He could not have been more gracious or more entertaining. Having myself borrowed many times Rumsfeld’s famous delineation of the world into known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, I asked him where it came from. He explained instantly that he himself had borrowed it from a senior NASA scientist with whom he had worked back in the 1990s on the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the US. As for Donald Trump, he seemed relaxed about the prospect of him being the nominee. I asked him whether he wasn’t worried about what this said about the national mood: had America ever felt more divided, or more angry? He said, gently: ‘When I was a young congressman in Washington in 1968, I woke up one morning to find the city on fire. This is nothing compared to those days.’ Intrigued, when I returned to the office I reminded myself of the 1968 events. After the assassination of Martin Luther King on 4 April that year, Washington was hit by six days of riots, damage to hundreds of buildings, and more than a thousand fires.

It wasn’t just Rumsfeld. I also consulted Colin Powell, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff during George H. Bush’s presidency, then Secretary of State during George W. Bush’s first term. Over lunch, we reminisced about the Blair/Bush days and about Colin’s exceptionally close relationship with the then British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw. I asked for his take on the Republican race: it turned out he wasn’t an admirer of candidate Trump (as he has since made clear publicly). And I called on the grand old man of the Republican Party, Senator John McCain, who recalled his many encounters with British politicians, back to Mrs Thatcher. He had a long-running feud with Trump, so it was no surprise to hear him express the hope that someone else, indeed almost anyone else, would get the Republican nomination. But I also sensed with McCain, as with Powell before him, an edginess. They hoped Trump wouldn’t be the nominee, but they were already sensing that he might be, and calculating the decisions that they would then face.

A few weeks later, I heard more of the same when I had a drink with Michael Bloomberg, zillionaire and Republican mayor of New York from 2002 to 2013 (though he would briefly run for the presidency in 2020 as a Democrat). He spoke judiciously but left me with the indelible impression that he was finding it impossible to stomach the rise of Donald Trump, a minor figure amongst the New York elite compared to himself. (New Yorkers would say that Bloomberg had given away more money than Donald Trump had ever made.)

And in a typically DC moment, I turned up at a Washington Post event at the George Town Club, sat down at a random table to eat, and introduced myself to the others at the table, to hear one of them say, ‘Hi, I’m Bob Woodward.’ When you unexpectedly meet such a celebrated figure, it is hard to sound cool. I recall saying something completely banal about how closely I had followed Watergate, and how much I admired what he had done then and since. He forgave me this, and invited me to lunch. We kept in touch over the next three years. He would write, in the form of Fear, the best, most authoritative book about the first phase of the Trump presidency. And when I resigned two years later, he sent me a personal note so precious I feel like framing it. That said … he doesn’t really look like Robert Redford.

Alongside this stroll through the pages of history, the political team and I were trying to build up our contacts with the Trump campaign. These took some tracking down, as Trump had assembled a collection of fringe figures and unknowns – largely because the big names had either hung back or gone with Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. Indeed, a counter movement of ‘Never Trumpers’ was already developing. Significant figures from previous Republican administrations were signing up to letters asserting that they would never work for a Trump presidency. But we made some progress, starting with Wilbur Ross. I first met Ross when he attended one of our regular commentators’ roundtables to discuss the election race. He had been out in the media supporting Trump, notwithstanding his past as a registered Democrat. It was hard to find anyone in Washington who would ‘speak for Donald’. So Ross found himself an isolated voice in the discussion. He didn’t seem to mind, and I was so intrigued that I invited him to a one-to-one lunch.

In preparation, I briefly scanned his life and times. He was a fascinating figure: a Wall Street multi-millionaire known as ‘The King of Bankruptcy’, the nickname reflecting a career in which, first for Rothschild & Co. investment bank and then for himself, he had acquired and restructured failed companies in industries such as steel, coal and textiles. This had earned him his critics; to this day there are financial journalists trying to chase him down with stories of corners being cut or disclosure rules being ignored. Yet I could not but be intrigued by someone who seemed repeatedly to have invested in disaster and come away ahead.

When we started to talk, I asked about his relationship with Trump. The connection turned out to be a bankruptcy. In the 1980s, Trump had gambled massively on casinos on the Atlantic City boardwalk. He ultimately acquired three, finally spending almost a billion dollars on what was at the time, with a typically Trumpian flourish, claimed to be the largest casino in the world, the Taj Mahal – all financed by junk bonds at 14 per cent interest. By 1991, he was haemorrhaging money and filed for bankruptcy. Ross was asked to represent the bondholders. Plan A was involuntary bankruptcy and the ousting of Trump. After negotiating with him, Ross persuaded the investors to keep Trump on – albeit with only a 50 per cent stake in the business, and after being required to sell his yacht, the unimaginatively named Trump Princess. I asked Ross why he had saved Trump. He told me that there had been two reasons. First, he had been impressed by how Trump had handled the negotiations. He could have come across as a broken man, but he had been calm, organised and on top of all the detail. And second, Ross had noticed Trump’s star appeal – the way people had crowded around his car and mobbed him in his casinos. So a condition of the bailout had been that Trump should personally be present in the casinos as much as possible.

I stayed in touch with Ross throughout the election season. I asked him at one point whether he would take a job in a Trump administration. People usually hedge when you ask them that sort of question: Ross said straightforwardly that he would. He duly became commerce secretary – in which capacity he several times went out of his way to help us. The Atlantic City casinos, however, fared less well; they went bankrupt again and have all closed. News reports suggest that the Taj Mahal has found a role as a home for feral cats.

We didn’t stop at Wilbur Ross. My deputy developed a good relationship with Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager. This was useful until, on 20 June, Trump fired him. Meanwhile, I got to know Jeff Sessions, a senior Trump adviser, a long-time senator for Alabama, and as courtly a Southern gentleman as you could meet. He was one of the first senior Republicans to come out for Trump, and hence, we reckoned, a likely pick for a Trump cabinet. We were right: he became attorney general, though he later fell out with the President and also got fired. And in common with a number of embassies in Washington, we became aware of a young man called George Papadopoulos, who was putting himself around town as a leading foreign policy adviser in the Trump team. Having spent a year at University College, London doing his masters, he was quite the Anglophile, and though I never met him, my team got to know him quite well. But although he was indeed a member of the campaign foreign policy advisory panel, he never really convinced: in that memorable Texan phrase, he was all hat, no cattle. So when he asked us to set up a number of meetings with British ministers before a visit to London, we instead put him in front of the desk officer in the Americas Department. As the history books will relate, Papadopoulos got up to a number of other things in London which ultimately landed him in prison. Maybe we should have filled his diary for him.

My political team also came across a British element to the Trump campaign. It was a small company called Cambridge Analytica. They described themselves as a political consulting firm specialising in data analysis, digital campaigning and strategic communications. They already had something of a track record in American politics, having been engaged on several campaigns in the 2014 midterm elections. In the 2016 presidential elections, they were initially carrying out data analysis for Ted Cruz’s campaign. But they ended their association with Cruz after the 20 February South Carolina primary – according to the Cruz camp, because they really weren’t delivering anything of value; according to some in the media, because their founder, the reclusive American billionaire Robert Mercer, switched from Cruz to Trump.

The Cambridge Analytica team were based in New York, alongside the Trump campaign, rather than in Washington. So our contacts were more on the telephone than in person. At the time, it was never entirely clear what precisely they did; they certainly weren’t the only pollsters inside the campaign (indeed, the story was that this particular candidate was so obsessed with polling data that if presented with figures suggesting he was doing badly, he would demand new data be found from a different source that told a better story). But the CEO, Alexander Nix, would come through Washington from time to time, have a coffee with one of the political team, and provide some snippets on campaign dynamics – who was up, who was down, who counted and who didn’t. They were useful, though second-order, insights.

That a British company, albeit American-owned, had managed to break into the extraordinarily competitive world of US political consultancy was quite a story; that they had been hired by the likely winners of the Republican race made them hot property. So there was growing media interest in Cambridge Analytica’s life history. Initially, in the British media, the tone was celebratory – a bunch of Brits outsmarting the American companies and grabbing the best job in town. I wondered idly whether they would be up for one of those prestigious business awards at the end of the year. But as is now exceedingly well documented, it all turned bad – though not until a year or so later. It was revealed that the company had used an unauthorised intermediary to acquire the personal data of 87 million Facebook users. They had then used this data for profiling and targeted campaign messages; they were eventually banned from using the Facebook platform for any future messaging or advertising. Channel 4 News produced a seriously damaging piece of investigative journalism on the company, from which it never recovered. Cambridge Analytica would file for insolvency on 1 May 2018 and would ultimately close down.

The enduring known unknown is, did they make a difference? Cambridge Analytica’s calling card was ‘micro-targeting of voters’. The technical term for it was ‘psychographics’ – which, it has to be said, conjures up instantly an image of mad-eyed scientists conducting brainwashing experiments. In layman’s language, it amounted to analysing data to predict the behaviour, interests and opinions held by specific groups of people and then serving them the messages to which they were most likely to respond: hence the value of data from 87 million Facebook users.

It is of course impossible to know for sure whether many, or any, of the almost 63 million people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 were influenced by messages on social media. The Trump campaign itself downplayed the company’s contribution, describing it as modest and suggesting that it was claiming credit for work done by others. A cynic might observe that, once the company got into trouble, they would say that, wouldn’t they. But more persuasively, the view amongst political scientists was and is one of deep scepticism about the effectiveness of micro-targeting. One prominent figure in the field, Eitan Hersh of Tufts University, said ‘Every claim about psychographics made by or about Cambridge Analytica is bullshit.’ And personally, I was with the sceptics. The claims of the digital crowd reminded me of a different era and the ludicrously inflated claims made in 1979 about the role in Margaret Thatcher’s victory of the Saatchi ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ posters. I think that voters were rather more influenced by the spectacle of James Callaghan’s government being plainly out of ideas and staggering from confidence vote to confidence vote. Success tends to have many fathers, while failure is an orphan; and none shout louder than political consultancies associated with the former, or run for cover faster if attached to the latter.

We weren’t, of course, only building relationships with the Republicans. There was a Democratic campaign too. It was clear Hillary Clinton was going to be the nominee, though it was equally clear that there were serious doubts about her among Democratic Party insiders, and a manifest lack of love for her among large swathes of the American public. But the die was cast early; the party thought Bernie Sanders too far to the left to be electable, and Joe Biden wasn’t running. And the Democratic establishment circled the wagons around her.

We knew most of this entourage. Many had worked in the Obama administration. Some dated back to Bill Clinton’s two terms. Generations of British ambassadors and politicians had connected with them. Yet building links with the 2016 campaign was an unexpectedly frustrating experience. The Clintons were notorious for running two parallel sets of advisers. There was the official team: the chief of staff, the campaign manager, the pollster, the policy advisers. And then there was the circle of longstanding Clinton friends and confidants, with whom every shred of advice from the official team had to be checked and tested. So it was a divided and, one sensed, unhappy team, and far less accessible than anticipated. It was weirdly easier to talk to senior members of the Trump team.

From what I heard and saw, journalists were finding themselves similarly excluded. Trump was everywhere on the news channels; Clinton’s team built a wall around her. There were exceptions: Jake Sullivan, a friend from the Obama days and Clinton’s lead foreign policy adviser, stayed in close touch. Democratic Party royalty like Tom Donilon, one of Obama’s national security advisers, did the same. There were lots of well-connected Democrats around Washington who were happy to critique the Clinton campaign from a distance (though they would have expected jobs had she won). And the middle rankers in the campaign team were happy to escape for an evening to share their insights. But the senior figures – the inner campaign team – might as well have been working from Mars.

As we tracked the two campaigns, and kept London informed through our reporting, we also tried to bring out an unusual, perhaps unique, feature of this particular race. It was Democrat against Republican. But it was also Establishment against Insurgent. Trump was sometimes described, with good reason, as engaging in a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. He was at odds with some sacred tenets of the Republican faith, such as support for open markets and free trade. And he had assembled around him a team of outliers and unknowns: Steve Bannon, Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, Kellyanne Conway, Peter Navarro, Steve Mnuchin, Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn. Some of this was by choice, but much was by necessity; the Republican mainstream was by and large refusing to work for him. It made for a wild ride, presenting a profound contrast between the style, tone and approach of the two campaigns, and the starkest of choices for the American people.