The mid-1980s were not a happy time for New York City.
America’s biggest city was still smarting from a brush with bankruptcy, crime was seemingly out of control, racial tensions were at a fever pitch, and the municipal government’s ability to deliver even basic services seemed haphazard at best.
In Central Park, the skating rink had been closed since 1980 on the promise of a two-year renovation. Six years later, the refurbishment was still unfinished and over budget, and the rink itself remained a swamp.
Enter Donald Trump, at the time a flashy real estate developer, who in the middle of 1986 told mayor Ed Koch he could get the rink finished in time for the northern hemisphere winter skating season and for a fraction of the cost.
Four months later, the renovations were complete and the bill came in 25 per cent under budget.
It’s a small but telling story from long before Trump’s entry into politics that prefigured the governing philosophy of his campaign and presidency: the system is broken. Government isn’t working. You aren’t getting what you deserve.
And only I can sort it out.
Fast-forward 30 years to Trump’s announcement of import tariffs on steel and aluminium this week.
For those who have been watching, it was an event about as surprising as the dawn as it fulfilled a promise (whatever its wisdom) to protect American workers from the ravages of the global economy.
Yet it must be said that even the closest Trump watchers were startled by news yesterday that he would have a sit down later this year with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
Presidential aides and even his own Secretary of State were reportedly blindsided by the announcement, and it is still not clear through which particular back channels the meeting was arranged.
And while there is still plenty of cause to be sceptical of Kim’s offer of talks, which may turn out to be nothing more than a delaying tactic against US action while Pyongyang puts the finishing touches on its missile program, the meeting is far better than the alternative.
After all, talking to an enemy is preferable to silence and waiting for war.
If the face-to-face does lead to a dialogue and the eventual denuclearisation of North Korea, it will be a diplomatic triumph of the sort that even the most fervent Trump-haters will not be able to deny.
And those haters would say they have plenty of cause.
Trump is crude, crass and a womaniser.
His White House turns over staff like a rototiller, his family makes the Borgias look like a model of functionality in power, and his tweeting can veer from the chaotic (“covfefe”, anyone?) to the unhinged.
He’s a multiple corporate bankrupt whose business deals remain shrouded in mystery and is the first president in living memory not to release his tax returns.
And of course there are the allegations, still swirling, that he is somehow a puppet of the Russian regime and in the pocket of Vladimir Putin.
Yet for all Trump’s flaws, there is a method to the madness.
In office now just over a year, there is a proven record of successes both domestically and abroad, driven by an overarching sense that the current system doesn’t work, that both Democrats and Republicans are to blame, and that a self-interested establishment class has let bad situations worsen, to the detriment of ordinary Americans.
Trump: Bomb the s... out of ’em. I would just bomb those suckers
There is a story that went around in Washington last year about a phone call which took place early in Trump’s campaign against Islamic State between the President and his Defence Secretary, General James Mattis.
Mattis had rung the Oval Office for permission to move 50 troops into a village outside Raqqa, then the de facto capital of the self-declared Islamist caliphate.
“Why are you calling me?” asked a perturbed Trump.
“Well, that’s what we’ve done for the past eight years,” answered Mattis, referring to the protocol under Barack Obama.
Trump questioned Mattis further, and asked who precisely wanted to send in the soldiers.
“A major, first in his class at West Point,” Mattis told Trump.
“Why do you think I know more about that than he does?” said Trump, hanging up the phone.
The moral of the tale is that where Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dithered and micromanaged, Trump let the Pentagon get on with the job of eliminating Islamic State.
And indeed Donald Trump made no bones during his election campaign about wanting to see Islamic State wiped off the face of the planet.
During a stop at a rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa, he famously said he would “bomb the s... out of ’em. I would just bomb those suckers.”
As president, Trump changed tactics and unleashed a previously hamstrung military. Islamic State is, for all intents and purposes, spent as a fighting force. Iraq, with America’s help, has regained control of its cities and its border with Syria.
While there remain plenty of sympathisers in Western countries, the group’s ability to inspire and organise attacks — as they did, particularly, in that horror year of 2015 — has been reduced to almost nothing.
What was once the world’s largest jihadi army has been reduced to a few ragtag gangs, and fighters who went to join the fight for the caliphate have deserted, taking their chances trying to return to home countries that in many cases don’t want them back.
It’s part of a broader realignment of the Middle East which Trump is seeking to capitalise on.
Last December, Australians woke to the news — which was, again, shocking only to those who had not been listening to Trump’s pledges — that the United States was going to make good on a decades-old pledge to shift its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
It was a canny move that both fulfilled a promise to his supporters at home while sending a clear message that Palestinian bluster and threats would not dictate American policy.
And it came just as Saudi Arabia was embarking on a rapid reform and modernisation program, led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, that while also working to break the stranglehold of Islamic conservatism on daily life is also seeing the desert kingdom work increasingly closely, if quietly, with sworn enemy Israel against a common foe, Iran.
Economics is often called the dismal science, and it is never so dismal than when political partisans try to sort out whose team is responsible for which success or failure.
There is no doubt, however, that the American economy, far from tanking as predicted (on election day Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman said the share market would “never” recover and said “we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight”), is going gangbusters.
Growth is up and the unemployment rate, already at a low 4.1 per cent, is tipped to fall into the 3 per cent range this year.
Personal and corporate tax cuts have further stimulated growth, and hundreds of companies handed out bonuses to employees after the legislation’s passage. The sudden attractiveness of the US as a destination for global capital has put other countries, including Australia, on notice about the need for to be competitive on tax as well.
Beyond economics, Trump has pushed a quiet revolution through the judiciary, not only placing Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court but nominating 73 other federal judges.
And in a recent fight with Democrats over immigration and the legal status of so-called “Dreamers” — young people living in the US who had been brought into the country illegally by their parents — he caused the opposition to blink during a brief government shutdown.
Will it work?
The Ancient Greeks liked to tell the story of Nemesis, the inescapable goddess who would bring low those who succumb to hubris, or arrogance.
For those who loathe him, Trump is guilty of hubris of the worst sort.
His “Make America Great Again” pledge is an affront to everything they believe about a cooperative world. His bumptious and proud anti-intellectualism offends the belief that articulate and measured intelligence should rule the day.
In taking on — and defeating — Hillary Clinton, who for her supporters was all but predestined by the gods to sit in the Oval Office, he meddled with the primal forces of nature.
And they believe Trump’s own flaws, or failing that, special counsel Robert Mueller, will prove to be his nemesis and take him down.
His supporters turn the equation around, of course, and see Trump as the enemy of the arrogant and well-connected classes who are trying to eliminate the man who would “drain the swamp” of special interests and silence their filthy-rich everyday hero.
Perhaps both sides are right. It may just that be Trump is an awful person who is also, despite himself and his obstacles, getting stuff done.
Recently Trump provoked gales of laughter when he referred to himself as a “very stable genius”.
Perhaps yes, perhaps no.
But his very American story calls to mind another American, the author F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose thoughts on the subject of genius may just shed some light on what is required to fully appreciate the simultaneous highs and lows of Trump’s administration and character.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” Fitzgerald said, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind and still retain the ability to function.”
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