Donald Trump and The New York Times: It’s uncivil war in the White House

In the blockbuster case of Donald Trump and the White House whodunnit, the choice of The New York Times is telling.

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

Is it the revolt of the adults or the revenge of the swamp? Or is it just Potomac fever on steroids? American politics went crazy this week.

Perhaps the Trump presidency entered a new phase. Much more worryingly, maybe the US entered a new phase in what has become an extraordinarily ugly polarisation.

The New York Times published an explosive opinion piece from an anonymous “senior official” in the White House of US President ­Donald Trump. The anonymous official claims to be part of “the resistance” inside the White House, trying to prevent Trump from implementing his wilder ideas.

The op-ed is explosive in its tone and its judgments on Trump but, oddly enough, doesn’t reveal any specific new information.

Nonetheless, it is blistering in its assessment of Trump’s character: “The root of the problem is the President’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision-making.”

The President’s chaotic work habits and management approach were also impaled: “The President’s leadership style is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective … Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.”

The writer claims to want Trump’s presidency to succeed but not to want the President to make wild and reckless decisions. The commentary piece acknowledges the good done in the Trump administration: “Effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.”

But this, the author says, is a result of the senior officials in the administration working around, or even against, the President. In particular in foreign policy there is a “two-track presidency” in which Trump, for example, publicly and privately praises Russia’s Vladimir Putin while the administration imposes ever tougher sanctions on Russia.

In some respects, the piece states the obvious. Defence Secretary Jim Mattis routinely extols the virtue of US alliances; Trump routinely trashes them. It is undeniable that in foreign policy at least there is a two-track presidency.

But still, the provenance and purpose of The New York Times blockbuster are deeply confusing.

If this really is a senior Trump administration person, what on earth did they hope to achieve? If they really are, as they represent themselves, a genuine conservative and moderate right-winger, why would they choose the left-wing New York Times as their place of protest?

You would never influence fellow conservatives from The New York Times. Not only that, The New York Times has demonised and vilified every Republican president going back at least to Richard Nixon.

According to The New York Times’ writers, Ronald Reagan was a B-grade actor and the Chauncey Gardiner incompetent of modern presidents; ­George HW Bush had a speaking defect that indicated problems with his thought processes; his son George W. Bush was an empty-headed cowboy warmonger; and so on. Even Republican presidential candidates such as Mitt Romney and John McCain were vilified whenever they looked as though they might possibly be competitive.

US President Donald Trump is crude and rude, but he’s made policy headway.

Then the anonymous “senior official” used the distinctive word “lodestar” much beloved of Vice-President Mike Pence, apparently to throw suspicion on Pence. Pence, like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and most other senior officials, instantly denied they were the author. It would be astonishing if it were someone like Pence, not least because once the identity comes out, this will be the end of the author’s political career within the Republican Party.

So the true purpose of publishing an “insider” denunciation of Trump in The New York Times seems instead to create a new round of caterwauling outrage among the liberals who viscerally hate Trump anyway, and if anything to increase the chaos and paranoia of the White House itself. If the “senior official” turns out to be anyone other than a cabinet secretary, or a senior figure within the White House itself, The New York Times will suffer enormous discredit when that person’s identity is finally revealed.

The timing also seems weird. It occurred in the week that Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, one of the two reporters who broke much of the Watergate story under Richard Nixon, released a new book, Fear, which contains similarly incendiary accounts of the Trump White House.

Woodward’s book has former officials such as economics adviser Gary Cohn rushing to steal documents from Trump’s desk, in one case notification of a US intention to leave the North American Free Trade Agreement, to stop Trump from acting on his instincts.

Woodward’s book is full of juicy direct quotes, such as Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, declaring of Trump: “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown.”

Fear is potentially more damaging to Trump than previous tell-all books about the White House because Woodward has a high journalistic reputation. However, Woodward is generally centre-left in his orientation and his own methodology is questionable.

I have read, I think, all the Woodward White House books and they are not 100 per cent reliable. I knew the Bush White House very well and what was obvious was how dependent Woodward’s books were on his sources, and how as a result they could be seriously slanted. If you didn’t talk to him you got treated harshly. If you gave him a great deal of material you got better treatment.

I don’t believe for a minute that Woodward would make things up. But he reconstructs large slabs of conversation verbatim on the basis of the recollections of the people who talk to him. The more sensitive the conversation, the fewer his sources and the more he himself is open to manipulation by those sources.

Kelly denies that he ever said the things Woodward has him saying. Woodward’s response was: “I stand by my reporting.”

One of the most eccentric, though perhaps least important, revelations of the week was Woodward’s release of a conversation he taped between himself, Trump and senior aide Kellyanne Conway. Trump says Woodward wrote his book without coming to Trump first. Woodward says he approached six or seven senior Trump people about it, including having lunch with Conway and getting senator Lindsey Graham to raise it with the President.

Trump then says the senator did raise it with him but keeps complaining that Woodward should have rung the President’s office directly and Trump would have been happy to talk to him.

Just some of the US senior administration officals that denied writting a New York Times opinion piece.

So, overall we’ve got another week of delirious insider Washington mayhem. The question is what does it mean, what significance will it have outside Washington?

First, look at the other side of the aisle politically.

In congressional hearings it became more or less irrefutable that the big internet search engines effectively, though they claim not intentionally, discriminate against conservative websites and opinion in calling up political topics.

This fuels paranoia among conservatives all over America. But guess what? It turns out the paranoia is at least partly justified. The limousine liberals of Silicon Valley have derived algorithms for their search engines that routinely under-represent conservatives and over-represent left liberals.

Or look at the decision by Nike to feature Colin Kaepernick as the face of its new advertising campaign. Kaepernick was the first NFL football star to refuse to stand for the US national anthem at games. He said he was taking this action to protest police brutality against African-Americans.

It is just another expression of the toxic nature of identity politics. There is a vigorous and entirely legitimate debate about policing policy in minority communities.

In any event, the anthem has always been a symbol of unity in modern America. Countless African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans and all kinds of Americans have honoured the flag and the anthem in military service and civilian life. If left liberals claim they hate the way Trump is polarising American life, then making a commercial saint out of Kaepernick is one way to make sure they maximise social division.

It is also exactly the kind of gesture uniting the commercial elite and the social elite and one slice of the sporting elite that enrages Trump’s 60 million voters and makes them think Trump and his defiance are their only champion. Trump benefits from his enemies.

And then finally we have had the confirmation hearings for Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. By any measure, Kavanaugh, an academically brilliant and distinguished federal court judge, is eminently qualified to sit on the Supreme Court.

He is a legal originalist, which means he tries to interpret laws as they were written and the constitution according to the meaning it had when written. Unfortunately, the constitution and a good number of laws are written in vague terms, which mean judges have to exercise a great deal of personal discretion in interpreting them.

Every day of Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings this week were disrupted by protesters determined that he should never sit on the Supreme Court. Democrats denounced him as though he were the devil. Hillary Clinton tweeted that Kavanaugh would certainly overturn the ruling in Roe v Wade, despite Kavanaugh saying he would not do this.

It is worth pausing for a second on Roe v Wade. This decision found, pretty bizarrely, an untrammelled right to abortion in the US Constitution. There is no prospect of its being overturned because, as Kavanaugh himself observed, it has been repeatedly upheld by the court. However, even if it were overturned, this would not make abortion illegal. It would simply mean that state legislatures, in other words the normal democratic process, had the right to decide on the regulation of abortion.

The progressive side of US politics has won many of its social policy battles in the courts rather than in the democratic process. The courts are thus utterly politicised. What this week’s confirmation hearings, with the Democrats hurling the most vicious character accusations against Kavanaugh, suggest is that now both sides of politics will do anything they can to frustrate the other side.

Republicans are as guilty of this as Democrats. To confirm a ­Supreme Court nominee it is necessary to get a majority vote in the Senate. Once the Republicans had control of the Senate, they would not pass Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees

It now seems that no administration will ever be able to appoint a Supreme Court justice unless its party also commands at least a simple majority in the Senate.

Trump’s Supreme Court nominees may well be his most important policy legacy. He won’t be able to nominate any more Supreme Court justices if Republicans lose the Senate in November’s midterm elections.

And of course it is the looming mid-terms that provide the most important context for this unbelievably ratty week in US politics. The RealClearPolitics average of polls has Trump’s approval rating at 41 per cent. A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll has it at 46 per cent.

Trump’s supporters and his detractors know all about his character flaws already. If Trump entered a re-election contest on a 46 per cent approval rating, especially if the Democrats choose as their candidate an equally polarising left-winger, he would have every chance of re-election.

But this November he’s not up for re-election. Congress is. The RCP poll average gives Democrats a generic lead in House of Representatives contests of more than 8 per cent. US house congressional districts are Byzantine in their complexity and subject to sometimes extreme gerrymander, but there is every chance the Republicans will lose control of the House of Representatives.

This will hurt Trump because the Democrats will then control all the house congressional committees and will turn the next two years into a paralysing circus show of endless inquiries into every aspect of Trumpworld, real and imagined. Nonetheless, losing the house would not doom Trump’s presidency. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama lost the house in the midterm elections in their first terms and both easily won re-election for a second term as president.

Much more important is the Senate, for without the Senate Trump cannot appoint any more Supreme Court judges and the Senate race looks too tight to call. All of which suggests the anonymous administration official in The New York Times is more likely to have the purpose of helping the Democrats rally their base in the mid-terms than anything else.

US politics is extremely unedifying at the moment. Trump’s White House is chaotic and dysfunctional. It leaks prodigiously. Trump himself is truly a disgrace in some of the things he says and tweets, such as denouncing his own Attorney-General for not interfering in the judicial process to prevent criminal prosecutions of two Republican congressmen. Some of his statements undermine US strategic credibility.

Nonetheless, partly because his senior colleagues have indeed tempered his worst flights of policy nuttiness, and laboured heroically to transform his populist attitudes into a coherent government agenda, there are big achievements by the Trump administration. And it is perfectly right for conservatives to want to protect, continue and enhance those achievements.

These include the tax cuts and deregulation that have led to turbocharged economic growth and low unemployment rates. There is historic and necessary repair to the military budget. Trump is right to challenge Beijing’s longstanding mercantilist exploitation of the trade system. It is reasonable for conservatives to find Trump’s crudity and reflexive dishonesty repellent yet value those achievements dearly.

Trump’s voters, or at least a good number of them, hate the liberal establishment.

For their part, left liberals are within their rights to call attention to Trump’s verbal outrages and to oppose his policies. But their wild demonising of everything Trump says and does is deeply destructive, and incidentally beneficial to Trump politically.

And the relentless culture war offensives of the left liberals make a full contribution to the needless bitterness that is roiling US politics today.

Alas, this seems to be America’s new normal.