What it has been like covering the Donald Trump era
From the tweets and ‘alternative facts’ to Sharpie-gate and a bromance with Kim, Trump’s whirlwind presidency has left havoc, and history, in its wake.
What’s it been like covering the Trump era, I’m often asked. What’s it been like? Hmm.
Well, imagine it is August 2019 and you find yourself in Greenland, at an Irish pub called Daddy’s in downtown Nuuk. Icebergs are floating past the window. Manchester United are selfdestructing again on the telly. And you are approaching a group of bibulous Inuits to ask them what they think about Donald Trump offering to buy their island.
“It’s ridiculous,” Inuk, one of the locals told me. “Very, very weird. What is going on?”
I promise not to do this to Greenland! pic.twitter.com/03DdyVU6HA
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 20, 2019
What is going on? How many times have we all wondered that during this surreal, mesmeric, appalling, divisive, defiant, anarchic, vainglorious and relentless presidency? Under what other president could I have possibly ended up quizzing confused Greenlanders on the merits of becoming the 51st state?
The sheer volume of previously unimaginable things that have happened during Trump’s first term has been overwhelming. Even four years in, there are still days when you see the Donald landing Marine One at one of his golf resorts and pinch yourself.
During his inauguration speech, Trump told us that “American carnage stops right here”. Alas not. Life with the self-proclaimed “very stable genius” has been anything but steady. As for covering Trump: it has been the strangest experience of my life.
....Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star.....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018
....to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius....and a very stable genius at that!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018
It was 10.53pm on Tuesday November 8, 2016, when the Trump presidency became manifest. I was standing on Manhattan’s Sixth Ave, outside the Fox News building, with several hundred men and women in red Maga caps, watching the coverage on the big screen.
They called Florida for Trump and the crowd erupted, hugging, backslapping, chanting: “USA!” It was one moment in my life when I have felt the earth-shaking power of real history, certain that nothing would be the same again.
The early days of the Trump administration quickly set the tone for what would follow: a blur of factional infighting, chaotic policymaking, relentless media onslaught and unmissable performance art.
It began immediately with the inauguration. A chilly, grey day outside the Capitol building and a crowd notably smaller than that which gathered for Barack Obama eight years earlier. Except not, at least according to Sean Spicer, Trump’s hapless first press secretary.
“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration - period,” the Pooterish Spicer claimed. An obvious lie? Not according to spin master Kellyanne Conway, who called it an “alternative fact”. The post-truth presidency was under way.
Comparing inauguration crowds: Donald Trump (2017) vs. Barack Obama (2009) https://t.co/GqqbS5a2VO pic.twitter.com/MiofGCrHcD
— New York Times Video (@nytvideo) January 23, 2017
From there we quickly moved on to “Muslim” travel bans, transgender military bans, the horrors of neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, the firing of the FBI director James Comey and the Mueller inquiry.
It is difficult to remember it all. Entire years’ worth of political news unspooled in single weeks. Take the “11 days of the Mooch” in July 2017, when Christmas came early for political hacks with the appointment of the wise guy New York hedge funder Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director. Ah, the Mooch. He came, he saw, he told a reporter on the record that Steve Bannon tries to “suck his own cock”.
Priebus left his job days later, before Mooch followed him out the door, receiving divorce filings from his wife and turning on Trump in the process.
Having hitherto monitored Trumpland from New York, that was the first week I spent in Washington, covering for a colleague. It was a sharp lesson in Trump era savagery.
“Hell is empty,” I wrote in an excitable news report, drawing on my A-level Shakespeare. “And all the devils are here.”
Much of 2018 was taken up with migrant caravans and Trump’s obsession with building a border wall with Mexico, and making someone pay for it. Trump’s Sisyphean wall project took me down to McAllen, Texas, so often that I even befriended the security staff at the local courthouse.
It also led to the cruellest moment of Trump’s first term: the short-lived decision to separate illegal migrant children from their parents, some of whom have still not been reunited. That will not be forgotten.
A row over wall funding also caused the longest government shutdown in American history, some 34 days. So long, in fact, that I ended up reporting from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, where furloughed park rangers had stopped taking out the rubbish bins and hungry bears were descending from their mountain hideaways for a free lunch.
For most of its duration, Trump’s presidency has seemed on the verge of destruction, his doom predicted many times by excitable media critics and members of the “Resistance”. First it was the Mueller inquiry, which turned up lots of dirty tricks and unseemly Russian fraternisation but never delivered the grand collusion narrative that so many liberals hoped for.
Then it was impeachment, a piece of impressive but ultimately empty political theatre. An investigation into Trump’s threat to withhold military aid from Ukraine - unless it investigated the Biden family - failed to persuade tribal Republican senators, some of whom slept through the interminable proceedings. Trump survived again.
Sometimes, even if it was your job to follow every twist, you just wanted to turn it all off. Yet always there was more drama, another tweetstorm and another round of outraged headlines.
Trump’s Twitter feed has been the central feature of his presidency. It has crashed markets, threatened nuclear annihilation (”my button works!”), espoused racism (”Why don’t they go back and help fix the ... crime infested places from which they came?”), encouraged domestic insurrection (”Liberate Michigan!”) and launched spats with everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger (”pathetic ratings”) to Snoop Dogg (”failing career”).
North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.†Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2018
....and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2019
Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't voluntarily leaving the Apprentice, he was fired by his bad (pathetic) ratings, not by me. Sad end to great show
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
At times Trump’s feed has ventured into abstract expressionism, such as in 2017 when he tweeted: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”. Was it a typo? A brain fade? A deliberate troll? No one was sure. The covfefe tweet launched an avalanche of memes, somehow capturing the incoherence and eccentricity of the most powerful man alive.
Who can figure out the true meaning of "covfefe" ??? Enjoy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2017
Wakes up.
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) May 31, 2017
Checks Twitter.
.
.
.
Uh...
.
.
.
📈 Lookups fo...
.
.
.
Regrets checking Twitter.
Goes back to bed.
Your word is covfefe.
— marshall weber (@marshmau5) May 31, 2017
May I have the country of origin? pic.twitter.com/feo1mAqd9u
All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, have been locked in a relationship with Donald Trump’s psyche over the past four years. A while back I asked Michael Wolff, author of Fire and Fury, the best-selling book about this presidency, how he felt about Trump the man.
“It still shocks me,” Wolff said. “He is a character that we will be talking about 100 years from now. Who is this guy really? How did this happen? He’s either an aberration, or perhaps he’s the ultimate American character multiplied, America written in some hyperbolic way.”
At times, when Trump veers off into his own unique brand of political dadaism, things have just been plain weird. Hurricanes in particular always seem to bring out his inner absurdist.
“One of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water” was his verdict on Hurricane Florence. And of course there was “Sharpie-gate”, when he altered the official map of Hurricane Dorian with a sharpie pen to back up his wild claim that Alabama was about to be hit hard.
Then there was the orb. Let us never forget the orb.
In May 2017, Trump arrived in Saudi Arabia for his first foreign trip and visited the opening of the Global Centre for Combating Extremist Ideology. There, Trump, Melania, King Salman and the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, gathered mystically around a glowing white orb for one of the all time weirdest diplomatic photos. “For clarification,” tweeted the Church of Satan, “this is not a Satanic ritual.”
Yet in policy terms, beyond the orbs and sharpies, the grandstanding and firings and random attacks on the actor Samuel L Jackson’s golf swing, Trump’s first four years have - at least in part - resembled a fairly conventional Republican presidency.
Don’t like @SamuelLJackson’s golf swing. Not athletic. I’ve won many club championships. Play him for charity!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2016
In concert with the Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, Trump has remade the judiciary and swung the Supreme Court in a firmly conservative direction. He delivered tax cuts large enough to satisfy even the most devoted Ayn Rand acolyte and oversaw a growing pre-Covid economy. He also pushed through much-needed criminal justice reform, working with Kim Kardashian, among others, to pass the First Step Act that allows for easier compassionate early release from prison.
On foreign policy, there has been plenty more anarchy, a bizarre love-hate bromance with “little rocket man” Kim Jong-un, a humiliating decision to side with Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agencies at a 2018 summit in Helsinki, withdrawal from the Paris climate accords - but some qualified successes too. Trump has started no disastrous foreign wars, helped forge some surprising peace deals between Israel and its Muslim neighbours and, despite a messy trade war, pushed America into an overdue and far more competitive stance with China.
I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man...
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2017
These more concrete achievements are one reason Trump still has a shot in Tuesday’s election. Alongside the Team America fantasia and performative trolling beloved by his base, when Trump has managed to govern, it has been as a not entirely abnormal Republican. Many will vote for him accordingly.
What next for the Trump show, then? Four more years? Or will the American people say enough? After a year of racial crisis, a rampant pandemic and the president’s own attacks on the democratic system, the latter seems more likely than the former.
Ultimately, Trump’s ability to twist and spin his way around reality has probably met its match in a brutal coronavirus that has no interest in his Twitter feed, and even found its way into his White House. With two days to go until the election, it looks as though a majority of Americans are ready for something a little quieter. So what’s it been like covering the Trump era? It’s been covfefe.
The Times
More Coverage
King-sized bombshell sits in FBI files
Assassination documents will disappoint Kennedy conspiracists but reveal the full extent of the bureau’s drive to defame Martin Luther King Jr.
Duke sought billions from China with help from alleged spy
New documents raise concerns about Prince Andrew’s links to Yang Tengbo and his willingness to use his royal status despite the security risk.