THE WRECKER-IN-CHIEF: Trump’s chaos abroad mirrors the damage he’s inflicting on Washington

In recent years, I have become weary of the normalisation of madness that emanates from the White House. We are confronted by a still-powerful but delusional leader who projects his delusions towards the rest of us.

It is the political equivalent of the conversation in Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, when Alice tells the Red Queen, “There’s no use trying. One can’t believe impossible things.” And the queen replies, “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” 

That is where we are now with the US chief executive.

At the UN General Assembly opening session on Tuesday, 22 September, where scores of world leaders gather each September to deliver major speeches, Donald Trump fully adhered to his standard form. He reeled off his bog-standard claims of domestic and foreign successes, claimed victory in Venezuela, threatened fire and brimstone upon Cuba even as it teeters towards collapse, and inevitably gave the Iranians a choice between taking his good deal or facing “annihilation” as part of US policy preventing Iran from developing any possible nuclear weapons capability. 

As the Economist noted afterwards, “Donald Trump told the UN General Assembly that he could either make a deal with Iran to end the war or he could ‘annihilate the Islamic Republic’. He predicted the two sides would strike an agreement after America’s midterm elections in November. In spite of Mr Trump’s threat, Iranian and American officials held what he described as a ‘very productive’, three-hour meeting on the sidelines.”

So, which part of Trump’s remarks should we believe? Or, should we take our cues from the actual events occurring in the Middle East?

Watching Trump’s speech was like observing a stand-up comedian whose stories (and tall tales and made-up facts) are shopworn and dated. The most imaginative moment in the speech came when he defended corporate America’s efforts on artificial intelligence, insisting that it should be rebranded “super intelligence”.

More than one commentator has noted that Trump’s remarks seemed tailored for domestic audiences – aimed at shoring up Republican candidates ahead of a difficult midterm election – rather than delivering a strategic message to international partners.

Here comes Xi Jinping

Meanwhile, the UN Assembly did not render the applause Trump would get from a rally of the Maga faithful. We suspect he was preoccupied with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s imminent state visit and the contentious issues they will discuss – such as the regulation of AI or the vital rare earth minerals trade. 

After Xi had arrived on Wednesday evening in Washington, the Washington Post noted, “The leaders are expected to work through an array of issues in meetings Thursday and Friday as they manage the complicated relationship between the world’s largest powers. Trump has worked to pull manufacturing back to the U.S. and has sought Chinese cooperation in doing so. Xi, meanwhile, has sought to take advantage of a relatively sympathetic U.S. leader to impose more pressure on Taiwan and expand Chinese influence over global affairs.

“Trump will also seek to limit China’s involvement in the war with Iran. ‘I’ll be talking about that and many other subjects but it’s all coming along, including that,’ he said.”

We anxiously await the outcomes from the talks and whether things have moved towards more – or less – amity and cooperation.

Disruption and distraction

Now, as he is nearly halfway through his second term, Trump has been applying a lifetime of lessons learned in selling the highly improbable to the extremely credulous. Applied to governance, however, this translates into a mercurial process of ever-changing tactics – presumably to keep opponents off guard. By contrast, in strategic terms, he has continued to profoundly disrupt the US’s relationships with its long-time allies and near neighbours, as well as to a web of multilateral partnerships. 

In international terms, he seems to have largely pinned his hopes on what he believes are personal friendships with the authoritarian leaders of Russia, China and North Korea. This week he will attempt to apply that technique in his meetings with Xi, via a level of pomp and ceremony rarely shown to US partners and allies. 

Besides fracturing the US/European alliance, Trump has given Ukraine the metaphorical back of the hand (and cutting the supply of US military materiel) even as it resists a Russian invasion. In contrast, his negotiators seem effectively to have embraced Vladimir Putin’s territorial demands on Ukraine. In the most recent geopolitical opera buffa, following a snit fight with Denmark, Trump has trumpeted an agreement with Denmark/Greenland that effectively reaffirmed the 1951 agreement for US military facilities on the island.

Meanwhile, he has led the US into a war of choice with Iran – offering multiple, ever-changing justifications, but with no clear goals or outcomes other than “no nukes for Iran” – a condition that had existed following the five-nation agreement reached with Iran during the Obama administration. The geopolitical landscape in the Middle East is now more unstable than it was in 2017. Moreover, this conflict threatens to spread further, even as the global energy trade has been upended by the virtual closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait.

Inflicting his ideas on the capital

Rather than dwelling on the US’s international relations, we will shift to the desecrations the Trump administration is inflicting on the nation’s capital – seeing them as symbolic of how Trump handles foreign and economic policy. 

The city of Washington was designed as an expression of the balance between the branches of government. The French architect Pierre L’Enfant sought to lay out a city that would deliver a civics lesson. In the years that followed, memorials and monuments have been added to honour the country’s greatest leaders and commemorate its momentous conflicts. 

Height restrictions have meant buildings may not be taller than the Capitol, giving the city somewhat of the feel of a European capital. Right across the Potomac River is Arlington National Cemetery. We will come back to the importance of that space shortly and why Trump’s plans have generated such anger.

Each new administration and Congress have indeed made contributions to shape the city, but they have remained largely within L’Enfant’s vision. A web of architectural, city planning and historical preservation bodies protects historic buildings and statuary and carefully scrutinises plans for new constructions. 

Adjacent to the actual executive mansion, both the East and West Wings of the White House were added in the 20th century; the latter includes the famous Oval Office. In comparison to his predecessors, however, Trump’s ongoing response to Washington has been remarkably different, and not in a nice way. 

Inside White House offices, he has added garish gold gilt appliqués and tchotchkes plus a parade of gold-plated ewers and vases. He added pictures of every president in the colonnade from the residence to the Oval Office, except for Joe Biden, who is mocked by a drawing of an autopen.

The Rose Garden was ripped out, replaced by a concrete plaza and beach umbrellas, and he retiled the bathroom adjacent to the historic Lincoln Bedroom with flashy marble and gold fittings, a look unlike anything Abraham Lincoln would have recognised. 

The Trump ballroom rises

But these were just warm-up exercises. He has now torn down the East Wing of the Executive Mansion to be replaced by a giant ballroom (influenced by French King Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles), and with more gold than any room should endure. This deep urge to fidget and fiddle with things that already exist, but absent any broader vision, is thus a feature of government policies and the physical features of the city of Washington as well. It is almost as if this man must leave a scent marker on everything he comes in contact with, branding every policy with his name and every building with his name or likeness. 

In the face of fierce criticism, this ballroom is now being described as the surface floor of an emergency presidential command centre in the event of a nuclear attack. With minimal consultations with the official preservation committees, the bulldozers, excavators, and pile-drivers have torn down the East Wing and are now constructing that command centre/ballroom. But its shape and size will distort the symmetry of the White House, and its estimated cost will far surpass private pledges of support. Amazingly, the building rubble is being dumped right on top of one of Washington’s public golf courses. 

The Kennedy Center

His narcissistic urge to get his name etched on public buildings (as well as coins, banknotes and passports) has been impossible to suppress. Besides the rumoured renaming of the US Institute of Peace after himself (after all, he ended eight wars all by himself), there is the fiasco at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where his name was placed above that of the president to whom the building was dedicated. Kennedy, of course, had been felled by an assassin’s bullets in 1963, and the new cultural centre was the memorialisation of him through the arts.

Since 1971, the Kennedy Center has become a core element of the region’s cultural life. It was home to the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera, and the preferred venue for many hundreds of US and international touring companies and artists. More than a dozen nations donated extraordinary gifts to equip the building — from massive Scandinavian crystal chandeliers to African sculptures. 

The building opened in 1971 with the commissioned work Mass by Leonard Bernstein. A controversial work, it included electric guitars and rock riffs (and references to growing anti-war sentiments opposing the Vietnam conflict). On a personal note, I was lucky to see and hear it in 1971, while I was still a penurious university student. Over the years, whenever I lived in Washington, we saw everything from operas to African dance, jazz, drama, and Broadway shows at the Kennedy Center. 

But there is always Trump’s urge to fiddle – and disrupt. In his second term, after basically boycotting the place, he appointed himself as chairperson, replaced virtually the rest of the board, and appointed a sharp-elbowed apparatchik as CEO. He demanded his name be added to the building’s facade and insisted he would expunge all the so-called woke, anti-American works from the centre’s oeuvre.

His rule has driven away audiences, donors, numerous touring performing artists and groups, and sponsors, and now the opera company and the orchestra as well. After court challenges, his name was ordered removed, but in retribution, he announced that the building was on the verge of collapse and would be closed for two years for renovations. Along the way, he ordered the removal from the building of much of the art donated to honour the fallen president. 

In response, over the past weekend, thousands of angry supporters demonstrated, demanding the centre be restored to its original purposes, and with appropriate management and renewed support from a network of donors.

The sad tale of the Kennedy Center is one more example of a president desperate to slather his name and visage (like giant hanging banners featuring his glowering face on major public buildings in Washington) on the physical texture of government. 

We have not even discussed the fiasco of the repairs to the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial or his insistence that signs must go up in front of the buildings of the Smithsonian decrying the wokeism of what is inside the buildings. But these are yet more examples of how his temperament rules his actions.

The Arch de Trump

The nadir is his plan to erect a massive arch on a traffic circle between the Lincoln Memorial and the Arlington National Cemetery, ruining the symbolic connection between those two sacred spaces. Trump insists this arch must be bigger and gaudier than any other arch. But, pressed by another wave of criticism – or derision – the president has now argued it would be manned by snipers, 24/7, and equipped with drones and a massive store of ammunition for those snipers. There are, of course, defences already in place in the city and beyond. 

Because the location is on a flight path to the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, one must wonder what the purpose is of such a construction, equipped with the hardware to shoot down aircraft or even attack major government buildings. 

Can it be fixed?

All this behaviour informs our understanding of a president so consumed with embellishing government buildings in accordance with his own whims that he barely has time to engage in serious thinking about international and domestic policies. Unlike Harry Truman, who famously had a sign on his desk reading, “The Buck Stops Here,” if the incumbent had a sign on the Resolute Desk, it would doubtless say, “Look at Me! Look at Me!” 

Regardless of who wins the presidency in 2028, they will be required to exert superhuman efforts to rebuild relations with long-time friends, neighbours, and allies; to reinforce the defence of like-minded societies; and to insist that potential antagonists be on their guard. Oh, and they will need to begin scraping away the awful physical damage done to the capital’s dignity. DM