JD Vance has said the most honest thing about Trump yet
In 1976, a fleet of tall ships sailed into New York Harbour to commemorate the 200th birthday of the founding of America. It was a stunning sight. Gerald Ford was US president, having replaced the disgraced Richard Nixon. The nation, still reeling from the Watergate scandal, held Bicentennial parades and celebrations all year. America began to feel better about itself.
Today, America’s 250th anniversary celebrations, culminating on Independence Day, 4 July, are in the hands of Donald Trump. There has been a cage fight on the White House lawn, a tawdry Trump rally on the National Mall and historic Washington looks like a tacky building site.
Trump’s Vice President, JD Vance, had this to say about Nixon, while promoting his book on religion, Communion: “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
Vance is right, isn’t he? His boss has survived so many potential career-ending scandals that Nixon’s crimes seem trifling by comparison. The current US President would probably have brushed off the Watergate burglary, insisted it was all a radical Democrat “hoax” and sent the leakers to prison, if he could.
Trump arrived in Washington for his first presidency in 2016 promising to “drain the swamp”. The algae-ridden, paint-peeling reflecting pool by the Lincoln Memorial is the perfect metaphor for what has happened since. Were Trump to look into the pool, like Narcissus, he would see the rot at the heart of his administration reflected back at him.
To renovate the pool, Trump hired a Virginia golf club pool-maintenance company he had used at his Trump National Golf Club, on a no-bid contract, and another company owned by a donor. He ended up with a putrid, expensive mess at a cost of $16m. The basin has just been fenced off – allegedly because of vandals – but in my view because Trump can’t bear the public going there to take selfies and laugh at him.
The last time a similar barrier was erected in Washington, but on a far larger scale, was after the riot that took place on January 6, 2021. Joe Biden’s inauguration two weeks later was sealed off from the public and the capital was swarming with armed National Guard troops. All because Trump couldn’t be trusted with an orderly handover of power.
In his second term, Trump has become more disinhibited and unconstrained. This has been chronicled, almost in real-time, in a new book by New York Times correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, which is storming up the US bestseller charts.
As Swan explained in an interview with Vanity Fair, the book covers “a form of regime change in our own country”.
“The full expanse of the way that he’s used power, even down to the monetization of the presidency, is like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetime. In some respects, it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen from the American president,” Swan said.
In a revealing exchange at the White House, Trump handed the authors a two-page document from a “historian” comparing him to what he called the “top 10” world leaders. These included Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Tamerlane and William the Conqueror. The historian turned out to be the golf caddy of South African champion, Gary Player, a friend of the President.
Every now and then, reality intrudes, but not for long. Trump had boasted of being a bigger star than Elvis when he offered to take over as the main attraction at the launch of the Great American Fair after celebrity musicians declined to appear.
When the show went ahead on Wednesday, an audience of “more than 1,000” according to NBC News, turned up at the Mall to hear Trump praise himself. “A short time ago we were a dead country. We were dead. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world,” he claimed. The national anthem was sung by FBI chief Kash Patel’s country-singer girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, accompanied by the US Marine National Band.
It was the former deputy head of the FBI, Mark Felt, who revealed late in life that he was “Deep Throat”, the Watergate source immortalised in the film All the President’s Men.
Judging from Haberman and Swan’s books, there are still White House sources prepared to reveal inside information on Trump, though access is more limited in his second term.
In one notable scoop, the authors appeared to get verbatim quotes from inside the Situation Room, the White House’s most secure location, during a crisis meeting on whether to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. This has led to speculation that the pair have “tapes”, but they have declined to comment on this claim.
There may not be many recordings for future generations to investigate. In 2020, on Fox News, Trump claimed to have “learned a lot” from Nixon and appeared to suggest that one of his biggest mistakes was “he had tapes all over the place”. Trump won’t want history to repeat itself.