Reviews

- Jeremy Agar

FIRE AND FURY:
Inside The Trump White House
by Michael Wolff, Little, Brown, London, 2018

THE DESPOT’S APPRENTICE:
Donald Trump’s Attack On Democracy
by Brian Klaas, Scribe, London, 2017

Imagine that, as the Reagan years ended, a white female investment banker jogging in New York’s Central Park was raped and murdered. Five black boys were arrested. The setting would be perfect for a film adaptation. In the big screen version, viewed by millions, the victim was a soccer mom with adorable children; the defendants were violent and macho, their rapping swagger protected by elitist judges, a weak Police Chief and a Mayor who allowed blacks and liberal whites to parade through Manhattan absurdly protesting the boys’ innocence. In the art house version, viewed by a scattering of hip white musicians and female pensioners, the innocent boys would have been framed.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario more likely to arouse the passions and expose the fault lines in America. But this wasn’t a movie. The boys, confused and initially lawyerless, were convicted. Later DNA evidence and a confession from another man set them free. That was then, but with crime rates falling in American cities this episode would not now make such a likely movie. So why recall it now? Because in 1989 it was just what a real estate tycoon needed. As the story broke, Donald Trump took out ads calling for the boys to be executed. That’s not a surprise. The point is that even after the boys’ acquittal Trump was still calling for them to be killed by the State.

The year before this episode, Trump had appeared on TV to discuss a chemical attack that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had unleashed on civilians, killing 5,000: “Saddam Hussein throws a little gas, everyone goes crazy! ‘Oh, he’s using gas!’”. Getting philosophical, Trump elaborated, “But you know what? He did well. He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them their rights. They didn’t talk. They were terrorists. Over. Today, Iraq is the Harvard for terrorism”.

Brian Klaas includes these examples to give an indication as to his assessment of the President that was to be. Klaas is an academic and journalist who has advised the likes of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Union. So, he’s very much the sort of swamp monster that Trump says he is obsessed with destroying. The antipathy is mutual: Klaas’s career has focused on despots and despotism, many of whom happen to be the people that Trump sees as mates. He starts his chapters with summaries of some of them, before inviting us to consider how they remind us of their “apprentice” at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump Admires Duterte

In February 2018, in the aftermath of the latest school massacre, Trump employed his usual diversionary tactics by suggesting that the US should follow the example of President Duterte in the Philippines by executing drug dealers. Whether he wants to throw them out of airborne planes, as his mate Rodrigo does, he did not say. Duterte seems to be the despot Trump most wants to emulate. When it comes to silencing potential opponents, he’s the go-to guy.

A Trump Tower Manila was due to open in 2017, but final details are still being worked out. It’s going to be quite something. “Some people dream of luxury, while others live and breathe it”, pitches the project’s public face, Ivanka Trump, before cutting to shots of Donald Trump playing golf (“fitting your exclusive lifestyle to a tee” Trump’s daughter deadpans). The spot closes with an endorsement from Trump: “It’s going to be great,” he says. The local developer is a firm whose chairman is Duterte’s trade envoy to the United States (this summary is derived from Wikipedia).

Follow the money, they say. The White House, of course, says there is no conflict of interest in the two Presidents having a direct financial interest in the Tower. According to Trump’s financial disclosures, between 2014 and mid-2016 he received between $US1 million and $US6 million in payments from the project. 

The family take is that Ivanka – who, remember, is also the unpaid adviser to the US President - is there in a “nongovernmental, unpaid, non-policymaking role that does not involve itself in foreign policy or relations between the two governments”. Meant to assure us that her relationship with money and influence is benign, this description fails utterly. Since Klaas published we’ve learned of one way in which Duterte and Trump differ. Whereas Duterte advocates shooting women in their genitals to make them “useless”, Trump likes to grab their genitals to make them useful.

Another favourite despot is Turkey’s President Erdogan, who has been assiduously rolling back democracy. He holds the world record for jailing journalists so as to protect his people from “fake news”. It might turn out to be significant that, according to Klaas, Michael Flynn, the former US National Security Adviser who was fired for not disclosing some yet unknown ties to Russia, had been paid over $US500,000 for lobbying for Turkey.

This secretly and lucratively linked the top policy and information sources in the US with the despots of Russia and Turkey (what, for a start, does this mean for Syria?). Inevitably Trump owns properties in Istanbul. Asked about this, Trump was happy to agree that, yes, that involved him in “a little conflict of interest”. Then there’s Saudi Arabia, where Trump registered eight companies in 2016 alone. In the past the Saudis twice bailed out Trump. He owes them.

The son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is thought to be the most influential of all the palace courtiers in Washington. Like his father-in-law, Kushner got his start in property from his mega-rich father. The family apparently is in debt to the tune of $US1.2 billion to interests in Qatar, China, Israel, France, Saudi Arabia and South Korea. And in February 2018 Donald Trump Jr – the family member said to be running the family business, as opposed to having a governmental role - was in India selling luxury apartments. News reports were replete with talk of “selling influence”.

The Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Turkey - and of course Russia: they host just a few of the global Trumpian entanglements, examples included by Klaas not because they are the most egregious, but because they link to his immediate topic of despotism. We can expect a continuous trail of rumour, news, information, misinformation and disinformation as long as the family is in the White House, and most probably long after they’ve left.

Closer to home – in fact over the road from the White House – sits the Trump International Hotel, a favourite for the myriads seeking influence with the President. The hotel’s owner, the guy who’s meant to be running the country from the other side of the street, has pocketed $US20 million from his DC digs since 2016. I’ve scratched your back, Donald, so what can you do for me today?

Here is the deepest part of the swamp that Trump wallows in, the one he said he’d drain. There are in Washington an astonishing 160,000 lobbyists, many of them milling around the Trump International Hotel and Mar-a-Lago, the “Winter White House” in Florida. The line between Trump’s private and public roles is generally said to be blurred. In fact, it’s been erased.

There’s no such ambivalence in Uzbekistan, where the daughter of the despot is estimated to have profited by $US1 billion because dad is the boss. This presidential daughter went to an American Ivy League uni, got some modeling gigs, then went into jewellery and fashion and even joined the Uzbek UN delegation in New York. Yes, it’s almost an identical career to Ivanka’s, whose dad, the father who once said she was so hot he’d have been keen to date her, says she’s his “secret weapon”, a big part of his “brand”.

Following In Mobutu’s Footsteps

In Zaire (which is now the Democratic Republic of Congo) Mobutu Sese Seko served as the quintessence of despotism. In a country where people cling to existence on incomes of a few dollars, Mobutu built himself a palace near an impoverished village. He had the jungle cleared to accommodate an airstrip so daily pastries and other delicacies could be flown in from France.

His walls were festooned with art masterpieces. Mobutu’s dream was to despoil his country so that he could live by having no contact with his neighbours, and no contact with the natural environment. That indeed was the whole point. God lives in Heaven; the supreme ruler lives in his own splendid isolation.

Mobutu exemplifies the despots in his essential qualities of having no taste and no knowledge of the alien expressions with which he surrounded himself. He did not hack down a jungle because he had a sensitive taste for the best cuisine; he did not spend millions on French Impressionists because he had a passion for 19th Century painting.

He acquired his lifestyle because he had heard that this what rich people did. Planes landing in the jungle would intimidate the locals and the products they unloaded would make the wider world tremble with envy. Mobutu’s extravagances spoke of a total lack of imagination or curiosity. Art? Baguettes? Whatever. Tell me what other people deem important and I will seek it. The last time Mobutu was in the news the TV screen showed an image of him swimming forlornly alone in his pool. He had to paddle back and forth because that’s what successful people did. He looked miserable, but at least he died “worth” several billion useless dollars.

It is this quality of seeking to avoid real experiences that is the most insidious of despotism’s sins. Power, we have always known, corrupts, but the pursuit of power only for its own sake corrupts absolutely. For Mobutu, it equates success with the deliberate ruining of those over whom he rules, because the bigger the gap between ruler and ruled the greater the proof that in his world of winners and losers and the more excessive the waste, the more the despot is a winner. Sympathy for the governed is exactly what has to be purged from the despot’s mind.

In the USA, where such a stark and simple duality is not available to a would-be despot, oppression is frustrated by the checks and balances of liberal democracy and an equality (fast declining) of conditions. Trump has had to work hard to be tone deaf to his country’s culture. In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein assaults, he refused to say a word against abusive men, and after the Florida shootings he showed no understanding of what a grieving community needed to hear. 

The apprentice despot dislikes the rule of law, freedom of the press, legal due process, and almost every person who is not rich, white, male and bigoted. What he does like is to hang out with supplicants and his family at Mar-a-Lago. Mobutu had his swimming pools; Trump, his golf courses.

After each chapter Klaas feels obliged to repeat that he’s not saying Trump is that bad. He’s not a despot. He protests too much. He shouldn’t have to. The difference between the political and social culture of the United States and those of Zaire/Congo and Turkey should be obvious to any literate person. That Klaas has to keep anticipating abuse from the gun and rape lobby shows how far democratic norms have been debased. The Founding Fathers assumed reasoned debate.

Supporters Don’t Even Pretend To Offer Rational Logic

Klaas points out that a majority of Republicans have supported him all the way, no matter how absurd their man. For example, a Republican majority polled agreed that Trump should be able to postpone the 2020 election if he thought that necessary to ensure illegals could not vote. To reach this verdict his supporters had to have accepted as true Trump’s childish allegation that there was widespread voter fraud from those criminal Mexicans, and that it was organised by Hillary Clinton. Worse, they were indicating that they would be readily exploited by an Erdogan-style abolition of democracy.

We’re told that the Constitution would save America from despotism. But it might not. The balance of powers between the three branches of Government assumes certain moral and intellectual standards which Trump does not exhibit. There are two main schools of thought as to why Trump won the 2016 election: that it was due to frustration from dispossessed Rust Belt workers or that it was racist. Klaas is convincing in asserting that the latter factor was the more significant (unemployment is lower than it has been for many years).

As with Republicans, a majority of white people –  including women - have agreed with him in all polls. Further, Trump’s voters averaged above the national average income. They were not only poor and white. They were also rich and white, female and white, and – most of all – male and white. Trump’s one skill is his ability to appeal to the worst instincts that lurk within the world’s greatest liberal democracy.

Michael Woolf’s popular account of life in the White House confirms the impressions readers might have gained from the news. Woolf was allowed unsupervised access to the White House and wandered in and out during the first year of the Trump era. In itself this confirms that the place was chaotic and random. No-one was in charge so they all assumed that someone else had OKed his presence. Trump himself would have thought that he’d get heaps of publicity. Woolf is known as a chronicler of celebrities, Trump’s kind of people. 

By creating rival factions Trump has set himself up to fail. It’s said that he operated this way in his business ventures so that the courtiers would need to compete with each other for his favour. His original Chief of Staff was a standard issue Republican whose personality and policies never emerge in this account. The family and his chief ideas man, Steve Bannon, manoeuvred him out.

Lenin Of The Right Vs Jarvanka

The main infighting was between Bannon – who was later fired himself – and his daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whom Bannon, Woolf’s main confidant, calls Jarvanka. The rellies, as he likes to remind us every so often, are unpaid. They have no set role or job description. This is not how any small business should operate, let alone the Government of the world’s one superpower. It’s never a good idea to hire family, whom you can’t fire, or give people the unaccountable time and space to make mischief.

The book might not have been written without Bannon, who seems to be the only person to have inhabited the White House since the election to have either brains or ideas. He was also Woolf’s main source of information. Unfortunately for America and the world Bannon was also the source of many of Trump’s worst excesses. He tells Woolf that he has three overarching goals: national security and intelligence, economic nationalism and “deconstruction of the administrative State”.

His “economic nationalism” buttressed Trump’s various walls, while his wish to “deconstruct” the administrative State is part of the reason Trump has lashed out at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the State Department, the United Nations, the Attorney General and the Justice Department, Congress, the Senate, federal judges, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton - and others.

This might seem to have some sort of libertarian or anarchic appeal, but it’s motivated by Bannon’s desire to create an American neo-fascist State. He calls himself a Lenin of the Right. A Bannon crony who hangs out at the White House is Richard Spencer from the National Policy Institute. “Let’s party like it’s 1933”, he shouted when Trump won. “Heil Trump” (1933 was when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany).

Part of the reason. The other reason Trump is sabotaging the State is that it confronts him with people who get in his way of being like Duterte or Putin. Trump doesn’t have the intellect to think systematically. He has no ideas or policies beyond those that he can approach as business “deals”. He doesn’t read even one-page summaries and various reports say he cannot listen to anyone for more than seconds.

Trump sees everything in personal terms. His “deals” are him versus everyone and everything. So, while Bannon is whispering nasty rumours about, say, the FBI so that he can replace its personnel with white supremacists, Trump sees only James Comey, the man who heads it, the guy who’s frustrating Trump’s immediate need.

It was Bannon who shaped Trump’s ride to power and it was Bannon who was greeted with “wild applause” when he told a business audience of his deconstructing desires (more accurate terms are “dismantle” or “destroy”). Woolf relates that “only a shared contempt kept (Bannon, Priebus and Kushner) from ganging up on one another”.

Trump of course feels the same, seeing his former Chief of Staff as “weak” and a “midget”; Bannon as being a “disloyal” ally who “always looks like shit”, while Kushner, his son-in-law, is a “suck-up”. Hapless Sean Spicer, the press secretary who had to confirm Trump’s lies, was “stupid and looks terrible”. Kellyanne Conway, his most loyal “surrogate” is a “crybaby”. And Jarvanka, whom he installed and needs, “should never have come to DC”.

“Good management reduces ego”, Woolf remarks as he sums up his account of life within the White House. “But in the Trump White House, it could often seem that nothing happened, that reality simply did not exist if it did not happen in Trump’s presence. This made an upside-down kind of sense: if something happened and he wasn’t present, he didn’t care about it and barely recognised it. His response was often just a blank stare”. And bad management has ego as its guiding principle.

Uniting Trump and Bannon was a mutual contempt for urban liberals, arty types, film stars, intellectuals, the sort of people that the Rogernomic crowd in New Zealand called chardonnay socialists, or, worse, elitists - Bannon and Trump being part of the downtrodden masses. Nothing could be more elitist than stylish but uppity Obama, who added to the awfulness by having quite the wrong skin colour.

Where Trump and Bannon again coincided was in the belief that a murky “deep State” was behind all the evils inherent in the FBI, the CIA and especially in the various investigations into possible Trumpian criminality and treason. For Trump it was the inevitable result of his petulant ignorance and narcissism.

Trump’s Conspiracy Theories

Unable to see past a childlike present tense, Trump resorts to conspiracy theories so he has a grand explanation of how maligned he is by an unfair system, by Them. Sad. For Bannon and the alt-Right the “deep State” is liberalism – and neo-liberalism. For both men it was liberalism and its usurping Kenyan black President that had enabled the evils of multiculturalism, immigration and taxation. The director of “deep State”, for whom the Special Prosecutor, Robert Mueller, and the rest are working is now … Hillary Clinton. She’s a villain with supernaturally evil powers.

During the campaign months, as folly followed folly, it had become common to hear people surmising that Trump had never intended his bid to succeed and that he was trying to sabotage himself. Woolf doesn’t quite say that this was a conscious tactic, but he does say that none of the cast of characters expected to win and even on election day they had done nothing to prepare for it.

One nice conspiracy of his own is offered by Woolf. One of the two steady and long term political Trumpians has been the New Jersey Governor, Chris Christie, who, when he was a state prosecutor, jailed Kushner’s father Charlie – who was blackmailing his brother-in-law - for income tax cheating. When Trump dropped Christie was it because Ivanka got to him? (The other longstanding mate is Rudy Giuliani, former New York Mayor).

The post-modern President, tagged the “post-literate” President by Woolf, connecting (like Mobutu) with the outside through “total television” does not know anything about that outside world except though the distorted screens of his needy ego. Who knew healthcare could be so complicated, Trump asked rhetorically, after he had been introduced to its most basic elements.

As Woolf confirms, he had no interest in the subject, except that it was something Clinton liked and thus it had to go, so his public remarks on the topic were less than eloquent: “This is an important subject but there a lot of important subjects. Maybe it is in the top ten. Probably is. But there is heavy competition. So, you can’t be certain. Could be twelve. Or could be fifteen. Definitely top twenty for sure”.

Woolf’s conclusion is that his is “a distracted nation, fragmented and preoccupied…. Alas, politics has more and more become a discrete business. Its appeal is B-to-B – business-to-business. The real swamp is the swamp of insular, inbred, incestuous interest. This isn’t corruption so much as overspecialisation. It’s a wonk’s life. Politics has gone one way, culture another. The Left-Right junkies might pretend otherwise, but the great middle doesn’t put political concerns at the top of their minds”. Knowing what the person presiding over the incestuous corruption wants to do about it is, in the words of one of Woolf’s sources, “like trying to figure out what a child wants”.

At the time of writing, all on one day in March 2018, Trump’s most loyal retainer, his Communications Director, quit one day after giving testimony to Congress; it was announced that Kushner had met bankers in the White House, after which they had granted him loans; four foreign countries, including China and Israel, were said to have worked at manipulating Kushner; Kushner’s security clearance was downgraded; Trump announced he wanted tariffs on steel, and Putin announced that Russia was developing an “invincible” nuclear weapon.

Whew. Which of these seems important when you read this? Who now can know? But what can be said is that as the surprises and the variables mount, the possibility of very nasty things happening gets more and more likely. The trigger could be the next big gun massacre or the next Central Park rape or some combination. What if the next outrage is committed by someone from a demographic group – that’s anyone who is not white and male - that Trump hates?

So, there can be no doubt that Trump is bad news. However, for all their contempt for the man, neither author has anything much to say as to what should be done. Woolf isn’t interested. His is a tabloid gossip session; policy is not his beat. Klaas, however, is a political junkie in the mainstream of the Democrats. This might be why, when he comes to his conclusions, he can offer us nothing more than saying that America needs to teach civics to its children. This is comically inadequate. If the books tell us anything for sure it’s that a post-literate, post-fact society won’t enroll for lessons.

AMERICA AND ME
A Film by David Bradbury, 2016

Near the start of “America And Me” there’s a shot of David Bradbury, an Australian film maker, unloading luggage and equipment from a train in Oakland as he sets out to look at the USA. With him are his wife and six-year old son. His ventures are modest in scale but he’s been working like that a long time. His relationship with America is sharply critical, but you sense he’s ambivalent, that it’s a country much like his own, that he wants to persuade Americans to change their ways.

He’s talking about Australia too. This is the unspoken impression we are left with as Bradbury interviews David Vine, a domestic critic of the “untrammelled capitalism” that neo-liberalism has unleashed on America, motivated by the greed of the rich elites who set the agenda. The result has been increased inequality and insecurity.

The millionaires are becoming billionaires but the unemployed and the homeless lie under bridges, hopeless. A cocaine addict is interviewed. He was jailed at 19, spending his wasted days making bombs for gang wars. Over the last 40 years, we’re told, the US jail population has soared by five times to 2.2 million.

Meanwhile the investment in its cities that is so needed is denied as huge sums are thrown at waging a series of “unwinnable wars”. Bradbury doesn’t elaborate on this; he doesn’t need to. The spectacular example these days is Afghanistan, spectacular in that the war seems endless, and policy makers don’t mind admitting publicly that it’s a stalemate. No-one can win.

We’re offered interspersed shots of the Trump-Clinton debates and quotations, often Biblical. Again, we don’t need to know detail about the President that is and the President that wasn’t to be. She would have been policy-as-usual; Trump will be policy as unusual. We’re offered a few thoughts about how American power has come to be so squandered and misdirected, enough to allow potential audiences to be guided into a deeper discussion.

At the end we return to Vine, who concludes that the present course is not “sustainable”. It’s a term that’s much over-used but here it’s bang on. The present trends of rising wealth gaps, increased environmental degradation and deeper social alienation cannot continue without some nasty shocks. That’s because neo-liberalism is the cause, the means through which the ills have been entwined. They are inter-related and inter-dependent. So, Vine is a wise guide when he says that progressives need to work to bring about change at “multiple levels”.

CHOCOLATE WARS
by Deborah Cadbury (2010)

- Linda Hill

I picked this book up thinking it would be a light commodity history like “Salt”or “The Devil’s Cup”. A history of chocolate, yes, but it’s also about Quaker capitalism and business ethics – with take-home messages for today. Cadbury, Roundtree and Fry were all British Quaker companies, as was Hershey in the US. The Quakers were one of the dissenting Christian groups that emerged in the 17th Century English civil wars. They have a personal, not institutional, relationship with God, and a mission to build a better world here on Earth. For Cadbury’s founders, business was about community, as well as family, hard work and personal austerity.

Quakers who did business and banked with each other developed a formal code of business ethnics, the “Trading section of the Christian and Brotherly Advices of 1738”, with regular updates. The Cadbury founder who had a moral issue with advertising would be rolling in his grave these days. Concerned about high levels of poverty around 1900, Cadbury built the first “garden town” for its workers with affordable cottages, parks, sports fields, schools and community activities, all funded by the business. 

All very fascinating, as were the chapters about Cadbury developing recipes for high drinking cocoa and chocolate, then milk chocolate, then “unit lines” (chocolate bars sold by unit, not weight), in competition with other “chocolatiers”, first in Britain, then in Switzerland and the US. By the 1960s Cadbury was a transnational run by the 4th generation, all modern educated men. I thought the story was turning into a bit of a hagiography at this point, but then the plot thickens. 

Goodbye To Ethical Capitalism

Modern financial thinking began to reshape the old ways of doing business. To fund further global development, Cadbury did a partial float on the stock market. Its Charitable Trusts were advised to diversify investment away from the Cadbury business as their sole source of revenue (in case we all stop eating chocolate?) The boys still ran the business but, as a global company, the Board and its Chair were now non-Quakers. 

“Returning value to stockholders” replaced Quaker values, and the short-term stock exchange gamblers bought in. The result?  In January 2010 there was a hostile share market takeover by Kraft, makers of plastic cheese and former subsidiary of Philip Morris (1988-2001). Cadbury’s Board Chair saw it as his job to recommend his shareholders to sell if the price was right. 186 years of Quaker business values and looking after the workers was “gone – and it was so easy”.  Just offer shareholders $US11.5 billion. 

This takeover story was educational, well worth a read. And it explains why a couple of years ago my regular evening favourite, a mug of Bournville Cocoa, became undrinkable crap. Around the same time, Cadbury’s Dunedin experiment with palm oil instead of cocoa butter in chocolate lost it market share to a little local family company, Whitakers.   

In October 2012, Kraft split into Mondelēz International, Inc., a global snacks company, and Kraft Foods Group Inc., a North American grocery products company. Mondelez’s Website shows a timeline history of Cadbury with no mention of Quakers.  Most production at Dunedin’s Cadbury factory was moved offshore and Mondelēz’s response to public outcry about loss of jobs – not to mention chocolate fish, jaffas and pineapple lumps – was a marketing launch of “Kiwi Favourites”.

However, there must have been some of that Quaker community philosophy still alive and well on the factory floor. In 2017 the workers formed the Otago Chocolate Company (Ocho), raising $2 million from the New Zealand public through crowd funding. As I sat down to write this, Ocho announced they now have a new site on Dunedin’s waterfront where they are setting up a new craft chocolate production using single origin Pacific Island beans. There’ll be tours and tastings.


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