All the world’s a circus and Donald Trump front and centre again won’t help us
Last week did not go out like a lamb. On Friday Kwasi Kwarteng, chancellor of the exchequer for 38 days, was dismissed and Jeremy Hunt was unexpectedly drafted in to replace him as the prime minister’s lightning conductor. In Whitehall, games of “What if…?” have had to be suspended because reality is now expected to outdo anything a tired mandarin mind can concoct.
Chaos, however, is not restricted to British politics, and we would do well to keep our eyes open. In Washington DC, the select committee of the House of Representatives examining the 6 January 2021 attack on Capitol Hill last week issued a subpoena for Donald Trump to appear as a witness. It might seem obvious to hear from the man some people believe at least connived at and at worst masterminded last year’s attempted coup. But this is likely to be a decision which generates more heat than light.
Donald Trump is a unique politician. He has carried to its logical conclusion an approach to truth and falsehood which is wholly transactional, and he understands the game of politics only through the prism of his own narrative. It is not that he is willing to lie, misrepresent and obfuscate in order to achieve his desired ends: it is that he has no real recognition of that being a transgressive act. His words suit his immediate priorities at the time they are spoken, and carry no other weight or intention.
To haul him in to answer questions is to play into Trump’s game. It gives him a platform to yet again paint himself as defying “the institutions” and the “mainstream media” which tar him as a liar. Either he appears and uses that platform for his own means or, as the current betting goes, he ignores the subpoena in defiance of those who, in his mind, “stole the election”.
To be in contempt of Congress has its consequences. Only in July, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former intellectual anchor, was convicted by a federal jury of ignoring a similar subpoena and awaits sentencing later this month. But Bannon is not a former president of the United States. In any event, most eyes are now on the mid-term elections in November, when there is a good chance that the Republicans will gain control of the House of Representatives. That would shift the balance of power on the select committee and change the whole complexion of its deliberations.
This is Trump’s ideal milieu. He is an agent of chaos, happiest when tearing up rules and conventions, and plotting his own erratic course through events. It was always unlikely that a congressional committee would proceed calmly to an agreed narrative of the facts of 6 January and a consensus on what the consequences would be; but it is unfortunate, to put it very mildly, that the investigation should be so melodramatic.
The twists and turns in Washington are easy to dismiss as politics-as-showbusiness, especially when our own political scene becomes so unpredictably fantastic. But we have to keep our peripheral vision sharp. One of the duties of a government is to be able to multi-task.
This is all the more important when the noises-off are in the United States. To paraphrase Metternich, when America sneezes, the world catches a cold. The US is now so dominant in terms not only of politics but of economics and broader culture that it is myopic to imagine we can ignore what happens there, a point driven home uncomfortably by The Donald’s careless reference to Boris Johnson as “Britain Trump”. Although our polities remain distinct, they are inextricably interlinked.