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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Mad Men: Trump’s Perilous Approach to Dictators
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Mad Men: Trump’s Perilous Approach to Dictators
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- [00:00]
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Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and guests about Politics. It's Thursday, January 9th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. President Trump's sycophancy toward dictators has been one of the defining features of his presidency. Some have explained it as a crazy like a fox strategy, a version of Richard Nixon's handling of communist regimes. Nixon told his chief of staff, HR Haldeman, I call it the Madman theory, Bob. We'll just slip the word to them that, for God's sakes, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry and he has his hand on the nuclear button. But the madman theory doesn't explain Trump's openly expressed envy of Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, or his blatantly contradictory approach to Iran, where he's both bellicose and fearful of a war. On Tuesday evening, just days after Trump ordered the assassination of general Qassem Soleimani, who commanded Iranian military forces in the region, Iran attacked two Iraqi military bases housing US Troops Speaking yesterday about the attack, Trump started out by saying, by.
- [02:35]
Donald Trump
Removing Soleimani, we have sent a powerful message to terrorists. If you value your own life, you will not threaten the lives of our people. As we continue to evaluate options in response to Iranian aggression, we, the United States, will immediately impose additional punishing economic sanctions on the Iranian regime.
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Dorothy Wickenden
He concluded, on a different note, we.
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Donald Trump
Must all work together toward making a deal with Iran that makes the world a safer and more peaceful place. We must also make a deal that allows Iran to thrive and prosper and take advantage of its enormous untapped potential.
- [03:19]
Dorothy Wickenden
Evan Osnos, a New Yorker staff writer, joins me to discuss how Trump's view of totalitarian leaders and of his own presumed abilities to work with them shapes a dangerously deluded approach to foreign policy. Evan, welcome back.
- [03:35]
Evan Osnos
Thanks, Dorothy. It's a cheerful start to the new year.
- [03:38]
Dorothy Wickenden
It sure is, isn't it? So let's begin maybe by talking about the piece you just published in the New Yorker about the U. S. China relations you mentioned there. Trump's rhapsodizing about Xi Jinping's absolute power. He said about Xi's suspension of term limits, maybe we'll want to give that a shot someday. He played it as a joke, but, you know, that's another one of his habits. We first saw it during the 2016 campaign when he publicly invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton's emails.
- [04:11]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, I mean, Xi Jinping in some ways is Donald Trump's ultimate imagined idea of what it means to be president because he is the leader of a one party state. He has no term limits, so he'll be in power as long as he chooses. From the very beginning, Trump imagined that he would have this natural personal relationship with Xi Jinping. He used to talk about how they were great friends, he invited him to Mar a Lago, and then he went over to Beijing. And you may remember this was in the first year of the presidency. They really sort of laid it on pretty thick. They gave him the full pageantry, they gave him a tour of the Forbidden City, they gave him a crowd of cheering children to meet him upon arrival. And he gushed about it in the press conference. And what I think the Chinese, and I heard this too, that Chinese organizers for Trump's visit were talking about the fact that he was, as they put it, uniquely susceptible to that kind of flattery. And I think what we've seen develop over the last three years has been this very clear emphasis, almost an obsession, on the appearance of respect and weakness. I will add one other thing about Xi Jinping and Trump's relationship to China, that's really interesting and sort of gets overlooked, and that's that he has a kind of two track mind about China. On the one hand, he has embarked on this very tough policy towards China over trade, over national security. And then at the same time, he has this fascination, this really, this affection for Xi Jinping's power. And so when Xi Jinping has appealed to Trump personally in phone calls or at the G20 meeting, Trump has really made these sharp turns in policy. I'll give you an example. There was a time when the US Was going after a company called zte, a Chinese tech company, and Xi Jinping asked Trump personally to lay off, and Trump did. And he's also created openings for Huawei, the Chinese tech company, also to have that kind of breathing room. So something in that personal relationship, in personal power, is just absolutely central to Donald Trump's governance.
- [06:25]
Dorothy Wickenden
And of course, these other leaders sense that vulnerability in him and they exploit it to the hilt. And it's interesting that you mentioned the 2017 summit at Mar a Lago. Many of his most memorable encounters with all of these leaders have come at these flashy summits. You know, his first trip overseas as president was to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. So he had this to say about Mohammed bin Salman during a meeting with the Crown Prince at the G20 summit in 2019, which, by the way, came after the CIA concluded that bin Salman had ordered the assassination of the Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who, with the.
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Donald Trump
Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, a friend of mine, a man who has really done things in the last five years in terms of opening up Saudi Arabia. And I think especially what you've done for women, I'm seeing what's happening. It's like a revolution in a very positive way. And I want to just thank you on behalf of a lot of people and I want to congratulate you. You've done really a spectacular job. We've had some meetings on trade.
- [07:31]
Evan Osnos
I think Donald Trump's affection, sort of enduring affection for mbs, as he's known, is partly related to something that is a theme. We also see that Donald Trump gives particular credence to the offspring of powerful leaders. You see this both in his relationship to mbs, but also with Bashar al Assad. He said, when even before he was President, Trump said of Bashar al Assad, he said, I think in terms of leadership, he's getting an A. This is when Assad was, of course, conducting a war in his own country that was just full of human rights violations. It was really. And this is, as we all know, after this decades long pattern of abuses by the Assad regime. So, I mean, we're going to talk more about Kim Jong Un, but I think it's worth reminding ourselves that he just returns to it over and over again is his fascination with Kim Jong Un's ability to have taken over from his father, Kim Jong Il. And, and as Trump said, he said this in an interview, he said it in a press conference. He says, I'm reading here, he says, you take it over from your father and I don't care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have. If you could do that at 27 years old, I mean, that's 1 in 10,000 that could do that. I think we understand each other. He said that on Fox News. That's just an incredibly revealing insight into his psychological analysis of somebody like Kim or mbs, you know, and his own.
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Dorothy Wickenden
Dynasty, by the way.
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Evan Osnos
Totally. And, you know, I think we all have come to understand that so much of Trump's conduct is driven by this constant fluctuation of insecurity and dominance and confidence and so on. And a lot of it goes back to him trying. And this is, you know, at risk of getting a little Freudian here, but that's, you know, we're trying to understand the guy's mind. It does go back to how much he felt he had to both carry on his father's legacy and also distinguish himself by getting out of Queens, getting to Manhattan, advancing the family dynasty.
- [09:35]
Dorothy Wickenden
So, you know, he taunted Kim in 2018 by tweeting memorably, my nuclear button is a much bigger and more powerful one. But he followed that up with his 2018 summit in Singapore with Kim, and then a second one in Hanoi in 2019 and during a rally in West Virginia, I think that was in 2018. He described his relationship with Kim as akin to falling in love after Kim wrote what he called beautiful letters to him.
- [10:05]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, well, the sort of instruments of power, the demonstrations, the minor trappings of power, make a huge difference to him. We see this even in his own aesthetic, when he thinks about how he wants to appear. I mean, if you think about the visuals around his press conference talking about Iran, the first thing we saw was this very careful assemblage of all of his national security aides standing out there waiting in kind of silent fealty for the leader to come. Trump loves that pageantry. He used it all the way back in his business days. And he really sees these leaders who are not, in his mind, impeded, troubled by democracy, as inhabiting the true leadership. And I think for that reason, he finds it attractive to imagine that he could strike up a natural rapport with them. I think, can I say, it's worth pointing out the obvious here, Dorothy, which is that that's not how they see it. They are actually operating from much more kind of conventional diplomacy, which is that they see themselves as driven by national interest. So Xi Jinping doesn't have the remotest interest in a personal relationship with Donald Trump. What he cares about is asserting China's national interest. And that's where this approach that Trump has had has run up against the practical realities of national security strategy.
- [11:33]
Dorothy Wickenden
Well, and you see it totally with Putin and with Kim as well. You've traveled to North Korea, you've written about the regime, and as I recall, in that piece, you talked about the prospect of a nuclear confrontation entering kind of a realm of psychological calculation that was much like that during the Cold War. But we have two very different kinds of leaders right now making these existential strategic decisions. This is not JFK and Nikita Khrushchev.
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Evan Osnos
Right, Right. If we compare this to previous iterations of these sorts of confrontations, you never had Khrushchev and Kennedy talking about having any kind of personal rapport. I mean, it's just not relevant, really. And in some ways, the North Koreans, as I talked to them over the course of a few months during this period of this intense nuclear standoff, they were trying in real time to decode what it was Trump was saying about personal leadership. They thought at first that this was a charade. They thought it was just a trick. They couldn't quite imagine that an American president was actually seeking to build the relationship on some imagined foundation of personal friendship. It just struck them as implausible. And so they would read his tweets, trying to figure out if this was some complicated triple play and so on, and they kind of concluded that no, actually. And this is, I think, a measure of Trump's intellectual and personal seclusion. He's grown up entirely within the confines of the American post war ascendancy. His total understanding of national security, foreign affairs, and power is coming from a position of dominance that he doesn't even fully appreciate because it's, you know, it's like asking a fish about water. They don't know what water is. It's just all they've ever inhabited. So he doesn't really understand what it feels like to be a weak nation to be Kim Jong Un trying to kind of punch up. And I think the North Koreans ultimately exploited that and bought themselves a lot of time. Katie.
- [13:40]
Katie Drummond
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director.
- [13:43]
Evan Osnos
I'm Michael Colori, Wired's Director of Consumer, Tech and Culture.
- [13:46]
Dorothy Wickenden
And I'm Lauren Good.
- [13:47]
Katie Drummond
I'm a senior correspondent at Wired.
- [13:50]
Dorothy Wickenden
And our show, Uncanny Valley, is all about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [13:56]
Katie Drummond
At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech.
- [14:05]
Evan Osnos
Right. So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you.
- [14:16]
Katie Drummond
Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [14:26]
Dorothy Wickenden
So maybe you can help explain what's going on with Iran, because the pattern is different there. He's been pretty persistently hostile toward the leadership with his travel ban, his sanctions, very tough sanctions, his rejection of the nuclear deal, the Obama nuclear deal. The New Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz wrote this week, Ayatollah mystified that he is the only dictator Trump dislikes. But Trump also has repeatedly said he doesn't want war with Iran. So what do you see in his thinking here?
- [15:01]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, in some ways, I think his relationship to Iran is the most interesting of all these because it's the most contradictory or it has sort of these two strong competing elements. So one is if you go all the way back to Trump's early days, really. Historians have identified this as his first comments on foreign policy. It was in 1980. He gave this interview with Rona Barrett, the gossip columnist, and they were doing it when Trump was 34 years old. He was just coming onto the scene. It was. It was right before Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. So this was at the height of the Iran hostage crisis.
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Dorothy Wickenden
If you could make America perfect, how would you do it?
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Young Donald Trump
Well, I think that America is a country that has tremendous, tremendous potential. I think that much like the mind, I think that America is using very, very little of its potential. I feel that this country, with the proper leadership, can go on to become what it once was. And I hope, and certainly hope that it does go on to be what it should be.
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Dorothy Wickenden
What should it be?
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Young Donald Trump
Well, it should really be a country that gets the respect of other countries today.
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Dorothy Wickenden
Is respect the most important thing, in your opinion?
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Young Donald Trump
Well, respect can lead to other things. When you get the respect of the other countries, then the other countries tend to do a little bit as you do, and you can create the right attitudes. The Iranian situation is a case in point. That they hold our hostages is just absolutely and totally ridiculous. That this country sits back and allows a country such as Iran to hold our hostages, to my way of thinking, is a horror.
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Evan Osnos
He went on to say that he thought that America should send in troops. He likened the situation to Vietnam. And he said, if we did that, I think right now we'd be an oil rich nation. And I believe that we should have done it. We're talking about 40 years ago. Donald Trump is beginning to form a sense of Iran. And with credit to Tom Wright, who's the scholar who really made this connection. There's a fascinating point that this was the formative experience of Donald Trump's early years of tiptoeing into worlds beyond New York and real estate. He was just starting to think about foreign affairs, and the Iran hostage crisis became one of those defining moments. He has also tried, and we sometimes forget this, he's tried the other tack recently. Over the course of the last few months, you remember, Trump tried to open up a dialogue with Iranian leadership. There was this great piece which I think was broken by Robin Wright on newyorker.com about how Trump had tried to phone in to a meeting between Rouhani and French French President Macron. And Rouhani said, no, he rejected it. But it was this kind of, you know, it was a very Trumpian sort of gambit where he was going to try to make this dramatic gesture. And the fact that he was rejected by Rouhani. And then in December, you had Iranian backed protests at the US Embassy in Baghdad. It was beginning to be described in the press as Trump's Benghazi. And that seems to have been the moment when he basically said, all right, I'm chucking out this prospect of more dictator bromance and I'm just gonna go and do something radical.
- [18:24]
Dorothy Wickenden
Well, and this is where his deep insecurities are so incredibly dangerous. They just cause him to react impulsively to perceived sights.
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Evan Osnos
Yeah, the prospect that he might look weak seems to be one of the big triggers in his patterns. And he has always said he wants to be dangerously unpredictable. And unpredictability is in some ways the, you know, it's sort of the opposite of what diplomacy is based on. And that's why he has pursued it.
- [18:53]
Dorothy Wickenden
Well, especially in that region. It's really horrifying for instance, predictably, Iran reacted to the killing of Soleimani not only by ordering airstrikes, but also by restarting its nuclear program. And also, surely the killing has strengthened North Korea's own determination to expand its nuclear capabilities.
- [19:15]
Evan Osnos
It is true that the more we get drawn into whatever is to follow in the Middle east, that gives other American opponents breathing room. And so we're likely to see those kinds of issues come back to the fore, I think.
- [19:34]
Dorothy Wickenden
And what do you think about domestically? This is an election year. You know, often foreign policy doesn't play a huge role. It hasn't played a role so far in any of the Democratic debates. Has Trump's can he defend his foreign policy on any of these fronts?
- [19:52]
Evan Osnos
I think it's going to get very hard for him to square the basic contradiction. You know, there is this basic contradiction in his foreign policy approach from his days as a candidate when hethere was a certain number of voters who really loved the idea that he said, I am going to bring American troops home. If he's in fact now moving in the opposite direction, you know, to use the terms that he would use, that goes against his brand. And I think that becomes very hard politically. So we'll see. I think he's going to be trying to figure out how to reconcile these two very different impulses.
- [20:26]
Dorothy Wickenden
And let's see how the Democrats, if the Democrats can exploit this.
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Evan Osnos
Yeah, exactly.
- [20:33]
Dorothy Wickenden
Thanks so much, Evan.
- [20:34]
Evan Osnos
My pleasure, Dorothy. Thanks.
- [20:39]
Dorothy Wickenden
Evan Osnos is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of Age of Ambition, Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. This has been the political scene. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app and find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com Feel free to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Our theme music is by Russell Gillespie. This program was produced by Alex Barron and kylie warner for newyorker.com Dorothy I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
- [21:18]
Katie Drummond
What the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis, and maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.
- [21:45]
Evan Osnos
I want a shark that, that eats.
- [21:47]
Katie Drummond
The Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
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Evan Osnos
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.
- [21:59]
Katie Drummond
Week we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false? You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the big interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
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Donald Trump
From.
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Evan Osnos
PRX.