Earlyish in my journalistic career I was interviewed for a job by the late Robert Maxwell, now perhaps best known as the father of Ghislaine. For those too young to remember, he was an overbearing, quixotic, mercurial press baron with ambitions to be as rich and powerful as Rupert Murdoch. When he fell off a boat in unexplained circumstances in 1991 that ambition was still unrealised. Oh, and it turned out he was a crook.
The interview was delayed by an hour or more as assorted flunkies were ushered in to bend the knee to the great man. Time stood still. A butler scurried around in white gloves. And then it was our turn—my prospective editor and me.
It soon became clear that, while my putative boss wanted me, Maxwell didn’t. He fired off a barrage of hostile questions and insults which grew in pitch and intensity until he growled: “Do you take drugs?”
All niceties and social norms had vanished. I was in the court of an autocrat and I had two choices: accept him on his own terms or walk out of the room. I rather wanted the job—bureau chief in Washington—so I quietly denied any form of substance misuse. “Are you a communist?” he bellowed next. “We’ll find out, if so.”
I assured him I was no red. “Now, when can your wife come to be interviewed by me?” Um…
It was all over in 20 minutes. I had the job – but I had also discovered how charismatic autocrats work: they break all the rules—ALL the rules—and you take them on their own terms or you’re toast.
Welcome to the second coming of Donald Trump. Like Robert Maxwell he trashes the conventions of how things should be done. You play by his rules. And as Leo, the leader of the Scorpions, tells John Travolta in Grease: “The rules are there ain’t no rules.”
And thus it comes to pass that a weekend Fox News presenter Pete Hegseth is Trump’s pick to be the defense secretary, overseeing a service employing more than two million people and a budget of nearly $900 billion. A Q-anon adjacent anti-vaxxer is in line to be the health secretary. And someone who cosied up to President Bashar al-Assad and is a darling of the Kremlin’s media apparatus is the choice to be in charge of the US intelligence agencies. Well, why not?
Who should be US ambassador to Israel other than Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who believes there is no such thing as a Palestinian; no such a thing as the West Bank; no such thing as settlements; and no such thing as an occupation? The UN is irrelevant in his mind: Israel’s boundaries are decreed by Almighty God. That should go well.
And I haven’t even mentioned the man-child Elon Musk, or Matt Gaetz, subject of FBI and congressional probes into sex trafficking charges, as Trump’s first pick to head the Justice Department—to be the actual attorney general. In Washington this week I met several distinguished lawyers whose jaws were still on the floor.
They rightly suspected that he could never survive a confirmation hearing—and Gaetz himself has now withdrawn his name from consideration, although he denies the allegations against him. Why nominate him in the first place? Was Trump testing the loyalty of Maga senators? Was Gaetz an outrageous stalking horse for a more palatable alternative? Was he a bit of chaff to distract attention from the sheer awfulness of his other appointments?
But there’s a fourth possibility: that Trump is behaving in this way just because he can. As with Maxwell, it’s futile to try and square the man’s behaviour with any previous conventions or norms. He demands you take him on his own terms. And the American people have just decided they’re fine with that.
This leaves the rest of the world in a quandry. You wonder how the top spooks at MI6 and GCHQ feel about cosying up to Tulsi Gabbard, accused this week by former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley of being “a Russian, Iranian, Syrian and Chinese sympathiser.” That’s quite the CV to be head of US national intelligence.
And so on—through trade, the environment, Nato, and much, much more—the world’s leaders are left scratching their heads. There is no point in trying to double guess this cast of misfits. They have simply been picked for their loyalty. Trump knew that Gaetz was, by any conventional measure, an absurd choice as attorney general. Buy the very act of nomination tells us a lot about what comes next.
Perhaps just as worrying are the nominees who are not exactly unqualified but will combine loyalty with extreme ideologies. I’m thinking of Brendan Carr, who is likely to lead the Federal Communications Commission [FCC], which has immense powers to investigate and/or regulate the media, including the internet.
Trump has repeatedly advocated stripping major broadcasters such as ABC, NBC and CBS of their licenses. Will Carr tamely do his bidding? You might ask, why else is he there?
Carr shares with his friend Musk a conviction that all content moderation—the attempt to curb the most ugly fringes of social media, including fact-checking—is censorship, pure and simple. He believes there is a “censorship cartel”—they include Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft—which needs to be dismantled.
His particular target in recent is an innocent enough outfit called Newsguard, which has developed a transparent rating system to help people evaluate the reliability of news organisations. In an age of information chaos, with the internet awash with gushing floods of mis- and disinformation, conspiracy theories and attempted electoral malpractice you might think an organisation like Newsguard would deserve a modest pat on the back. But, no, to Carr it is part of the censorship cartel and he has it in his crosshairs.
Now here is a parting of the waves with most of the rest of the world. Europe and the UK have been belatedly scrambling to work out how to handle an epidemic of bullying, fraud, disinformation, hate speech and child sexual exploitation, along with content that could lead to suicide or self-injury. We are in the early days of legislation which should bring some transparency and regulation to some very dark corners of the digital space while placing a premium on free speech.
But Tump, Mask and Carr seem to want to have none of that. They are free speech absolutists and will reject anything that appears to infringe a rather fundamentalist view of the US First Amendment. In this, as in so many other ways, Trump’s America is on a collision course with many other democracies.
In the coming weeks and months there will be lots of headlines about the more lurid candidates that Trump has launched—even if, like Gaetz, they crash and burn under the spotlight. But keep an eye on what’s happening under the surface. Whether it’s attacks on the media or the appointment of hundreds of conservative-leaning judges we are entering unchartered waters.
There ain’t no rules with autocrats. Maxwell knew it. Trump knows it. Buckle up.
