by Mark Austin
The Trump punch-up was over the issue of the Dreamers – the children of illegal immigrant parents who the Democrats were insisting be given protected status. Republicans and Democrats in the Senate could not agree on a funding bill with Dreamer protection linked to it. Trump the dealmaker wanted to forge an agreement; Trump the base seducer wanted to stand firm and appear tough on immigration; Trump the flip-flopper couldn’t make up his mind; and Trump the gunslinger just wanted to fire off tweets blaming the Democrats for the crisis.
Result: Trump sat stewing in the White House while political chaos reigned. In the end, the shutdown was short-lived and it was the Democrats who backed down, but Trump was still the target of their criticism.
The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said: ‘The great dealmaking president just sat on the sidelines.’ Many Republicans also bemoaned a president who didn’t seem to understand the complex issues involved, and who didn’t stand up to be counted when it mattered. I think it is unfair criticism − Congress got him into the mess, and he felt Congress should get him out of it.
But the point is that the Democrats backed down, and Trump could claim victory very quickly. At this point, the gunslinger Trump kicked in and he taunted the Democrats, not something that would make a deal any easier. It was as if winning the political battle was more important than the issue itself. I am not sure he actually cared about the Dreamers.
The whole spectacle of the government shutting down as both parties squabbled over highly partisan policies was pretty unedifying. It was a good example of why Trump’s election mantra – ‘Drain the Swamp’ – caught the mood of many Americans. The whole situation reminded me of a line in one of Marvin Gaye’s protest songs: ‘Politics and hypocrites is turning us all into lunatics.’
And if the Trump circus wasn’t enough, my arrival in Washington coincided with hurricane season in the United States.
I was still trying to adjust to the time difference when my mobile rang at some ungodly hour of the morning. It was Emily Purser, a Sky News producer, who uttered a sentence I will never forget. ‘Mark,’ she said, ‘sorry to wake you at 6.30 but the office want to send us to the Bahamas.’
As a welcome to my new job, I thought that would take some beating. Unfortunately, as so often happens in this line of work, we would be flying in just as everyone else was leaving.
Hurricane Irma was on its way, having already devastated the Caribbean islands of Barbuda and St Martin. Now it was the Bahamas, and then possibly Florida in its path, and the Sky News foreign desk decided a spot of storm chasing was what I needed.
We flew to Charlotte in the Carolinas and managed to jump on one of the last flights into Nassau, capital of the Bahamas. There were ten people on the flight and we were three of them. You’ll not be surprised to hear that the Bahamas isn’t such an attractive holiday destination when it’s in the path of a storm packing winds of 150 miles an hour.
We got there, we went live several times predicting a doomsday scenario and we were the main story on Sky News for a few hours. The producers loved it; the people of the Bahamas braced themselves and feared the worst. Not for the first time, I felt distinctly uncomfortable that a major catastrophe – or, in this case, an imminent one – should cause such palpable excitement in newsrooms.
Anyway, mercifully for the people of the Bahamas, Hurricane Irma turned left at the last moment and virtually missed us. It slammed into Cuba instead. We were in the wrong place, with no story, and the airport was closed.
We were stuck. At the insistence of our cameraman Duncan Sharp, we checked into a hotel called the Atlantis. It was vast, gaudy and awful, and the walk to my room was ten minutes via a ghastly casino where I lost two hundred dollars at blackjack.
A week later, however, we did get hit by a different hurricane on a different island. This time it was Hurricane Maria, which smashed into Puerto Rico as a Category 5 storm with winds of 155 miles per hour. I had never experienced anything like it. From a balcony at the Sheraton hotel in San Juan, we filmed its ferocity and the destruction it caused. We ventured out once it eased slightly to a Category 4, but I was knocked over, bruising my ribs, and we abandoned any notion of courage under nature’s fire.
The following day, we headed out to the worst-hit areas and filmed the devastation, which was considerable. Vast areas of one of the poorest American territories were destroyed. Homes, businesses and hospitals were damaged, and 90 per cent of the island was left without power. The electric grid was so badly hit that the authorities predicted some parts of the island would be without electricity for six months or more.
I recount this story because it is more instructive of Donald J. Trump than it is of a hurricane called Maria.
Trump’s response was slow and his disengagement was obvious. As the real extent of the damage and suffering became clear, he was more concerned with picking a fight with NFL stars who were kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality against African Americans. He showed scant interest in the ordeal of 3.3 million people in the American territory of Puerto Rico.
Eventually, the mayor of the Puerto Rican capital San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, was pleading for help on American network television. ‘We are dying,’ she told President Trump.
Trump responded not with sympathy, understanding and increased aid and resources for the island, but instead with a blistering attack on the beleaguered mayor and her people. Typically, of course, it was delivered on Twitter: ‘Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything done for them.’
This is typical Trump. When under fire, fire back with interest. He simply cannot accept criticism, act on it or ignore it, and move on. He has to bring a shotgun to a fist fight and use it. It may satisfy his bristling pride and ego, but in this case it seemed massively counterproductive. His response brought a marginally negative story to the front burner and turned it into a partisan political scrap. Most Puerto Ricans identify with the Democrats, not the Republicans.
There may have been other examples of American presidents demeaning and humiliating public officials trying to cope with a disaster… but I can’t think of one.
And what about ‘they want everything done for them’? This is the bit that is either unwittingly or deliberately borderline racist – it doesn’t really matter which. It is red meat for his core support, America’s disillusioned white working class who voted for him in such numbers. This is the bit that says Puerto Ricans are lazy, looking for handouts and expecting something for nothing.
And that wasn’t all. The next tweet in this Saturday morning sequence told us even more about Trump. It read: ‘The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.’
Nasty to Trump… there you have it. You have a major humanitarian crisis on your doorstep, you have millions of people without power, drinking water, enough food or medical supplies, and yet the president perceives this unfolding drama as being about him. He is unable to view it through any other prism.
This is astonishing stuff from an American president. In a few impetuous tweets, you have the Trump character laid bare. But you also have a glimpse of the political operator at work. He is somehow turning what should be a vote-losing, badly handled disaster into an event that plays well with his base. I don’t know how he does it, but he does it. Time and time again.
Trump is hard to admire. His manner is offhand and often childishly antagonistic, his style of diplomacy is brash and one-dimensional. He is dealing with both North Korea and Iran in precisely the same way: threaten to unleash the world’s most powerful military, impose tough sanctions, and wait for them to cave in. Indeed, it’s as if the same swaggering brinkmanship that served him so well in the shady, thug-dominated world of Atlantic City casinos and New York real estate is now apparent in his dealings on the international stage. His crude, back-alley scr
apping with Kim Jong-un suggested we were rushing headlong towards nuclear disaster, led by two narcissistic schoolyard bullies. But it brought North Korea to the table. It’s impossible to predict how it will work out, but maybe Trump is on to something. Maybe it really is that simple when dealing with dictators, Iranian spiritual leaders and China’s communist autocrats. It’s a risk, though. Fine if it works, less ideal if it doesn’t. His options narrow alarmingly if it doesn’t, and conflict becomes much more likely.
Trump’s way of international dealing is a different way but not necessarily a wrong way. A lot of his supporters broadly agree with him, and it certainly doesn’t mean he is incapable of succeeding. You may sometimes deplore the way he conducts himself, but it would be a foolish mistake to consider his methods and ideas unpopular or out of touch.
Treat him with contempt at your peril, because he revels in that and thrives on it. When Hillary Clinton referred to a section of his support as a ‘basket of deplorables’, she was playing into his hands. It rallied his core supporters against her, and may also have persuaded some undecided voters to go for Trump. She paid the price at the polls.
Trump is a president who does things unconventionally but he is also, in many ways, a president to be reckoned with. I’m on the political roller-coaster ride of the century… and I am loving every minute of it.
NOTES FROM A SMALL NEWSPAPER
THE FIRST LESSON I learned in my first job in journalism was that no one likes subeditors. They are, in truth, a breed apart. The ‘subs’ on the Bournemouth Evening Echo were – by and large – elderly, pipe-smoking, intimidating, eccentric figures, who occupied a rather gloomy, tobacco-smoke-filled office where reporters were seldom welcome.
Peter Tait, Jack Straight and Austin Brooks, wonderful names all, were veterans of the game I was starting out in. They were characters, but it seemed to me they derived their working pleasure from unnecessarily redrafting stories, rewriting your best paragraphs, and competing among themselves for the most cryptic or opaque headlines. And although we were grateful for the corrected mangled sentences, poor spelling, split infinitives and other grammatical howlers, they seldom, it seemed to us reporters, improved the way a story was told. Looking back, that was harsh, unfair and largely unjustified; but that’s the way we reporters felt.
In 1977, however, all that changed. There was a much younger addition to the subeditors’ office. He was a bearded, bespectacled fellow from Des Moines, Iowa, who had arrived in England as a backpacker, fallen in love with a British girl, eventually pitched up in Bournemouth, and landed himself a job on the Echo. He cut an incongruous figure in the subs room, and not only because of his American Midwest accent.
He used to do things few of his fellow subs would ever bother to do. For a start, he actually talked to junior reporters, and even deigned to venture into the reporters’ office. On one occasion, the newsroom door swung open and I could see he clearly had me in his sights as he headed straight for my desk. He asked if he could pull up a chair − another first, by the way; most subeditors just told junior reporters what they were doing. No one ‘asked’ us anything.
I only have a vague recollection of the story he wanted to talk about; it was a court case involving a prominent local businessman accused of assaulting his wife. But I do remember it was the first time we had properly met. I also recall he had rewritten the intro and the end, and had moved the quotes about in the middle. I had to acknowledge that it was much improved by his intervention.
As he rose to return along the corridor to the subs office, he said, ‘Anyway, nice to meet you, Mark. My name’s Bill… Bill Bryson.’
Yes, that Bill Bryson. Before he became famous, and before he’d written about the Bournemouth Evening Echo in a way I can only aspire to… and hopelessly fail.
In Bryson’s book of travels around Britain, Notes from a Small Island, his section on the subeditors’ office was priceless. He describes one colleague ‘so old he could barely hold a pencil’, who would routinely open one of the high windows with a long pole kept for the purpose: ‘It would take him an hour to get out of his chair and another hour to shuffle the few feet to the window and another hour to finagle it open and another hour to lean the pole against the wall and shuffle back to his seat.’
His recollections of Bournemouth are equally hilarious:
The parks used to be described on maps as the Upper Pleasure Gardens and Lower Pleasure Gardens, but some councillor or other force for good realized the profound and unhealthy implications of placing Lower and Pleasure in such immediate proximity and successfully lobbied to have Lower removed from the title, so you now have the Upper Pleasure Gardens and the mere Pleasure Gardens, and lexical perverts have been banished to the beaches where they must find such gratification as they can by rubbing themselves on the groynes. Anyway that’s the kind of place Bournemouth is – genteel to a fault and proud of it.
How I wish I had that story when I was on the Echo!
The Echo still lives on (though it now has Daily Echo on the masthead), and its survival is something to cherish in an environment where many local papers have long since disappeared. I have to admit that learning my trade there was one of the great fortunes of my life.
I joined from school instead of going to university as most of my friends did. My starting pay was precisely £36.28 per week, and I will never forget my first day. My light blue Ford Cortina Mark II was more of a skip on wheels than a car, but in between bouts of infuriating unreliability, it did its job. And on Monday, 18 July 1977, that job was to get me to the art deco offices of the Echo by nine o’clock sharp. I was the new junior reporter, and I was utterly petrified.
I was to report to the office of the editor, Mr William Hill. A large, stooping, austere figure, he would seldom venture from his dark, wood-panelled inner sanctum. He wanted me to sit in on the morning editorial meeting and introduce me to some of the people I was to be working with. When they trooped in, what struck me was that they all seemed quite old and quite male. In fact, there was only one woman in the meeting: Sally Ford, who compiled the Echo Diary, a local gossip column of sorts, but relatively gentle, certainly not scurrilous, and, in truth, as uncontroversial and unprovocative as the paper itself. But Sally was good at it. She got out and about, knew a lot of people and took no nonsense.
I came to rather like Mr Hill, but it seemed to me his philosophy was not to do anything that would risk upsetting the readers, though quite how he knew anything about his readers was always something of a mystery to me. He never seemed to leave his office.
But he ran a tight ship, knew the sort of paper he wanted to turn out, and left you to get on with it as long you didn’t make any serious howlers. And, in my eyes, any shortcomings he may have had as an editor were more than made up for by his inexplicable decision to employ me, a decision for which I will be eternally grateful.
So there I was that Monday morning listening to the news editor, Carl Whitely, a loveable Yorkshireman with the sharpest instinct for news and two talented sons who worked as reporters on the same paper.
The newsroom had a big desk in the middle for the junior reporters. The single desks around the outside, by the windows, were occupied by the senior hacks. We trainees would aspire to them; you’d made it then. All around were untidy stacks of yellowing papers, discarded cuttings, well-thumbed phone books and overflowing notebooks. Filling the air, particularly as deadline approached, was cigarette smoke and the incessant clatter of the manual typewriters; no computers in those days, or mobile phones. How on earth did we cope? But we did. The tools of the trade back then were chewed biros, appalling shorthand and a good pair of sturdy shoes. ‘Put in the legwork, lad,’ Carl used to say, ‘and the stories will come.’
On that first Monday, after the morning meeting, I was told to report to the office of the deputy editor, Pat Palmer. It was an altogether unnerving experience. He sat at his desk, taking snuff while looking through the readers’ letters piled up in front of him.
When I walked in, he looked up briefly and then returned to his letters. I stood there uncomfortably for what seemed like ages, and then he told me to take a drawing pin from the dish on his desk. On the wall behind him was a huge map which almost precisely represented the circulation area of the newspaper. He beckoned me over towards the map.
‘Shut your eyes, turn around a couple of times and then stick the pin into the map, BUT KEEP YOUR EYES SHUT,’ he bellowed.
Trying to ignore the overwhelming feeling that I was in the presence of a madman, I did what he asked. He peered at where my pin had landed.
‘Ah, Stanpit! An interesting village. Off you go,’ instructed Mr Palmer.
He wanted a double-page spread by the Wednesday. I had two days to find my notebook, find Stanpit and, most alarming of all, find a story. And not just any story. It had to sustain eight hundred words across the centre pages of the Echo.
‘And just remember,’ he said as I headed out of his office, ‘there’s a story in everyone and everywhere. Shut the door on your way out.’
I felt nauseous as I walked rapidly back into the newsroom, grabbed my coat and car keys and rushed out of the building with a sense of rising panic. It was already midday.
There’s not a lot in Stanpit… or there wasn’t in 1977. There’d been a lot more going on there in the eighteenth century, when the historic coastal village near Christchurch was teeming with shipwrecked smugglers who would fight regular battles with well-armed tax collectors. But I figured that was an old story.
I thought a drink at the village pub, The Ship In Distress, would be a good place to start, but the best thing about that pub was the name. (It’s now a very pleasant gastropub, by the way.) A couple of lunchtime drinkers sat at the bar bemoaning the price of a pint, and the landlady said a local Tory councillor was having an affair with a leading light of the Townswomen’s Guild. Or so she’d heard. Promising, I thought, but not really what the Echo was after.
