What I found behind Trump’s showy façade

My colleague Kai Diekmann, of the German newspaper Bild, and I were whisked up to the president-elect’s office in a lift plated with reflective golden panels and operated by an immensely dignified African-American attendant kitted out in frock coat and white cotton gloves. It was as though the Great Glass Elevator from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had been restyled by Donatella Versace then staffed by the casting director for Gone with the Wind.

Yet while there was both elaborate security and careful ceremony about our journey to Trump’s base on the 26th floor, when we eventually got there the atmosphere was relaxed and businesslike. After the briefest of waits in his outer office we were ushered in for our interview.

The Trump operation has been run so far with what at times has appeared either blithe insouciance or active hostility towards the whole political and media establishment, but he greeted Kai and me as though we were two potential Trump Tower tenants. It was all boyish bonhomie and gushing sales talk. He even complimented me on my appearance, not just the first time anyone has ever said anything nice about my looks but also telling evidence for his many critics that he is either prepared to lie outrageously at the drop of a hat or has shockingly poor judgment.

As we settled down to talk the only other member of Trump’s team in the room was his 28-year-old press secretary, Hope Hicks. A corporate PR executive who was headhunted by Trump to help on his political campaign, she was a composed and mostly silent presence in sleeveless shift dress and knee-length boots, interrupting only very occasionally to remind us when certain comments were emphatically off the record. In my experience most senior international politicians have a pretty extensive entourage with them when they meet the press, so it says a great deal about Trump’s exuberant self-confidence that he had just one aide in the room.

Of course Trump has a kitchen cabinet he relies on to rehearse his lines and test out his thinking. And just before we were admitted he had been conferring with his two closest advisers, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his chief strategist, Steve Bannon. Kushner looks younger than his 36 years but, as Trump explained during our conversation, he has the president-elect’s total trust and has been charged with helping to broker a Middle East peace deal.

Bannon, who until recently ran the provocatively right-wing website Breitbart, is a former naval officer and Goldman Sachs banker credited with executing the strategy that secured Trump the White House.

Bannon’s success has guaranteed him pride of place in the demonology of the liberal left and he’s been accused of every form of hate speech of which mankind is capable, including antisemitism. That allegation sits incongruously, to say the least, with his close personal friendship and political alliance with Kushner, who is an observant Orthodox Jew and a staunch Zionist. In person, Bannon is disconcertingly charming and he is clearly intellectually wide-ranging in his thinking, but for most in Washington his views, and his role in the Trump triumph, make him an irredeemably sulphurous character.

I wouldn’t want anyone to suspend their critical faculties when it comes to assessing Trump, his team and their plans. And, as Theresa May has rightly pointed out, some of his past comments are clearly unacceptable, while some of his policy positions are, to me, indefensible. But now that he is just days from entering the White House, I think it’s appropriate to try to look in a clear-eyed way at what we might be in for.

Trump’s unprecedented — and unpredicted — victory has so disorientated critical commentators and political opponents that there is an almost unseemly willingness to believe the worst about him and his team. For many he appears to exist in a space beyond the zone in which normal political courtesies are observed.

Victory, however, allows Trump the opportunity to disarm his critics by proving their worst fears to be phantoms. It is, of course, far too soon to know if he will take that path in office and surprise his opponents by demonstrating that President Trump will be a different proposition from candidate Trump, but in his conversation with us he was at pains to be gracious and generous.

He showered praise on almost everyone we discussed, from the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker (a “very fine gentleman”) to Barack Obama (“he’s been very nice, yeah, he’s been nice . . . one-on-one”). He brandished a new year’s card from the Chinese president with a beneficent wave and shared his most recent letter from Theresa May with a boyfriend’s pride.

There is, of course, an element in Trump’s reaction to all these overtures of the outsider delighting in acceptance, the boy from Queens surpassing even the toniest elements of the Manhattan elite in his rise to the very top.

And indeed the whole decor and demeanour of the president-elect’s corner office underlines how much he draws strength from status. From the red leather armchair in which he sat as the presenter of The Apprentice, which rests in front of the window looking over Central Park, to the framed magazine covers festooned over every wall, chronicling his business triumphs, Trump’s office is an echo chamber of his achievements.

However, business and media success — impressive as it may be — is now simply a prelude to the drama of the Trump presidency. And while so much of America is excited by the break from the past that Trump’s victory promises to bring, much of the rest of the world is, frankly, terrified.

Yet the Trump we met was much more inclined to conciliate than confront. Indeed Trump had invited Kai and me specifically to show geopolitical generosity.

He’d asked us to come along for a general discussion about Britain, Brexit, Europe and the world and he didn’t disappoint in the breadth of the issues he covered. Conversation with the president-elect is much more like tuning into talk radio than an exercise in Socratic dialogue. He overwhelms interjections, interruptions and objections with the sheer force of his personality.

A question about Brexit would segue into a critique of Angela Merkel’s error in admitting so many Syrian refugees, then a brief follow-up question on the German chancellor’s policy would unleash a torrent of criticism towards George W Bush for invading Iraq: “It was one of the worst decisions, possibly the worst decision ever made in the history of our country. We’ve unleashed — it’s like throwing rocks into a beehive. It’s one of the great messes of all time.”

And then, with scarcely a pause for breath, he would flick through an intelligence briefing on the situation in Afghanistan and launch into another riff on world affairs.

“I looked at something, uh, I’m not allowed to show you because it’s classified — but I just looked at Afghanistan and you look at the Taliban — and you take a look at every, every year it’s more, more, more . . . and you say, you know — what’s going on? . . . Afghanistan is, is not going well. Nothing’s going well — I guess we’ve been in Afghanistan almost 17 years — but you look at all of the places, now in all fairness we haven’t let our people do what they’re supposed to do. You know we have great military, we’re gonna have much greater military because we’re gonna have — you know right now it’s very depleted, we’re gonna have great military, but we haven’t let our military win.”

However, it would be a mistake, I think, to read into this apparent spontaneity and garrulousness a lack of discipline or an absence of focus. In the same way as Trump Tower has an attention-grabbing front but a much more sophisticated interior, so the man himself operates in a much more nuanced fashion than his torrent of verbiage would lead many to believe. He has assembled some impressive figures to serve in his cabinet — most notably his defence secretary James Mattis. Trump has been clear that he expects, and will welcome, different views around his cabinet table the better to inform his own decision-making. There is no guarantee that he will follow the best advice he gets but, before any of us are too quick to pass judgment on how successful he may be in office, we should at least acknowledge that he made fools of many of us in winning the prize in the first place.

His ascent to the presidency involved beating not only all of his Republican rivals, but upending the assumptions of the entire political establishment — columnists and consultants, funders and favour-mongers — so he is beholden to none of the traditional Washington power centres. That, alongside a Republican majority in House and Senate, gives him almost unprecedented freedom of manoeuvre.

I know he has been vulgar, sexist, grasping and divisive. But I also appreciate how tired America is of an arid war of position in which different politicians proclaim their superior virtue without providing evidence of how they have transformed lives for the better.

From our conversations it is clear that Trump has a plan, involving lower taxes for US companies that operate in the old country and higher taxes and tariffs for those who try to use cheap labour to steal American jobs. It is also clear that he wants to use the power of his office to forge better relations between Britain and America. Will he succeed? Well, it will be fascinating finding out. And as the man himself might have said: it’s going to be a very special relationship — very, very special.