How to lose friends and alienate people: Trump’s brand turns toxic as foreign friends flee

The Japanese were keen to broadcast that prime minister Shinzo Abe was the first foreign leader to meet Donald Trump after he got to the White House. The Indians were happy to publicise that Narendra Modi was the first to be invited for a working dinner at the White House. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu basked in their countries being chosen by the US president for his first official visit in office.  

There was a steady roll call of heads of state welcoming Trump,  among them Vladimir Putin who allegedly helped him win the 2016 election; Kim Jong-un, who outmanoeuvred him diplomatically; China’s Xi Jinping, who the US president flattered in his tweets while there was a trade war looming between the two countries; Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, while he was crushing dissent at home; Theresa May and Boris Johnson who were desperate for an American trade agreement after Brexit.  

Meanwhile, the president’s family was busy making money from business deals abroad. His son Donald Junior travelled to Indonesia on a Trump-branded resorts project. He visited India to sell condominiums in a Trump-branded tower. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, who retained a stake in a family business while a White House adviser, received trademarks in China related to her fashion ventures. Her husband, Jared Kushner, a senior adviser to the president, maintains a stake in his family business, which had sought investors in China and the Middle East.  

But in the space of one tumultuous, violent day in Washington, the Trump connection, politically and commercially, has plummeted in value, becoming something toxic after the president incited a mob of his supporters, including white supremacists and neo-Nazis, to attack the Capitol.  

There are increasing calls, from Republicans as well as Democrats in Congress, former intelligence chiefs and military officials, that the 25th amendment to the constitution is invoked to declare the president unfit for office. House speaker Nancy Pelosi has warned she will initiate impeachment proceedings if vice president Mike Pence fails to act. Resignations from people within his administration, in protest at Trump’s behaviour, have continued, with education secretary Betsy DeVos becoming the second cabinet member, after transportation secretary Elaine Chao, to leave.  

Others to go include deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger and Mick Mulvaney, the former chief of staff and current special envoy to Northern Ireland. There are reports that national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who took over from the recently departed John Bolton, is also considering leaving, along with deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell.  

Trump’s defeat in the election was a big blow to those who had invested in him from abroad. But it was not necessarily a terminal one.  

Trump could have remained a powerful and vocal presence in the background, with a Republican Party he had remodelled to fear and support him, on course to be in charge of the Senate and block Joe Biden’s administration on a number of fronts, including foreign policy and defence.  

There was also the possibility Trump would run again in 2024. And who is to say that the man who polled 73 million votes this time would not do well against a Democrat incumbent hamstrung in Congress, unable to implement its programme fully, and having to cope with the huge economic and social cost of the coronavirus pandemic?  

That prospect of Trump redux seems remote now. The outgoing president managed almost single-handedly to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in Georgia, hitherto a Republican bastion, through his antics. His record now is losing the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate, in one term, something unequalled since Herbert Hoover at the time of the Depression in 1932.  

Trump’s first venture into Twitter after his suspension from the social platform was to blame the mob he had incited to riot for the violence, charging their actions as “heinous” and claiming he was “outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem” of the Capitol siege that he incited, and saying those who “broke the law will pay”. His desire, he professed, was for a “smooth, orderly transition” to Joe Biden’s administration.  

This may have been an effort to head off the 25th amendment or an impeachment process or possible prosecution for incitement over the Capitol assault. But not unexpectedly it drew cries of betrayal on social media from his supporters.  

Some said they had received “a punch in the gut” and “a stab in the back”. One said “I feel like puking” while another concluded “he fooled us, he was always part of the swamp”. Some of Trump’s high-profile cheerleaders were also abandoning him, with the Fox News host Tucker Carlson saying he believed his political “shelf life” was over.    

Considering all this, it seems unlikely, at the moment, that Trump will be able to seamlessly restart his political career or that foreign states would be banking on him doing so.  

There were condemnations of the assault on the houses of Congress from some of the governments abroad which have cultivated Trump but, in most cases, an avoidance of blaming him directly, although Boris Johnson was one of the exceptions to this.

Some countries have undoubtedly benefited from Trump’s presidency. His administration has played a key role in Israel establishing formal diplomatic relations with the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. The US embassy was moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in a great propaganda boost for Netanyahu.

Prince Mohammed bin Salman was protected by the Trump administration over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and both Saudi Arabia and the UAE over their conduct in the Yemen war.

But the chances of Trump carrying out an attack on Iran during his last days in office, as the Saudis and the Israelis reportedly lobbied him to do, has now all but disappeared in the aftermath of the violence in Washington, and the subsequent dissipation of the departing president’s authority.

Other beneficiaries included Erdogan whose hands were freed in Syria by Trump pulling out US troops, and Kim Jong-un who continued with his missile programme in North Korea without facing additional sanctions from the US.

The Trump administration focused on strengthening its partnership with Japan and India, as well as Australia, in the Indo-Pacific, as a counter to Chinese hegemonistic expansion. But Barack Obama was also seeking to do that before being sucked back into the Middle East with the rise of Isis.  

There have been no major concessions for Japan and India in terms of the stand-off on trade with the US. A trade deal did not materialise for Britain either and it remains unclear how soon it can take place under Joe Biden who has pronounced that it is not a priority.  

“There was a surge of efforts by a number of states to get Donald Trump onside when became president, that is the case with all new US presidents, but perhaps more so in the case of Trump because of the transactional view he took on forming policies,” commented Robert Emerson, a British security and foreign policy analyst.  

“Some countries undoubtedly did well out of this, but there is a question of how long-lasting their achievements will be with Trump and his people now no longer in power and providing support. The rush has already started for foreign states to get alongside Biden’s people, and this should accelerate now that Trump has had to accept a normal transition to the new administration.”