Donald Trump’s inauguration now looms large. Less than a week and he will be the President of the United States. Only time will tell what sort of President he’s going to be, namely because he has no prior political record for us to go on and no real policies to speak of for us to analyse.
However, that doesn’t stop Donald Trump making grand pronouncements and statements about all of the things he’s going to ‘make great’ once he officially takes office. Yesterday, his first interview with a British newspaper was published in* The Times*. As if the phrase ‘President Donald Trump’ didn’t still ring as thoroughly surreal, the interviewer was none other than disgraced Brexit backstabber Michael Gove.
As if the above wasn’t enough to get your head around, the main take away from Trump’s interview was that he thinks ‘Brexit is going to be a great thing’. Today the pound has slumped to a thirty-year low against the dollar because of all the uncertainty over Brexit but, don’t worry guys, it’s OK because Donald Trump thinks it’s going to be ‘great’.
At this point, it’s probably worth reminding ourselves that Donald Trump has said a lot of things which are either bombastic, categorically untrue or a heady combination of the two.
The list of things Donald Trump has said which aren’t quite true is long. Let’s remember when he said that he had won ‘Electoral College in a landslide’.
The reality, however, is that Trump is in fact one of a very small number of American presidents who won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote making him what the Washington Post described as a ‘minority president’. More than this, his victory in several states was actually pretty narrow.
Let’s also take a moment to consider one of Trump’s very few clear election policies: building a wall between the United States and Mexico and forcing Mexico to pay for it. Mexico’s President, Enrique Pena Nieto, says that he has never agreed to this and has absolutely no plans to fund any such wall.
In his exclusive interview with Michael Gove Trump also said that he’s going to help ‘make Brexit great’ by doing a ‘deal with Britain’. Characteristically he didn’t offer any detail on exactly what this would entail. Perhaps there are people out there who find that reassuring but, again, based on his rhetorical flair for the undeliverable it’s hard to believe that Trump is going to be the key to Britain’s Brexit success. Indeed, Trump has also said in no uncertain terms that his priority is the US economy at the expense of other nations. He’s not in office yet and he’s already threatened to hit car manufacturer BMW with a tax because they want to open a factory in Mexico and not America.And, how do we know Trump won't change his mind? In any case, as a member of the EU tarrifs which UK exporters pay on the things we send to America are already pretty low. So if a 'good' deal is done between Trump and our government it's hardly groundbreaking, it's maintaining the status quo.
So, what did we learn from Michael Gove’s Trump interview?
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Donald Trump is the guy that promises you the world on the first or second date. He’s going to enrich your life, improve it beyond recognition. You’re going to see the world together and ride off into the sunset blissfully. You fall for it and start drinking the Kool Aid. After the third or fourth date the façade starts to crack, after the fifth you never hear from him again. Weeks later you find out he was messaging a mutual acquaintance all along and hedging his bets.
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Michael Gove is a questionable writer. Frankly we expected better of the former Secretary of State for Education’s prose. ‘Donald J Trump appears like a man who has been plugged into some power source where the dial has been turned up to levels well beyond what the safety regulations would recommend’, Gove writes. What exactly does he mean here? Plug sockets don’t have dials, do they? Does he mean a generator? If he means generator, he should just say that. His use of ‘some power source’ is redolent of my central heating knob not apparatus delivering a hyperbolic cartoon electrical shock. That’s a very weak, flawed metaphor which fails to pack a punch. GCSE English C for Mr Gove.
From here on in we should all steel ourselves and make scepticism with a large pinch of salt our default setting when reading, watching or listening to anything Donald Trump says. After all, actions speak louder than words and, so far, he’s all talk. And, as they say in pop psychology, 'past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour'. Let's measure Donald Trump but what he does, not what he says.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.