Donald Trump is a bully. He is a braggart. He is venal. But, as this week’s ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas shows, he is also capable of acts of uniquely brilliant statecraft. The US president is a master at using the hard power of his office to force changes that make the world a better place.
Trump and LBJ both demonstrate how loathsome people can do good things
Fascinatingly, because it shows how we tend to look at politicians through a two-dimensional prism, those words could also be applied to another, relatively recent, US president: Lyndon B Johnson. Trump and LBJ both demonstrate how loathsome people can nonetheless do good things.
We are familiar with the many examples of Trump’s appalling behaviour, such as when he was caught on tape talking about kissing women and grabbing them between their legs: ‘I’m automatically attracted to beautiful – I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p****. You can do anything.’
Compared with LBJ, however, Trump is an amateur. To read Robert Caro’s magisterial multi-volume biography of the former president (the good news for those of us who have waited years for the final volume is that Caro has said he has now written over 900 pages of it) is to marvel at what a monster LBJ was. He was obnoxious, vulgar, self-absorbed, cruel and insecure. He humiliated his own staff and others for pleasure.
But he was also – as is Trump – deeply charismatic. Like Trump, he was able to focus on what actually mattered about an issue, disregarding years of received wisdom and irrelevant constraints. And like Trump, he was a brilliant communicator who had people hanging on his every word. (Unlike Trump, LBJ also had an exceptional intellect, and could grasp the important minutiae of policy in an instant.)
Meetings for LBJ were power plays. He would fart, burp, pick his nose and scratch his crotch. He invaded people’s personal space as a tactic to overpower them. Ben Bradlee, the former editor of the Washington Post, described how LBJ groped its owner Katharine Graham and would ‘bump’ up against the breasts of female Washington Post writers. He would keep the door to his toilet open as he relieved himself so he could be seen. Arthur Goldschmidt, a United Nations official, was in the Oval Office when LBJ walked into the toilet, ‘took a crap, then shaved and showered, all the while continuing his conversation as though what he was doing was the most normal thing in the world.’
LBJ was notorious for using aphorisms such as ‘straight as an Indian shits’. He once described US economic policy as ‘the worst thing that’s happened to this country since pantyhose ruined finger-fucking.’ He would check on the looks of potential female appointees and would comment if female White House employees gained any weight. He repeatedly used the N word, describing to the manual labour of his youth as ‘n—-r work.’ In a 1964 telephone conversation about his prospects of winning Texas in the presidential race, he said: ‘I think I can take every Mexican in the state and every n—-r in the state.’ (He had his Oval Office calls and meetings secretly taped, like his successor, Richard Nixon.) In a 1967 meeting in the Oval Office about possible black candidates for the Supreme Court, Johnson said: ‘When I appoint a n—-r to the bench, I want everyone to know he’s a n—-r.’ When there was rioting by blacks in Los Angeles in 1965, Johnson said he worried that, ‘Negroes will end up pissing in the aisles of the Senate.’
And yet LBJ was one of the great US presidents, whose time as Senate Majority Leader prepared him brilliantly for ensuring that his massive legislative agenda for civil rights, healthcare and welfare passed. Many of his programmes remain in effect today. Paradoxically, given his personal behaviour, his civil and voting rights legislation changed the US. He got the Civil Rights Act through Congress almost single handedly, at the cost of his own political power and the support of many of his political friends.
LBJ was, in other words, a shit who used his obnoxiousness for good ends.
Trump isn’t in the same league as LBJ, either as a shit or as a politician (at least yet). But like his predecessor, the very personal qualities which make him an unpleasant man give him an ability to change the world for the better. The Abraham Accords would not have happened without Trump being Trump. Nor would any other president have simply ripped up the appalling JCPOA, the Obama nuclear deal with Iran.
And now we have the Gaza deal – or more accurately, Trump’s Gaza deal. You might not like Trump, but the same qualities that make him so unpleasant, are changing the world for the better.
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