‘Red carpet’ president: Veteran journalist’s lessons from four years of covering Donald Trump

28/06/2024

A book by a veteran correspondent who covered the Donald Trump presidency closely, offers lessons as the embattled former President fights back with a bid for a second term.

In ST’s Asian Insider Podcast, Nirmal Ghosh hosts author Steven L. Herman, former Voice of America (VOA) White House Bureau Chief during the Trump presidency. Mr Herman, also a longstanding foreign correspondent with past assignments in Tokyo, Seoul, New Delhi and Bangkok, is currently VOA’s chief national correspondent.

Notwithstanding one conviction, and other pending cases against him, Mr Trump remains the frontrunner for the Republican nomination this year - and thus has a realistic chance of being elected United States President again in November.

The Republican Party’s Convention is set for July 15-18 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and thus far, no credible challenger to Trump has emerged. Mr Trump has been roughly neck and neck with his rival - President Joe Biden - in polls in a bitterly divided nation.

This raises the question of what to expect in an albeit hypothetical second Trump administration.

A look back at Trump’s tumultuous four years in office (2017 through 2020) through the pages of the new book - Behind The White House Curtain: A Senior Journalist’s Story Of Covering the President - And Why It Matters - holds some clues as to what to expect and how to deal with it.

Some world leaders - Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi and Shinzo Abe for instance - quickly learnt that President Trump enjoyed being feted, said Mr Herman.

Among other things, Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had memorably massive joint rallies in Houston, Texas in September 2019 and in February 2020 in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in which both leaders praised each other fulsomely, he recalled.

“Leaders he was visiting made certain to really roll out the red carpet knowing that Trump’s mood greatly depended on how he was greeted, not only with these sort of spectacles, but also the personal relationships and whether his ego was massaged to a great degree by these other leaders,” Mr Herman told ST’s Asian Insider podcast.

There were a few world leaders who understood this - including then-Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe who visited Mr Trump at the latter’s residence in New York City even before he was sworn in as President.

Likewise, Mr Trump had good relationships with Russian President Vladimir Putin - a former head of the KGB intelligence agency - as well as China’s President Xi Jinping.

Trump’s unorthodox approach produced potential breakthroughs, notably in the shape of his summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. However, the summits did not change anything; relations between North Korea and the United States remain the same as they were, Mr Herman noted.

“Trump, I think, was operating in a very similar fashion to what he was doing in New York City when he was essentially franchising his name. And his critics would say that for Trump, the announcements of the deals were more important than the follow through,” he added.

Mr Trump, when he was in New York City, had a symbiotic relationship with the press, especially the New York Post and the Daily News, Mr Herman said.

“When he got to Washington, D.C. I think he expected a similar treatment by the press corps here, but the White House press corps is very prickly... and they’re not going to give any President really a free ride,” he added.

“There might be a brief honeymoon period, but they never last long. And I think Trump was surprised and really offended by the type of treatment that he got...from very early on in his presidency.”

However, in historical context, that was not unusual, Mr Herman said.

During the second administration of George Washington (1793-1797), some Republican newspapers in Virginia were calling him incompetent, senile, corrupt, and a traitor.

“Throughout history, there have always been with some of the more prominent presidents, periods where there was this sort of hostility and outbursts” Mr Herman said.

“In that sense it wasn’t unusual, it wasn’t unprecedented, to see what we saw during the Trump administration, but I think it was a higher volume and much more sustained.” he said.

When Mr Trump used the phrase “enemy of the people” to describe the media, it took a lot of journalists aback, he said.

“This was a phrase that Joseph Stalin had used, the dictator of the Soviet Union, and when that phrase was used against you in the Soviet Union, it had very dire consequences,” he noted.

“A lot of people that we interviewed did not think - even if Trump was trying to have some sort of semantic flourish - that he should be throwing around these very dangerous phrases,” Mr Herman said.

“But of course, as we know, that plays very much to his base... painting the press as rivals who aren’t giving him a fair shake. And I would say probably most Trump supporters do see the media that way,” he said.

Produced by: Nirmal Ghosh ([email protected]) and Fa’izah Sani

Edited by: Fa’izah Sani

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