This is ridiculous. Even Napoleon didn’t go this far.
But then, consider this by Jonathan Martin, one of the foremost purveyors of Village 2.0 conventional wisdom in which he reveals that up until now, just everybody has assumed that Trump has a lock on the White House. It has long appeared to me that the beltway press has felt that way and it’s nice to know that my perceptions weren’t wrong. But I honestly did know about the rest of this:
It has been close to an open secret in the diplomatic corps that America’s allies and adversaries are anticipating a Trump restoration. Discussing who will fill his second-term Cabinet and White House isn’t just the stuff of parlor games in embassies and overseas capitals — it has taken on a what-will-we-do urgency since Trump sealed the GOP nomination last month.
It is one thing for Hungarian President Viktor Orban, the contrarian and would-be authoritarian troll of the continent, to descend on Mar-a-Lago for an ersatz state visit. But the degree to which other countries are preparing for a Trump victory was illustrated by a far more unlikely visitor this week to the former president’s exile in Xanadu: British Foreign Minister David Cameron.
The British government hastened to say how common it was for top officials to meet with American opposition figures. But when he was prime minister in 2012, Cameron didn’t dispatch his foreign minister to Boston, let alone Lake Winnipesaukee, to visit Mitt Romney. The British received Romney at 10 Downing Street, their turf, when he happened to be in town for the beginning of the Summer Olympics.
In fact, as I was reminded this week, it was about this time in 2012 that Cameron came to the White House for a pomp-filled visit and state dinner. The then-prime minister compared the then-incumbent up for reelection, Barack Obama, to Theodore Roosevelt and all but endorsed his reelection, praising Obama for having “pressed the reset button on the moral authority of the entire free world.” (Yes, students of diplomatic sport history, that was the same trip where Obama brought Cameron to the NCAA basketball tournament play-in game in Dayton, which was surely difficult to translate into the Queen’s English.)
In fairness to Cameron, who may be gone with the rest of the Tories by the time Trump would be sworn in again, he did have a more urgent task in Palm Beach: softening the former president’s Ukraine opposition ahead of a House vote on aid to Kyiv this month.
Yet Cameron, more than any country’s foreign minister, knows the message he sent by showing up at Trump’s gilded door.
And, of course, Trump knows the message being sent. An official from another Western country, not Britain, told me Trump’s circle is advising a number of embassies to dispatch ambassadors and ministers to Mar-a-Lago to, well, rekindle relationships.
A high-ranking Biden official said it was not surprising but rather “unsettling” that Cameron would go to Mar-a-Lago. “They’re scared of how destructive he is and they’re seeing if he can temper him,” this official told me, with a measure of sympathy, because the British know Trump is bent on vengeance.
Yet right as major countries have embarked on mollifying Trump over six months before the election, there were reminders that his polling advantage in key states may not last. The fashionable assumption among Trump’s elite critics — perhaps the way of demonstrating this time one is not out of touch — that he’s a lock looks increasingly misguided or at least premature.
Foreign allies are assured that if Biden wins anyway, he and the Democrats won’t jeopardize the world or or American interests out of pique and vengeance as Trump would so they know they have little to lose by currying favor with Trump at this point. And the fact that Cameron was trying to get Trump to change his mind on Ukraine aide is also true (but he wasn’t successful. ) Still, it’s a very bad look.
They shouldn’t bother. Trump is very susceptible to flattery but he hates Europe and his alliance with Putin is written in stone at this point. If he wins, Ukraine is dead in the water and so, very possibly, is Europe. If they are looking at contingencies in case Biden loses in November there’s no point in looking to Trump for support.