United States President Donald Trump makes no secret of the fact that his favourite television show is “Fox & Friends”, an early morning programme on Fox News Network. Starting in 2001, the show had a rocky few years before it became the conservative heartbeat during the administration of Barack Obama. The election of Obama in 2008 came at the same time as the financial crisis. The combination of the two—the election of an African-American man and the attrition of middle-class wealth—was the fire starter for the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party gathered together old-fashioned racists and those frustrated by the outsourcing of their jobs and the collapse of the value of their homes. They would turn, each morning, to Fox News to listen to “Fox & Friends”, which had no filter and no fealty to the truth. Trump was, and is, one of the most loyal listeners of this unhinged programme.
The format of the show is simple: three anchors banter and then the anchors entertain guests. The conversation is snappy, the concern for truth irrelevant. One of the anchors for the show was Heather Nauert, who had started her career as a business reporter. Heather Nauert, who has now been nominated as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, has not had any experience in reporting from outside the U.S. Her foreign policy credentials are irrelevant. What gave her the office was her post at Fox News as the anchor of Trump’s favourite show. It is what brought her to Washington, D.C., with Trump and what sends her back to New York now as one of the most visible U.S. government employees.
Trump was not only a fan of Heather Nauert’s television show; he had a regular segment on it. Once a week, Trump would phone in and chat with the anchors about his thoughts. It was a rambling segment, with Trump fulminating about the latest conspiracy theories, ideas cascading inside his head that he felt emboldened to share with millions of viewers. Whatever Trump wanted to say, he said it: for instance, that Obama was not born in the U.S., that Robert De Niro was not the “brightest bulb on the planet”, and that he—Trump—was not a racist. No one questioned him. Trump’s phone calls to Fox & Friends have not ended. He recently called in to give his own presidency “an A-plus. Nobody has done what I’ve been able to do,” he said.
One of the things he did was to hire Heather Nauert into the U.S. State Department where she was the spokesperson. Now, she might go to the United Nations. Trump’s nomination is not sufficient. She will have to go through a confirmation hearing, where senators will have the chance to question Heather Nauert about her foreign policy views and her experience. Her gaffes are many, often inappropriate and tone-deaf. But it is likely that she will survive the confirmation process and become the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
One of the reasons why no one in the Trump administration will hesitate to back her is that there are powerful men behind the scenes who want to downgrade the role of the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. in the U.S. government. They are using Heather Nauert as a puppet for their own ambitions.
Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton, a former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. himself, has gone on record saying that he would not mind if 10 floors of the U.N. building in New York simply disappeared. This is part and parcel of the frustration that people like Bolton have had with the U.N. as a set of institutions. They do not believe in multilateralism and would like to drive a U.S. agenda without any check by the other veto-holding states in the U.N. Security Council. Bolton and his allies have long denigrated the U.N., following a tradition that goes back to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, sent as the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. by Richard Nixon in the 1970s to destroy the U.N.’s credibility. It was not as if Trump had sent Nikki Haley, the current Ambassador to the U.N., so that she could restore ties with the institution and with the leading states in the Security Council. She did her best, but it was not enough. Nikki Haley’s personality prevented her from being a wrecking ball, but the policies she pushed certainly further isolated the U.S., which confirmed to Trump that he should just not take the U.N. seriously.
It is this disregard for the U.N. that is leading Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Bolton to remove the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. from the President’s Cabinet. This will make the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. a subordinate of Pompeo and Bolton, both of whom would then set the course for U.S. foreign policy. It would mean that the ambassadors from other countries to the U.N. would no longer need to take their U.S. counterpart seriously, while their own embassies in Washington will need to quickly establish lines of contact with these two men.
The resignation of Nikki Haley and the elevation of someone so outside the core of power as Heather Nauert means that Pompeo and Bolton will run the foreign policy without any interference from anyone else. These two men—both as eager to go to war as Attila the Hun—will now push harder to lash out both at what they call the “troika of tyranny” (Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela) and what the U.S. has long considered “rogue states” (Iran and North Korea). Even the fig leaf of a U.N. mandate for war will not be considered.
Heather Nauert’s loyalty is to Trump, and Trump’s ears are burning red with the bile stuffed into them by Pompeo and Bolton. If Trump says what Bolton and Pompeo tell him to say, fewer and fewer people in his Cabinet and in the institutions of state remain willing to tell him he is wrong.
Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly has now said he will depart from the White House by the end of December 2018, with every indication that Trump will bring in a new Chief who has complete loyalty to him. That has been Trump’s modus operandi. He has increasingly surrounded himself with psychopaths and has begun to denigrate all those (including his former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson) of being incompetent and disloyal. The administration has several Fox News veterans and others from the swamps of neoconservatism. More will come. They will validate not Trump’s fantasies and rants but those of Pompeo and Bolton—men far more dangerous because they are both competent and intelligent. They believe that “America First” must mean that the rest of the planet bows before its power. That policy, not so different from the general tenor of U.S. foreign policy, will now be intensified through more war and more arrogance.
