POLITICS
‘There Are No Boundaries’: Experts Imagine
Trump’s Post-Presidential Life if He Loses
From profiting off his lifetime Secret Service
protection to trolling the Biden administration by cozying up to dictators
around the world, Trump’s stint as ex-president could be as disruptive and
norm-busting as the last four years have been.
By GARRETT
M. GRAFF
10/30/2020
03:50 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/30/imagining-post-president-trump-433704
Garrett M.
Graff (@vermontgmg) is a journalist, historian and author, most recently of the
New York Times bestseller The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11.
He is the director of cyber initiatives at the Aspen Institute. He can be
reached at garrett.graff@gmail.com.
Being an
ex-president can be a cushy and quiet life for the most part. Jimmy Carter
builds homes; George W. Bush paints. After leaving the White House, Barack
Obama went kite-surfing with Richard Branson on his private island in the
British Virgin Islands.
None of
that, though, seems likely to be in the cards for Donald Trump if he loses
reelection Tuesday and in just 80-odd days leaves the White House.
A restless
figure with few interests outside his own business and political career, no
hobbies besides playing golf at his own properties and few traditional friends,
Trump thrives on public attention and disruption; this, after all, is a man who
couldn’t even spend an entire weekend cooped up inside a hospital while ill
with Covid-19 earlier this month and had to take a joyride around Walter Reed
Medical Center to wave to supporters.
So if he
loses the White House, what new phase would begin on January 21?
In
interviews, historians, government legal experts, national security leaders and
people close to the administration have a prediction that will disquiet his
critics: The Trump Era is unlikely to end when the Trump presidency ends. They
envision a post-presidency as disruptive and norm-busting as his presidency has
been—one that could make his successor’s job much harder. They outline a
picture of a man who might formally leave office only to establish himself as
the president-for-life amid his own bubble of admirers—controlling Republican
politics and sowing chaos in the U.S. and around the world long after he’s
officially left office.
“Can he
continue to make people not trust our institutions? Can he throw monkey
wrenches into delicate negotiations? Absolutely,” one former Trump
administration official says. “He can be a tool. He’ll be somewhere between
dangerous and devastating on that extent.”
A president
unwilling to respect boundaries in office is almost certain to cross them out
of office. Experts envision some likely scenarios—a much-rumored TV show and plans
to use his properties to profit off his lifetime Secret Service protection,
perhaps even continuing to troll the Biden administration from his hotel down
Pennsylvania Avenue—and some troubling if less certain ones, like literally
selling U.S. secrets or influence to foreign governments.
Trump has
already mused that maybe he’ll leave the country if he loses, but few expect
him to willingly depart the American public stage. He would leave the White
House with one of the largest social media platforms in the world—including 87
million Twitter followers—and a large campaign email list with a demonstrated
small-dollar fundraising capability that could be used to aid other
MAGA-friendly politicians—or, just as likely, to sell Trump’s own wares. And
he’s presumably going to need every dollar he can squeeze from his businesses
and the office he will have just left. As the New York Times has been
documenting, Trump personally and the Trump Organization more broadly has more
than $1 billion in debt coming due in the years ahead. If he leaves office,
he’ll have to be busy raising the cash to pay it off.
Yes, Trump
will probably grab the low-hanging fruit favored by ex-presidents past:
profiting off the White House with a memoir—though many in the publishing industry
don’t think he’ll get that much money for it—and living off a spigot of
government money as he settles into the post-presidency. But those presidential
traditions will provide just a fraction of the hundreds of millions Trump
needs, and are unlikely to satisfy his entertainer’s ego.
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“He’s still
the leader of a movement,” says Nancy Gibbs, a journalist and historian who
co-wrote The Presidents Club about the lives of former presidents. “I’m hard
pressed to recall a past president who left office with a movement intact that
wasn’t transferred to someone else. I don’t see him giving it up.”
Which
means, from even those first minutes, Trump’s post-presidency would almost
certainly be unlike anything America—or the world—has ever experienced.
Assuming he’s able to settle any legal challenges arising from the presidency
and doesn’t spend the rest of his days in tax court in New York state, Trump as
a 74-year-old man has a normal life expectancy of around 11 years, and most
former presidents actually far outlive the average American, so he might have a
couple decades to disrupt the world’s most exclusive club of ex-presidents.
“It’s a
safe bet that many of the rules and patterns of past presidents will not apply
to him,” says Gibbs. “I long ago stopped putting limits on what he might do or
sell. There are no boundaries.”
A career
salesman will find himself with more connections around the world than he’s
ever had before—and also with more grievances against people he feels
mistreated him and forced him from office prematurely. “I put two years as the
over-under on groundbreaking for Trump Tower Moscow,” says one former national
security official. “It’ll be a huge F.U. to all the Russia coup plotters.”
Here’s what
might be in store—both the traditional and the very untraditional—for a former
President Donald J. Trump—and the unique worries it may raise for the country:
The Memoir
As a
defeated Trump weighs his post-presidential paydays, a memoir from the
bestselling author of The Art of the Deal and 14 other books might be the most
obvious move—albeit not quite the record-breaking check he might hope.
Usually,
presidential memoirs are some of publishing’s most predictable home runs. Even
George W. Bush, who sold his presidential memoir for a relatively modest $10
million, a sign of his unpopularity upon leaving office, ended up with a
massive bestseller, selling more than 2 million copies in just over a month.
Barack and Michelle Obama, together, received north of $60 million for their
memoirs; the first installment of his, which is scheduled to be released on
Nov. 17, will likely dominate the weeks after the election this year.
In
conversations with a half-dozen publishing insiders this week, they predicted
that a publishing house would pay “mid-seven figures” for Trump’s memoir,
closer to the Bush range than the Obama range and a fact that surely would
rankle the competitive Trump. Why the comparatively low estimate? While books
about Trump have proves some of the year’s biggest sellers—from John Bolton to
Bob Woodward to Mary Trump—the ones criticizing him have dramatically outsold
the ones praising him. A Trump book would still be a major draw for his devoted
fan base, with a potential for seven-figure sales, but it’s unlikely to become
the blockbuster of Michelle Obama’s memoir—which might be the bestselling
memoir of all time.
Also,
Trump’s unpopularity and divisiveness are likely to make prospective publishers
think twice before rushing to participate in a major auction for the book. The
insiders I spoke to all squirmed at the possibility of their own houses
tackling a Trump memoir. “There’d be walkouts, protests galore,” one editor
said, pointing to the controversy earlier this year when publishing giant
Hachette announced it would publish a memoir from Woody Allen. It backed down
after widespread criticism and a staff revolt.
“I think a
lot of publishers would stay away from it,” said one senior editor. “You
wouldn’t have 10 publishers bidding—you’d have two and at that point, they can
pay whatever they want,” says another.
Many
publishers have dedicated conservative imprints, which might find a Trump title
irresistible, but the clearest route for Trump might be to follow his son’s
model and self-publish. Donald Jr., after publishing a bestseller last year
that sold more than 280,000 copies but attracted controversy because of the
bulk purchases by groups like the Republican National Committee, decided to
self-publish his follow-up book earlier this year—a move that usually
guarantees more uncertainty in distribution but a higher percentage of the
underlying sales.
Trump’s
bald-faced record of deceit, lies and spin in the White House and on the
campaign trail—he’s averaging one false or inaccurate statement every 45
seconds at reelection rallies—might give him an even better reason to skip the
traditional publishing houses and self-publish: He’d be able to say anything he
wants, exactly how he wants to say it, with no pressure from an editor or a
publisher’s skittish corporate lawyers.
The
Government Dole
As he
leaves office, Trump would have the chance to decide how and where to set up
his post-presidential life—and where to direct a spigot of taxpayer dollars
that will continue to flow to him for the rest of his life. Former presidents
are eligible for a range of taxpayer-paid benefits, including a roughly
$200,000-a-year pension for life, about a million dollars a year for travel and
office expenses, and so-called franking privileges, the ability to send mail
postage-free. The law does stipulate that such offices have to be inside the
U.S., so that would prohibit Trump from using the funds to set up his office
in, say, a nonextradition country.
Trump would
even have the right to use a special government-owned townhouse on Lafayette
Square, across from the White House, reserved exclusively for former presidents
visiting Washington, although it seems hard to imagine Trump forgoing the
chance to stay in his own hotel just down Pennsylvania Avenue.
He’ll also
inform the Secret Service what homes and offices he’ll want secured on an
ongoing basis as a former president. Unlike other former presidents, Trump
could presumably direct much of the spending intended to protect him back to
his own properties and own businesses, just as he’s done while in
office—charging the Secret Service $17,000 a month for a cottage at his
Bedminster golf course, $650 a night for his room at his Mar-a-Lago resort, and
even $130,000-a-month for the military to run a command center out of Trump Tower
in New York, a place he’s rarely visited at all as president. The Secret
Service even paid $179,000 to rent golf carts and other vehicles this summer at
his New Jersey resort.
Where Trump
will set up “home” is an open question: He moved his voting residence from New
York to Florida last year—so it seems unlikely he’ll return to set down roots
in Manhattan—but in converting the 17-acre Mar-a-Lago into a private club, he
agreed years ago that he couldn’t live there year-round and the club closes for
the unpleasant Florida summer, so he’ll have to find a second home elsewhere.
If he declares that he’ll be living permanently at some combination of
Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster, Trump Tower in New York, and the Trump Hotel in
Washington, D.C., the Secret Service might well be paying millions of dollars
to the Trump Organization for years to come.
The Donald
J. Trump Presidential Library (and Theme Park?)
Another
area that will be top of mind as Trump leaves office will be his plans for a
presidential library and associated taxpayer-paid archives. Such endeavors
usually become the centerpiece of a former president’s world—part educational
center, part shrine, part day job. Carter’s work around the globe through his
Carter Center in Georgia even earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, a prize
Trump clearly covets himself. Presidential libraries are always grandiose and
expensive projects—Obama’s in Chicago is expected to require half-a-billion
dollars raised from private funders, despite having nearly all-digital archives—intended
to bolster and cement a president’s legacy in exactly the way the president
wants. While every president is focused on shaping a historical legacy, no
former president seems likely to eclipse Trump’s interest in restarting his
personal brand immediately.
Trump’s
ambitions for his library seem likely to exceed past imagination; presidential
libraries and their associated centers usually are arranged as nonprofits or
have related foundations that support the government-paid work of the National
Archives and Records Administration, which technically runs the library and
archives. Most see a few hundred thousand visitors a year.
“As a
matter of ego, you can imagine why it would be in his nature to have it be the
biggest, largest, goldest and most visited presidential library—more theme park
than library,” Gibbs says.
Trump could
easily re-imagine the very essence of such an endeavor, turning his
presidential library into a for-profit arm of the Trump Organization that
becomes a mecca for his devoted MAGA fans the country (and world) over—a
“Trumpland” Florida tourist attraction to rival Disney, SeaWorld or Universal
Studios, complete with regular guest appearances from his family members, live
broadcasts from Trump’s own media endeavors and no shortage of Trump-branded
merchandise. It’s not hard to imagine, at least in near-term years, attendance
in the low millions—a potentially rich branding exercise. Having the Trump
Organization bankroll a for-profit Trumpland might also skirt an embarrassing
situation for Trump: Most presidential libraries receive large corporate and
foundation donations, but post-presidency, Trump’s divisiveness would
presumably limit normally controversy-averse corporations from pitching in.
Many
presidential libraries contain scale or even full-size replicas of the Oval
Office; imagine the possibilities for MAGA tourism of renting out the full-size
replicas of the Oval Office and Lincoln Bedroom at Trumpland—complete, perhaps,
with Trump’s own upgrades: Gold gilt and improvements like the high-pressure
showerheads he so loves in the bathroom.
A grand
undertaking like a presidential library might also allow some opportunity for
self-dealing—think Trump choosing to put his library on land he already owns
and then overpaying himself for it—and given the Trump family’s propensity for
misdirecting charitable funds and the bizarre ways that tens of millions of
dollars disappeared into his overfunded inaugural and reelection campaign
funds, fundraising for the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library would seem to
present a unique opportunity for further enrichment or payments to family
members.
Tensions
have existed between past presidents and their official archival records
before; the caretakers of Nixon’s image spent decades in dispute with the
National Archives over the portrayal of his presidency, and Bill Clinton
famously glossed over his Monica Lewinsky scandal in his library, where it was
labeled as the “Politics of Persecution.” It’s not hard to imagine similar—and
worse—disputes arising between professional archivists and historians and Trump
loyalists over how the “Russia Coup” and the “perfect” Ukraine call will be
portrayed in official history, not to mention Trump’s handling of the Covid-19
pandemic—all another reason that Trump may abandon the traditional model to
tell his own story in his own way.
The GOP’s
Mega-MAGA-phone
It’s
possible that, if he loses reelection, Trump may wake up January 21 in
Mar-a-Lago and find himself exiled and forgotten by a Republican Party eager to
move past him. It’s possible too that Trump will decide to forget about
Twitter, bury @realDonaldTrump and live out his days quietly golfing with his
friends and admirers and holding court at the Mar-a-Lago buffet in the
evenings, before settling in to watch Sean Hannity’s show in peace and silence.
Possible,
but unlikely. Trump, unloved by his father, has spent his entire life craving
public adulation and attention and possesses a unique—almost
algorithmic—understanding of how to maximize the spotlight shining on himself.
Almost everyone agrees he seems likely to want to remain in the public
eye—setting up a novel circumstance where a new president might assume office
while being critiqued publicly minute-by-minute or hour-by-hour by his
predecessor.
Ex-presidents
of both parties usually go out of their way to stay quiet, at least for some
period of time after leaving office. In March 2009, in his first speech as a
former president, George W. Bush said he wouldn’t critique Obama at all. “He
deserves my silence,” Bush said. Eight years later, in their first meeting
post-election, Obama told Trump, “We now are going to want to do everything we
can to help you succeed because if you succeed, then the country succeeds.” Later,
explaining why he’d stayed almost silent even as the Trump administration
unraveled so much of his legacy, Obama said in 2018 as he eased back onto the
public stage, “Truth was, I was also intent on following a wise American
tradition of ex-presidents gracefully exiting the political stage and making
room for new voices and new ideas. We have our first president, George
Washington, to thank for setting that example.”
It’s nearly
impossible to imagine Trump’s abiding by any of those sentiments—it’s hard to
even imagine Trump’s Twitter fingers staying still all the way through a Joe
Biden inaugural address.
Meanwhile,
there’s reason to believe the Republican Party may not be quick to turn on
Trump, even if he’s badly defeated on Tuesday.
In fact,
ironically, the bigger the GOP wipeout that accompanies a Trump defeat, the
more Trump would likely continue to control the remnants of the party. Trump’s
ascendency since 2016 has dramatically rearranged the ranks of the Republican
Party in Washington and nationally; roughly half of the 241 Republicans who
were in office in January 2017 at the start of his term are already gone or
retiring. Any sort of broad loss on Tuesday would further wash away the very
swing districts and candidates most inclined to move beyond Trump, leaving just
the most solidly Republican districts—GOP areas where Trump’s approval ratings
remain sky high and whose representatives would conceivably be the last to risk
abandoning him. Republican candidates even far down the ballot are competing
over who loves Trump more, and Trump’s scattershot approach to policymaking and
betrayal of long-held conservative beliefs means the only ideology that unifies
his party today is adulation of him (and, perhaps, the QAnon conspiracy
theory). The intellectual inconsistency of the current party was made all too
clear by the summer decision at the Republican National Convention to forgo a
traditional party platform and simply offer a blanket endorsement of whatever
Trump wanted to do in a second term.
Supporters
of President Donald Trump cheer and hold a shirt that says Trump 2024 at a
rally at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum on February 19, 2020 in
Phoenix, Arizona. President Trump says he will be visiting Arizona frequently
in the lead up to the 2020 election.
Supporters
of President Donald Trump cheer and hold a shirt that says Trump 2024 at a
rally on February 19, 2020, in Phoenix, Arizona. If Trump does not win
re-election this year, he could run again in four years. | Caitlin O'Hara/Getty
Images
Instead,
Trump—with his all-powerful Twitter feed and fundraising list—might become the
party’s most reliable megaphone and kingmaker, akin to the role Sarah Palin
played in 2010 amid the rise of the Tea Party after her 2008 defeat as John
McCain’s running mate. In that sense, it’s possible that the 2022 midterms and
the 2024 presidential race would actually be the most MAGA-friendly GOP
primaries yet, conducted almost entirely on a stage designed by Trump himself,
with supplicants parading through Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and an entire
generation of GOP stars molded in his image. And that’s even before considering
the Trump family’s direct influence—say a titanic Ivanka vs. AOC campaign in
New York for Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat in 2022 or Donald Jr.’s campaign for
Congress (or even the presidency) in 2024, as he becomes the next-generation
MAGA standard-bearer.
This path
of influence might prove one of the most stable visions ahead, assuming a
relative level of normalcy from a man who has time and again demonstrated
anything but. In fact, this entire piece and its imagined premise of a Trump
post-presidency assumes that Trump and those around him would, at least
superficially, if not graciously, accept a loss and that he would be content to
just grumble loudly from the political balcony à la Statler and Waldorf in The
Muppet Show.
There are
darker visions and scenarios in which Trump never does accept a 2020 defeat, is
pushed reluctantly from the White House in January, and moves to assume some
more explicit mantle of a wronged leader-in-exile. Al Gore, after his
acrimonious defeat, traveled across Europe and grew a beard, instead of setting
up an opposition government in the lobby of the Willard Hotel across from the
White House. But imagine if he had wanted to contest the election long past
Inauguration Day?
Imagine
that on January 21Kayleigh McEnany begins broadcasting regular news briefings
from the Trump Hotel a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White
House; picture the 45th president hosting congressional leaders in a replica
Oval Office reconstructed inside his hotel to plot GOP strategy and rail
against the injustices done his supporters, using Twitter to stoke ongoing
protests and MAGA-nation resistance across the country and touring to show up
at boat parades and host his signature rallies. What if Trump wakes up each day
attempting to explicitly—not just passively—undermine a Biden domestic policy
at home and foreign policy overseas? He could go as far as even appointing his
own “shadow cabinet,” fundraising off his aggrieved fan base as they underwrite
his most loyal aides like Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence, who would also be out of
office alongside Trump and casting about for how to chart their own political
futures. They could hold their own political meetings, press conferences and
appear every night on Fox News to stir the national political pot.
Rather than
being able to focus on combating the pandemic and restarting the economy, Biden
could find himself consumed on a daily basis by responding and batting away
Trump’s latest conspiracies and complaints, and the nation consumed by an
unprecedented roiling, low-grade political insurgency unlike anything the
country has ever experienced. One open question, though, is how much hold does
a defeated Trump end up having on the nation’s attention as time goes by? What seems
wild on January 21 might become background noise by late February. As one media
expert said to me: “The question is how much people stop listening to him?”
A Media
Venture (But Not An Empire)
Almost no
matter his approach to his successor—merely disgruntled or actively
hostile—Trump will surely want to be listened to, which is why he might look
for a platform to keep himself in steady communication with the national
movement of the disaffected he's fostered over the past five years as he seized
and remade the Republican Party.
“He should
go where his genius takes him,” says one expert. “He’s a genius about
attention. Where is that most easily monetized? He’s a man in constant need for
attention and exceptionally good at commanding and holding it.”
Rumors have
long circulated that the Trump family would try to build its own media empire.
Some have speculated that in 2016 Trump had been planning to launch “Trump TV”
if, as even he expected, he lost the presidency to Hillary Clinton; one
reporter even swore to me he saw a sign on the camera riser at Trump’s election
night victory celebration reserving a spot for “Trump TV.” Earlier this year,
there was conjecture that the Trump family and its backers might be interested
in boosting and formally partnering with One America News (OAN), the upstart
Fox challenger that has become an all but unofficial Trump TV.
But many
around Trump doubt that’s where his ambitions truly lie. Starting a media
company would be tremendous work and capital intensive, and unless he was set
up as the front man for deep-pocketed investors willing to do the heavy
lifting, it hardly seems like the type of project a man who spent nearly a year
of his presidency golfing would take up.
At the same
time, establishing some sort of regularized media engagement will almost
certainly be necessary as part of a unified brand-building and cross-promotion
exercise—just as he used campaign appearances in 2016 to promote his branded
wares before it became clear he’d actually win the nomination. In the future,
think a Trump talk radio or TV show where the commercials are hawking Trump
steaks. Even as president, the Trump family has continued to apply for
additional trademarks around the world, presumably for future projects and
products.
“Whatever he
does, he’ll be a bad actor in the media environment,” says one political
observer. “Even if the Republican Party abandons him and says ‘Trump who?’ he
still has enormous reach to people who are disaffected and violent. ‘Stand back
and stand by.’ I’d imagine he’d want to stay public in the same way he did with
birtherism—but dialed up a notch. He wants to be relevant. He’s been very
successful creating this dark and chaotic political environment. That makes him
powerful even if he’s not holding office.”
As another expert says, “He’s going to do whatever it
takes to stay in the conversation—and it’s going to take being ever more
outrageous to stay there.”
One
particular challenge Trump might pose domestically is if he becomes a nexus for
disaffected, hawkish military or intelligence officers who want an outlet to
criticize the Biden administration—just as former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani
became a conduit during the 2016 campaign for disgruntled New York FBI agents
unhappy with the bureau’s treatment of Hillary Clinton. (Yes, you read that
right: Ironically, national security experts fear that Trump might become his
own player in the “Deep State” resistance to his successor that he’s long
railed against as president.)
“If a
President Biden takes us back to a worse version of the Obama administration—an
apologizing version of America that pulls back from aggressive action
overseas—I can totally see him becoming that pathway,” says a former Trump
administration official. As another intelligence professional says, “It’s Rudy
on steroids in terms of introducing disinformation.”
One reason
it will be likely be important for Trump to build and maintain his own
megaphone and media platforms is that it seems unlikely Trump will benefit as
much as his predecessors from what has become one of the most lucrative outlets
for former national leaders: The cushy, high-priced paid corporate and
university speaking gigs. Hillary Clinton made more than $22 million in
speaking fees, addressing corporate groups (Gap paid $225,000 and Goldman Sachs
paid $675,000 for three speeches), trade associations (the National Association
of Chain Drug Stores paid $225,000), civic gatherings (the World Affairs
Council of Oregon paid $250,000) and colleges and universities (UCLA paid
$300,000). Still, while he might not exactly become a regular on college
campuses and at Wall Street retreats, Sun Valley or other elite haunts, there
are plenty of foreign governments, universities or companies that would have
little compunction about welcoming Trump with open arms and presenting him with
a hefty paycheck.
The Trump
Brand on Steroids
The simple
truth is that six-figure speaking gigs probably wouldn’t get Trump where he
needs to be financially; the Trump Organization will need to be prioritizing
seven-, eight-, and even nine-figure business deals. As Trump surveys his
earning opportunities, it seems almost certain that—as troubling and stubborn
as he may prove in domestic politics—his real chance to upend presidential
tradition and American government lies overseas, the place where his richest
business deals are likely to go down, too.
Trump could
choose to become the post-presidential equivalent of Dennis Rodman,
globe-trotting at whim to advance his interests, collect checks and tout his
ongoing relevance. Once he leaves office, there’s nothing to stop him from
entering into lucrative and questionable business deals the world over—and he’d
likely find a certain type of country or company all too eager to engage with
him. “His mischief is much more international than national as an ex,” says a
former senior Trump administration official. “There’s nothing [about leaving
office] that diminishes his utility as an instrument of a foreign power.”
Trump’s past
business practices already illustrate the possibilities: A hotel in Baku,
Azerbaijan, which the New Yorker labeled “a corrupt operation engineered by
oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard”; recently revealed questionable
business deals in China; and of course the Trump Tower Moscow project that he
evidently pursued even as he ran for president. The possibilities for such
deals post-presidency will expand exponentially and likely prove particularly
necessary to secure the requisite cash flow to hold off the estimated $1
billion-plus in debt owed by his entire business empire.
In the
years before the White House, the Trump Organization had largely become a
branding entity—licensing the Trump name to products and projects rather than
owning them outright or developing them himself. That may continue to be a
smart play post-presidency, providing steady cash without a lot of the
headaches of running enterprises.
Trump As
Strongman Validator
Even more
lucrative than the Trump brand, though, would be selling Trump himself. Look
for Trump to be wooed not by the nation’s top adversaries or allies, but
instead by the secondary and tertiary global powers who want the imprimatur of
U.S. recognition and respect and are willing to roll out the red carpet for state-visitlike
celebrations, perhaps all under the guises of fancy ribbon-cuttings of new
Trump-branded projects.
Intelligence
professionals can envision, for instance, Trump standing on the world stage
alongside his favorite global strongmen—say Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Venezuelan
President Nicolás Maduro—bragging about his new joint development deals and the
world leaders willing to host him even as they reject entreaties from President
Biden. Think “Trump Tower Damascus will be a new start for my peace-loving
friend Bashar al-Assad.” Or even imagine Trump, Rodman-style, turning up
courtside at North Korean basketball games with his buddy Kim Jong Un in
Pyongyang, just as Joe Biden turns up the pressure on the Hermit Kingdom’s
nuclear program.
Current
presidents often deploy former presidents as roving global diplomats par
excellence, ambassadors without portfolio but owed the highest level of
respect. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, for example, have both been sent to
North Korea to work out delicate negotiations. But it’s unlikely that a
President Biden would ever turn to Trump for help on touchy geopolitical
problems. And it’s unlikely Trump would give it. Instead, experts imagine Trump
as free chaos agent—more or less what he’s been inside the White House, but
with even less staffing, process or official restraints.
“Undermining
our will, effectiveness and attempts to reassert our values and effectiveness?
He’d be 100 percent willing to mess with that 100 percent for personal gain and
continued notoriety,” says a former Trump administration official. “Imagine you
don’t have Jimmy Carter out there doing your bidding, you have Donald Trump
sitting down with these guys and offering them a stage to sell themselves.”
Trump, who
has brokered what he sees as a historic opening between Israel and other Middle
Eastern countries largely by excluding Palestinians from the process, might be
particularly inclined to undermine any attempts by future presidential
administrations to restore their voice or rebalance power in the Middle East.
Similarly, if a President Biden moves aggressively against any of the regimes
Trump befriended as president, Trump wouldn’t necessarily stand on the
sidelines.
“He could
become the best friend, underminer, impediment to reestablishing any kind of
normalized relationships the United States seeks in the future. He’s able to be
there offering a different perspective. You’ve now created in him a
negative-pressure relief valve,” says the former Trump administration official.
As another
expert told me, “When it was his job to put the country’s interests first, he
didn’t put the country’s interests first. Why would we expect anything
different after?”
There is no
precedent for a former president’s conducting his own freelance foreign
policy—and certainly not one that would go against the expressed policy of his
successor. (Perhaps the closest analogue is the complex plot by former vice
president—and Alexander Hamilton killer—Aaron Burr to form a breakaway republic
in the then-southwestern United States with perhaps himself as emperor.) While
the U.S. does have laws against citizens attempting to carry out their own
foreign policy—it was concerns about that so-called Logan Act that helped
launch the investigation of incoming Trump national security adviser Michael
Flynn as he spoke to the Russian ambassador about Obama administration
sanctions—the law has never been used in American history. As president, Trump
has said he thought that former Secretary of State John Kerry violated the
Logan Act in his one-man diplomacy to preserve the Iran deal as it was under
attack from the Trump White House. The bar to deploy the Logan Act against a
former government leader would be presumably high and prove as much a thorny
political question as a criminal one. “We all shit all over the Logan Act [as
useless], but at what point does that cross over into a legal issue? If he’s
going to be trying to obstruct the foreign policy of the United States, what
does that mean?” wonders the intelligence professional. “Talk about a complex
investigation and case to bring.”
Most
helpful to America’s adversaries overseas, though, would be that Trump’s
ongoing tweeting and public appearances would simply serve as a constant
reminder of America’s political instability. One of the reasons that Russia
originally interfered in the 2016 election was simply to undermine the
legitimacy of western democracies, and Trump’s ongoing tradition-shattering
continues to underscore that message and lead other countries to doubt the
moral superiority of American democracy.
Trump as
Official (or Unofficial) International Consultant
Engaging
with a former president offers other potential benefits for foreign powers.
There does not appear to be anything beyond a sense of patriotism that would
stop a former president from offering up the nation’s geopolitical,
surveillance and intelligence secrets to the highest bidder and signing, say, a
$10 million-a-month consulting deal with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—a regime
Trump has assiduously courted in office while brushing aside its most egregious
actions, like the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. In certain ways, he could even use
his final weeks and months in office to aid certain foreign countries that
promise to pay him or his company later.
Presidents
and vice presidents, as constitutional officers, are exempt from the normal
security clearances and nondisclosure agreements that come with access to the
nation’s most secret information. In fact, the entire classification system
derives from presidential authority and the president is legally allowed to
declassify anything at any moment for any reason. Trump has from time-to-time
appeared either to make public unique American capabilities or to reference
even more secret ones, and he famously revealed highly secret foreign
intelligence during an Oval Office meeting with Russian ambassador Sergey
Kislyak and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
As
president, Trump has surely learned secrets worth literally trillions of
dollars—information about U.S. espionage capabilities, intelligence assets on
earth and in outer space and nuclear and war plans, as well as the quirks,
perversions and predilections of leaders and politicians the world over.
Normally, former presidents have remained tight-lipped about these secrets
after leaving office, but that’s more about tradition, integrity and their own
sense of duty than it is about the law. It would pose an uncertain legal
question whether such freedom to share secrets continues on post-presidency.
While the technical answer would almost certainly be “no,” the sensitivity of
prosecuting a former president would make the bar enormously high—and
presumably require a deeply egregious (and known) violation of government
secrecy to even consider any action. “Can an ex-president be prosecuted for
exposing classified information? There would be obstacles,” says one senior
former government attorney. “It would be a novel argument that criminal laws
apply to him.”
There might
be some hoops for a former president to go through to do specific types of
business with a foreign power—like registering as a foreign agent, under the
Foreign Agents Registration Act law that tripped up Paul Manafort and others in
Trump’s orbit. But as long as Trump files the correct paperwork, he would be as
free to work with foreign governments as any other private citizen. As a former
intelligence leader says, “His ability to lobby for the Saudi nuclear deals or
Goya beans, if it’s got a dollar sign attached, he’ll try for it.”
Pumping
Trump for secrets, though, wouldn’t necessarily come as part of a paid
consulting gig. In fact, intelligence leaders and officers who have been around
him in the White House doubt he’s paid enough attention to details or retained
enough information to be that useful in turning over secrets. “He really
doesn’t know that much,” says the former Trump official. “I don’t really
believe he’s got the depth of knowledge to go explain to a foreign power the
level of penetration that the NSA has gotten into various systems. I don’t
think he can undermine the sources and methods of U.S. intelligence. He doesn’t
know enough with enough fidelity to be actually destructive.”
Instead,
the secrets most likely to leak out of Trump’s mind are exactly the examples
we’ve already seen in public: places where the U.S. possesses a unique weapon,
capability or protective measure that fascinates him and that a foreign power
could glean from wining, dining and coddling him amid a long-term business
engagement or friendship. “In the 8-year-old kid that inhabits him, the things
that would stick with him are details that he would think are neat or
powerful,” assesses one former counterintelligence officer. “It’s going to be
someone who hits his buttons, someone who can play him and make him blurt it
out that way. Like ‘Oh, you in the U.S. aren’t all that powerful,’ and he goes,
‘Oh yeah? We can do X!’ [I worry] there are infrastructure things and security
details—this beautiful armored vehicle, they’ve got jetpacks in the
presidential limo!—in the context of boasting that he would give up—details
about continuity programs, resilience or security of the U.S. government.”
But it
might not all be about money for Trump. Another reason that a Trump who loses
reelection might mostly look inward to his existing supporters and outward to
friendly foreign nations for friendship and admiration is that he’ll likely be
excluded at home from the normal celebrations and honorary roles that typically
flow to presidents.
When Kate
Andersen Brower interviewed Trump in the Oval Office for her new book on former
presidents, Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump, he fully
admitted he expects to be ostracized by his predecessors. “I don’t think I’ll
fit in very well,” he told her. “I’m a different kind of president.” Even as
president, he’s largely eschewed the moral leadership aspects of the office and
the role of the nation’s healer in chief, skipping most of the high-profile
funerals and memorials during his presidency—and even panning the legacies of
people like John Lewis and John McCain—and it’s hard to imagine him hitting the
state-funeral circuit as a former president. Nor does it seem likely that he’ll
pursue humanitarian projects, akin to the Carter Center or the Clinton
Foundation, or invest his time in mentoring future generations of leaders and
Americans, as the Obamas do, or tending privately to causes like wounded
warriors, as George W. Bush does.
“None of
those are things you imagine him having the slightest interest in—or being
invited to participate in,” Gibbs says. “He likes being around the people who
like him.”
Not even
the most ardent West Wing fan fiction writer would stage Trump and Obama
teaming up on future endeavors, as Clinton has done with both his predecessor
Bush 41 and his successor Bush 43, leading W. to call Clinton his “brother with
a different mother.”
Whenever—and
if ever—Trump becomes a former president, he will pursue the job just as he’s
pursued being president itself: On his terms, answering only to himself and
keeping his own counsel, reinventing almost every aspect of what Americans
think of the office and its traditions. As Brower says, “President Trump
is an island.”
