Analysis
What does Liz Truss’s book tell us about her
American ambitions?
Martin
Pengelly
in
Washington
The former prime minister spent just 49 days in office
but wants to stay on the world stage. Her attacks on Biden and praise for Trump
are aimed at the populist right
Tue 16 Apr
2024 05.01 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/16/liz-truss-book-republicans-us
In her new
book, the former British prime minister Liz Truss directs scathing attacks and
mockery at Joe Biden, president of her country’s closest ally. Biden was guilty
of “utter hypocrisy and ignorance”, Truss writes, when the US leader said he
“disagree[d] with the policy” of “cutting taxes on the super wealthy” in the
mini-budget Truss introduced in September 2022, shortly after taking power.
“I was
shocked and astounded that Biden would breach protocol by commenting on UK
domestic policy,” Truss adds. “We had been the United States’ staunchest allies
through thick and thin.”
Such harsh
words between British and American leaders, in or out of office, would normally
seem unusual. But Truss has scores to settle. By the time Biden spoke, in an
ice-cream parlor in Portland, Oregon, Truss’s mini-budget had already caused
panic over British pension funds, threatened to crash the UK economy and been
withdrawn – a humiliating reversal for any prime minister, let alone one little
more than a month into the job. Six days later, Truss was forced to resign.
A year and
a half later, offering the public her version of what went so terribly wrong,
Truss still manages to thunder: “What the Biden administration, and the
[European Union], and their international allies didn’t want was a country
demonstrating that things can be done differently, undercutting them in the
process.”
Perhaps.
Either way, Biden is still president while Truss is now a mere backbench MP for
a constituency in rural Norfolk. But the release of her book, Ten Years to Save
the West, alongside her founding of Popular Conservatism, a new pressure group,
says a lot about where she sees her future.
Far from
taking her allowance and pursuing traditional, relatively sedate pursuits –
lobbying, say, or trying to achieve peace in the Middle East – Truss wants to
remain relevant on the global populist right, particularly in the US.
Truss’s
book is published in the US and UK on Tuesday. The American jacket carries
praise from two hard-right senators, Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah,
both vocal enemies of Biden. It also carries a different subtitle from the
British edition. In the UK, Truss is said to offer “Lessons from the Only
Conservative in the Room”. In the US, she is “Leading the Revolution Against
Globalism, Socialism, and the Liberal Establishment”.
It’s a lot
to pack in between the school run – Truss has two daughters – and her duties as
a Norfolk MP. But it all points to a clear ambition to carve out a presence in
rightwing US media, long on plain display.
In
February, Truss attended the CPAC conference in Maryland, giving an address to
an audience of what Politico called “bewildered conservatives” before appearing
with Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former campaign chair and White House
adviser, a leading far-right voice who pitched Truss into controversy with
remarks about the jailed far-right figure Tommy Robinson.
Truss will
soon be back, visiting Washington to promote her book at the Heritage
Foundation, the thinktank behind Project 2025, a vast and controversial plan
for a second Trump administration.
Truss’s
relationship with Heritage is well established. She spoke there in 2015, as
trade secretary and over the objections of the British ambassador, and accepted
an award named after Margaret Thatcher there last year. Kevin Roberts,
president of Heritage, also blurbs the US edition of Truss’s book.
The
foundation is a couple of miles from the White House, but Truss is hardly
likely to seek contact with Biden or his administration. That may be just as
well. Elsewhere in her book, she describes meeting the president at the White
House in September 2021, when she was foreign secretary under Boris Johnson.
“Our Oval
Office meeting lasted around an hour and a half,” Truss writes, adding that
this was not a sign of favor.
“The truth
was it owed more to Biden’s penchant for telling extended anecdotes in response
to any issue that came up. ‘Ah, that reminds me …’ he would say, as his
officials looked at each other with knowing smiles. Ten minutes later, the
story would end and he would move on to something else.”
Biden’s
age, 81, and mental capacity to be president are the source of constant media
speculation and political attack – and strong White House pushback. But Truss
has more to say. At the Cop 26 climate conference in Glasgow, later in 2021,
she “bumped into Joe Biden again. He remembered our meeting at the White House,
telling me he’d never forget ‘those blue eyes’, even though we’d both been
wearing Covid masks.”
It is not
clear if the reader should think Biden or Truss was under the impression mouth
coverings also obscure the eyes.
Truss is
still not done. She includes the president with the former House speaker Nancy
Pelosi among US politicians deemed “unhelpful” over Northern Ireland issues,
their interventions “generally on one side of the argument, doubtless egged on
by the Irish embassy in Washington”.
She also
describes how in September 2022, as prime minister, she attended the UN general
assembly in New York. There, she says, “Biden regaled me with tales of the
Democrat campaign trail, including an incident in which he had fallen over. He
said, ‘I can see them thinking, ‘You can’t get up, grandpa’, but I got up.’
“I formed
the view that he was running again in 2024,” Truss writes, before risking a
self-own by writing about a faux pas at the same event, when she called out
“Hi, Dr Biden!” to “a blonde lady” who turned out to be Brigitte Macron, the
wife of the president of France.
The
vignette about Biden at the UN is not the only one in Ten Years to Save the
West in which Truss uses “Democrat” to refer to the Democratic party. It is a
telling choice. Republicans have long used the incorrect term as a term of
political abuse. Nor is it the only instance in which Truss – or her US editors
– must adapt or explain her language.
When
writing about UK politics, as in most of the book, Truss must often offer
translations or explanations for US readers. For one small but telling example,
in referring to her distaste for National Insurance – a payroll tax that
supports state pensions and unemployment and incapacity benefits – she calls it
“a social security entitlement”. On the US right, “entitlement” is almost as
dirty a word as “Democrat”.
At least
until the eve of publication day, Truss had shied from saying Donald Trump’s
name but said she wanted a Republican in the White House in 2025. She says so
in her book but abandons any pretense of subtlety when it comes to praising
Trump, now the presumptive GOP nominee despite facing 88 criminal charges and
multimillion-dollar penalties for tax fraud and defamation, the latter arising
from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.
Calling
herself “an early fan of the TV show The Apprentice” who “enjoyed the Donald’s
catchphrases and sassy business advice”, Truss says that when Trump entered
politics in 2015, colleagues in parliament and “elderly ladies” in Swaffham, a
town in her constituency, were united in “seem[ing] genuinely animated by the
disruptive Republican candidate”. She makes a common link between support for
Trump and support for Brexit – which she campaigned against before becoming its
hardline champion on her way to leading her country.
When Trump
was president, Truss writes, she “chased” Boris Johnson “down a fire escape” in
New York, to demand inclusion in a meeting between the British and American
leaders. According to Truss, who was then trade secretary, that meeting saw
Trump urge her and his own trade representative, Bob Lighthizer, to get on with
talks for a UK-US trade deal – only for Johnson to try to make Trump focus on
restoring the Iran nuclear agreement, a tactic that did not work.
Truss never
got her trade deal. In part, she blames “many in Number 10” Downing Street who
“seemed to want to hold Trump at arm’s length for political reasons”.
“The UK
media provided universally negative coverage of Trump, and leftists in the
Conservative party were keen to insult him at every opportunity,” Truss writes.
“My view was that he was the leader of the free world and an important ally.”
That view
stands in stark comparison to her abuse of Biden, who beat Trump conclusively
in an election Trump still refuses to concede. Furthermore, when it comes to
the deadly fruits of that refusal – the attack on Congress Trump incited –
Truss keeps her observations to a single paragraph.
On 6
January 2021, Truss writes, she was “on a phone call with Bob Lighthizer”,
“working on” removing a US tariff on Scottish whisky. From the Executive Office
building, next to the White House, Lighthizer “remarked … in passing that the
street was full of people with huge American flags walking towards Congress.
Little did I realise how seismic that event would turn out to be.”
Truss
eventually saw the whisky tariff removed – in summer 2021, after “talks with
the new Democrat administration”.
“But with
Joe Biden as president,” Truss writes, “it was made quite clear that a trade
deal with the United Kingdom was no longer a priority. We
had missed the boat.”
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