The big Aer Lingus Airbus passed over the Labrador Sea south of Greenland and swept in over Newfoundland and Nova Scotia on its approach to the North American continent. Will all of them soon be part of Donald Trump’s greater United States?
This week, the American president again reiterated his desire to annex Greenland. “I think it will happen,” he said, this time to Nato chief Mark Rutte. On Monday, he said Canada should become “our cherished 51st state”.
Snowy hills and valleys and the criss-cross grids of towns 36,000 feet below reminded travellers peeking out the window just how long the winters are up here.
Then, onwards past Boston and New York before landing at Washington’s Dulles Airport in 20-degree heat. You forget how much of a southern city it is.
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Many of the passengers have made this trip to the US capital before but never perhaps with such uncertainty of what it might hold. For this year it is a journey into an America transformed by the election of Trump and by the disruptive, revolutionary, norm-abandoning first 50-odd days of his presidency.
The Taoiseach, arriving from earlier engagements in Austin, Texas, was coming to Washington from the opposite direction, but with the same uncertainty of what awaits. Micheál Martin was seeking to ensure that even if everything else has changed, the door to the Oval Office remains open to Ireland’s leader. After a nervy few weeks, the invitation duly arrived. But what would lie behind the door when it opened?
How to defuse an atomic bomb
It would be hard to overstate the level of trepidation on the part of the Taoiseach’s party before Wednesday’s meetings. The treatment of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the Oval Office last month demonstrated just how much the codes of diplomatic behaviour that previously governed these events have been thrown out the window by the Trump administration.
Senior officials privately feared a “very, very difficult day”, said one. Others simply said: “Anything could happen.” If Martin looked a bit edgy in the Oval Office, the faces of his three senior advisers – chief of staff Deirdre Gillane, Irish Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason and top civil servant John Callinan – were pictures of intense stress. Each looked like they would happily change places with a bomb disposal squad.
But the Trump bomb never went off.
Not your ordinary press event
Though many will be familiar with the president’s style through seeing clips of his statements and interactions with reporters, a full and unexpurgated Trump press conference is quite the experience.
It is utterly dominated by Trump. His presence – by turns expansive, humorous, whimsical, menacing – fills the room. Everyone else is just a prop or bystander as Trump commands the stage with his mixture of braggadocio, downright lies, flattery and threats. Part reality TV star, part medieval king, part mob boss.
[ Micheál Martin’s White House bout with Donald Trump: How did the Taoiseach fare?Opens in new window ]
Martin played it meek and clever, declining to challenge Trump on his attacks on the EU – or on anything else, for that matter. He conveyed a few of his key points: he understands Trump’s concerns on trade but the Ireland-US economic relationship is a two-way street; he supports Trump’s efforts to achieve peace in Ukraine and in the Middle East (that is one way of describing his policy, all right); and, above all, he values US-Irish ties.
If Trump views the EU as an enemy, he has a different view of Ireland, even if we have “stolen” the American pharmaceutical industry.
“I think the Irish love Trump. We won the Irish vote with a tremendous amount of vote, I want to thank you very much. I want to thank you very much. I got the Irish vote ... I love your country. I love it. I’ve been there many times as you know, and we don’t want to do anything to hurt Ireland ... but we do want fairness and he [Martin] understands.”
On and on it went. The Taoiseach was just fine with all of this. In fact, he could hardly have looked more pleased with the way things were going.
‘I love you guys’
The good vibes continued throughout the day as the action moved to Capitol Hill, where Martin met senior congressional lawmakers at the Friends of Ireland lunch, also attended by Trump. Being nice to and about Ireland is about the only thing Democrats and Republicans agree on at the moment.
Then it was back to the White House for the shamrock ceremony and more warm words. “I love you guys,” Trump told the reception. Martin duly gushed back at him.
There are very clear and continuing threats to Ireland’s economic success. But, at the cost of some collateral damage to his dignity, the Taoiseach managed to keep one very powerful friend onside in Washington. All told, that probably qualifies as a good week’s work.
Not even the intervention of the family of Enoch Burke at the Ireland Funds dinner on Thursday could take the gloss off that. In fact, it hardly registered at all.
Whither America?
It is an extraordinary time in the US. The Trump administration has embarked on a frantic programme not just to remake America’s place in the world, but to hugely downsize the role of the government at home. This week alone, the administration cut half of the jobs in the department of education and pledged to close it altogether.
Trump routinely talks of federal workers (he did it again in the Oval meeting with Martin) not turning up to do their jobs. The political and presidential playbook has been torn up, and the rewriting of it is being done on the fly.
Or maybe there is no new playbook. Maybe they’re making it up as they go along.
The markets are certainly getting nervous. Stock indices have been in the red all week, indicating falls in value that will have real-world consequences for ordinary Americans, especially when they see them reflected in their retirement savings. Unless basically every economist is wrong, the coming trade wars will lead to increases in the cost of living. Even over on Fox News, home of the president’s greatest admirers, they fret that “the markets are jumpy”.
“The stock market is not the economy,” proffers one talking head, but without much conviction. Later he presents a programme on religiously based investing in the markets. “Anyone not investing is missing out.”
The Wall Street Journal, which is hardly a bastion of left-liberal thought, reports that business leaders are getting nervous about the trade wars and even more nervous about the uncertainty surrounding them. Political headwinds for the Trump project seem inevitable.
This then becomes the essential question: what is Trump’s tolerance for the political costs of his programme of economic and political change?
The world waits for an answer.
In Ireland, meanwhile, there is some satisfaction that, in a world more uncertain than it has been in decades, the welcome in the Oval Office remains as warm as ever.
