The failure of a teleprompter at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday had an interesting effect. It forced United States president Donald Trump to read from his notes.
For the first 10 minutes of his speech he looked down at his pages, looking up only to give the assembled leaders an occasional glance, and when he ad-libbed jokes and praise for himself.
It became clear that he was using two clearly distinct registers of speech. The natural speech of Trump’s asides was casual and vague. (“He seemed like a very nice man, actually.”) The longer sentences, which cited dates and proper nouns and multi-syllable words, were clearly read out. (“We are rapidly reversing the economic calamity we inherited from the previous administration ...”)
You could follow the switching speech patterns even after the autocue came back on. It revealed what material in the speech was prepared by Trump’s team in the White House, and what came spontaneously from the mind of the populist leader. In other words, it revealed the administration’s deliberate policy.
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Disregarding Trump’s distracting asides and anecdotes, what messages had been planned for delivery to the world’s leaders?
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There were primarily two, both focused on Europe: to attack renewable energy and the concept of refugees.
Trump returned to these topics repeatedly, and he had facts and figures to hand when he did so. Green energy and immigration were a “two-tailed monster” “destroying” Europe, he claimed. He hammered it home in his concluding remarks, urging leaders to adopt “strong borders and traditional energy sources”.
The opposition to renewable energy could be read as strategic, as an attempt to maintain US wealth and power. The United States still has large oil, gas and coal reserves, and Trump spoke about his ambitions to export them around the world. (The fossil fuel industry is delighted). The global leader in renewables is China.
The focus on immigration appears to be more straightforwardly ideological. He appeared to reject the concept of refugees in itself – the principle, enshrined in international law after the second World War, that people must be allowed to seek safety elsewhere if war or persecution forces them to flee their countries.
It was born out of the determination to prevent future incidents such as the one involving the SS St Louis. The ship of largely Jewish refugees – “illegal aliens” – was refused permission to land in the US in 1939 and returned to Europe, where more than a quarter of its passengers ultimately died in the Holocaust.
“In the United States, we reject the idea that mass numbers of people from foreign lands can be permitted to travel halfway around the world, trample our borders, violate our sovereignty, cause unmitigated crime and deplete our social safety net,” Trump said.
In carefully prepared remarks, he characterised UN supports for refugees – food, shelter and so on – as the international body “funding an assault on western countries”.
“The UN is supposed to stop invasions, not create them and not finance them,” he said.
He appeared to reject the principle of non-refoulement: that refugees cannot be returned to a place of danger. “If you come illegally into the United States, you’re going to jail or you’re going back to where you came from, or perhaps even farther than that,” he said, thanking El Salvador for imprisoning deportees.
In his second term, Trump’s focus appears to have shifted from worrying about China to worrying about Europe. Why?
In many things Trump is erratic. He can’t be relied upon to pursue US economic interests – some of his policies, such as tariffs, have been quite self-destructive and unpopular. But he is predictable in some things: he will seek his own financial advantage, and he will seek to extend his own power.
Some in Brussels believe Trump is focused on Europe because he sees it as a threat. This is due to its regulatory power – particularly the ability of the powerful new EU tech laws to curtail US companies – but also because it is a demonstration of a successful alternative system, something threatening in itself.
Europe, immigration and clean energy are all preoccupations for the far right in the United States, which sees the old continent both as the origin of western civilisation and a cautionary tale.
Perhaps it’s a mistake to seek some greater motivation or strategy behind the Trump administration’s policy. Perhaps these are simply deeply held beliefs.
But if a method can be read into Trump’s remarks to the UN, it is an attack on rival sources of power. Alternative sources of energy. Alternative authorities, such as scientific evidence as a source of truth.
If you take Trump’s word for it, the preponderance of scientific evidence demonstrating climate change is no more than a “hoax”. “I’m here to tell the truth,” he said.
His speech was rejection of the authority of the post-second World War system of international law. Rejecting the concept of refugees might have popular appeal. But the implication is that the US government can seize people, detain them and transport them at will. It’s a claim of total power over people’s lives.
