President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a campaign rally. Photo / AP
President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a campaign rally. Photo / AP
COMMENT:
The stranger-than-sitcom American presidency opened 2018 with a big tease about mutual nuclear destruction from two leaders who then found "love" not war. It seems President Donald Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong Un were just playing hard to get.
The presidency ends the year saturated in tumult, with the US government in partial shutdown.
Throw in an unhappy departing defence secretary, Trump's parallel universe of facts and his zillion tweets, and you can see that his world this year was touched by the weird, the traumatic and the fantastical - also known as WTF.
There was no holding back the self-described "very stable genius" with the "very, very large brain". Some serious and relatively conventional things got done in 2018.
There was a Midterm election. Many more Democrats are coming to Congress and not quite all of them plan to run for president. Divided government dawns in January when Democrats take control of the House of Representatives; Republicans retain their grip on the Senate.
An overhaul of the US criminal justice system was accomplished, and in an unusually bipartisan way, though it took a dash of reality TV's Kim Kardashian West to move it along. Gun control actually was tightened a bit, with Trump's unilateral banning of bump stocks.
Trump shocked allies and lost Defence Secretary Jim Mattis over a presidential decision to pull US troops out of Syria, following up with indications that up to half the troops in Afghanistan might be withdrawn.
President Donald Trump with Jim Mattis. Photo / AP
Self-described "Tariff Man" started one trade war, with China, and headed off a second by tweaking the North American Free Trade Agreement and giving it an unpronounceable acronym, USMCA. He withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal, putting action behind his Twitter shout: "WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH".
Trump placed his second justice on the Supreme Court in two years after Brett Kavanaugh, accused of alcohol-fuelled sexual assault in his youth, raged against the allegations at a congressional hearing and acknowledged only: "I liked beer, I still like beer," but "I never sexually assaulted anyone".
There were frustrations and fulminations aplenty for the President, particularly about the steaming-ahead Russia-Trump campaign investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Nor did he make much progress on his promised border wall, which he renamed "artistically designed steel slats" in December in what he regarded as a concession to wall-despising, concrete-cursing Democrats. It did not work: large parts of the government closed over the wall-induced budget impasse.
He took heat for a zero-tolerance policy that forced migrant children from their parents until he backed off, inaccurately blaming Democrats for "Child Seperation".
It was a very good year for jobs. It was a check-your-smartphone-right-now, pass-the-smelling-salts year for the stock market. Trump, who assailed the unemployment rate as a phony measure when he was a candidate, couldn't speak of it enough as Obama-era job growth continued on his watch. He went mum about the market, a prime subject for his boasting before it took a sustained dive.
Trump's approval rating in polls was one of the few constants on this swiftly tilting planet: 42 per cent approval and 56 per cent disapproval in AP-NORC's latest and 38 per cent-57 per cent via Gallup, neither much different than in January.
Through it all, the main-streaming of the bizarre proceeded apace.
US President Donald Trump meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Sentosa Island in Singapore on June 12, 2018. Photo / AP
North Korea's Kim set that tone right on January 1 with his New Year cheer to Americans: "It's not a mere threat but a reality that I have a nuclear button on the desk in my office. All of the mainland United States is within the range of our nuclear strike." Trump responded with a tweet about size and performance. "I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!"
Things quickly improved, helped by Kim's letters to Trump, which the US President called "beautiful". There was no more talk about Trump being a "mentally deranged dotard" or Kim being a "maniac," the musty insults of an earlier time. In June, they held history's first meeting between a North Korean leader and a current US president. "We fell in love," Trump later said.
Kim had previously vowed to visit "fire and fury" on the US but the Fire and Fury that made Trump livid was the book of the same name, Michael Wolff's insider account of the Trump White House. The President took particular exception to observations in the book by his former chief strategist, tweeting about "Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!" They are said to be on better terms.
Over the course of the year, Trump spoke at more than 40 campaign rallies and kept up his Twitter barrage (40,000 tweets since 2009 on his @realDonaldTrump account).
So what stands out?
Trump said of Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson: "He was dumb as a rock and I couldn't get rid of him fast enough. He was lazy as hell". He called Stormy Daniels, paid to stay quiet about their alleged affair, as "horseface". Attorney-General, Jeff Sessions, was as "scared stiff and Missing in Action". Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff was "little Adam Schitt" and nations in Africa were "shithole countries".
He (correctly) predicted that Hurricane Florence would be "tremendously wet" and told AP: "I have a natural instinct for science".
In July, Trump appeared to side with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a Helsinki news conference and gave weight to Putin's denial that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, despite the firm conclusion of US intelligence agencies that it had. "I don't see any reason why it would be" Russia, Trump said.
The year draws to a close as it started with warnings of a nuclear Armageddon. Putin said Trump's intention to walk away from one arms control treaty and his reluctance to extend another "could lead to the destruction of civilisation as a whole and maybe even our planet". Maybe he's just playing hard to get.
