The many parallels between Trump and Haughey

The day is getting closer. A day which many will say is like nothing we have experienced before. On 5th November, the people of the United States will decide who will be their next president. That is, of course, unless we get a long drawn-out legal process, and all the disorder, chaos and violence that might come up with that.

As it stands, it looks like it will be Trump. There is time yet to change the drumbeat, but just right now it has that feel. It really doesn’t seem to matter what he does or what he says, enough Americans seem to want him back. Some fanatically so. Those people – and their critics – will fill our screens over the next few weeks. MMA meets MAGA.

Many people here say that they have never seen anything like Trump – and the responses he generates in people – in their lifetimes.

But I wonder how true that is? Just how unique is this, the level of division he excites in people, the sense of danger to democratic norms that he invokes, the willingness of his supporters to threaten all sorts on his behalf? And on the other side, how unique is the willingness of his opponents to make all sorts of claims as to what he will get up to if he gets back into power?

Is all that so new for us in Ireland? Let’s consider how we might characterise Trump and everything that comes with him. Grotesque? Unbelievable? Bizarre? Unprecedented?

That’s right, GUBU, the acronym associated with the events of Charles Haughey’s tumultuous tenure as Taoiseach in 1982, but which came to stand for everything to do with the man. When you think about that time, there are many parallels between our experience of Haughey, and Americans’ experience of Trump. What are they?

The two men are similar in many ways. They both understood what is at the core of politics.

Machiavelli asked many centuries ago if it was better for the ruler to be feared or loved. Trump and Haughey knew that both fear and love are two sides of the same coin.

Long before it was used for a television drama, ‘Love/Hate’ could have been the name of the political documentary series made about Charlie. Like Trump today, everyone had an opinion about Charlie, and those opinions were never moderate. You either loved him or you hated him. Haughey was either the saviour or the charlatan, as so many see Trump. 

Both men had magnetic personalities which attracted supporters and controversy in equal measure. Their terms in office were replete with it, and don’t think Trump had all the wildest stuff. Not even he, with all his legal issues, had a murderer on the run discovered in the apartment of his Attorney General – even if, in fairness, that wasn’t Charlie’s fault.

And there are many more similarities. From his followers, Haughey attracted fanatical loyalty. Whatever he did could be excused because he did it. Tapping the phones of journalists? Big deal. Tapping up powerful people for money for himself? So what. Sending his political hitmen to intimidate opponents? All part of the game. Many who supported Haughey thought that ‘they’ were out to get him. And also that to do good you often have to be prepared to do bad. Ask any Trump supporter today about all the things he is accused of, and you will hear varieties of those.

In terms of Charlie’s money, which came about for reasons he never explained, his supporters didn’t care because – the argument went – if he made himself rich, he could make us rich too. Haughey played to the gallery on old-style nationalism, reaching into the past to frame his argument that with the right political leadership we could make Ireland, what might we say, great again.

And the parallels are even more striking in respect of the opponents of the two men. Haughey was hated and feared by the establishment, with many of them willing to do anything to stop him gaining and regaining power. Many feared that he would not hand over power if he lost it. They feared he was bugging them and spying on them (and some were right). 

In the eyes of many, his involvement in the events that led to the Arms Trial made him an untouchable. It has never fully been explained what on earth led him anywhere near those events in 1970, when he, a Minister for Finance in an Irish government, was somehow involved in an attempted illegal importation of arms to hand over to self-declared enemies of the state. Doesn’t that seem as extraordinary and as unbelievable as much of what Trump has done?

The analogy continues into their respective political parties. Many in Haughey’s own party hated him and feared him, but after a series of attempts to take him out, they either left the party or gave up. After that, the party became about him. Uno duce, una voce: one leader, one voice, as his spokesman PJ Mara put it. 

The tactics that the Haugheyites used to bring about that conversion of Fianna Fáil from the party of 1926 to the one it became in that period would look very similar to what Trump did with the Republicans. At one of their meetings today, ‘Arise and follow Charlie’ could easily be sung as arise and follow Donald.

Haughey’s first period in office, in 1981-82, was very like Trump’s chaotic and undisciplined first term. Anyone who has read anything about Trump’s administration between 2016 and 2020 will be struck by the similarities. From day to day in Haughey’s government there was no shortage of bravado but more mistakes than achievements. This was the era of GUBU, with skullduggery everywhere. Phone taps. Dodgy money. Squandering the public treasury. Doing deals – at any price – to stay in power. Throwing shapes at the British and getting nothing for it only trouble. Promoting the unworthy simply because they were loyal.

But in Haughey’s second term there was a change, even if his opponents don’t like to admit it, even now. While many of the bad elements were still there – especially when it came to his private finances – there was a noticeable difference in how he governed the country. From 1987 on, Haughey had a plan which he more or less stuck to, and with rather less of the wilder, erratic stuff from his earlier days. He wanted to get the public finances in order, to stay close to Europe to get the benefits of the Single Market, and stand up to the British the better to persuade the Provisional IRA to give up the gun. He had learned a little from that first term.

And that, alas, is where the two political stories diverge. Listening to Trump, there is little hope that he has learned anything from his first time around. If he wins, expect more chaos, more loyalty tests, more testing the rule of law (and that will just be the start). GUBU II is coming, unless Kamala Harris can stop it. And if she can’t, this time there will be no parallels.