What do Donald Trump and Rebekah Vardy have in common?

It might be strange but the former president and the Wag share one key detail, writes Holly Baxter

Trump and Vardy have both painted themselves as victims (Getty/iStock/PA)

When you work in transatlantic news, it’s amazing the parallels you start to see. For instance: a disgraced former reality TV star ends up getting rid of evidence for fear of it appearing in a courtroom. Do you read that sentence and think former president Donald Trump? Photographs shared by New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman this week and published in Axios appear to show torn-up documents floating in the White House toilets. Haberman, who has been working on a book about Trump’s time in office called Confidence Man, says she obtained the photos from a DC insider.

“You have to be pretty desperate to sell books if pictures of paper in a toilet bowl is part of your promotional plan,” a Trump spokesperson told Axios in response. Indeed – but then you also have to be pretty desperate to cover up what you’re doing if you’re disposing of your notepaper in toilets while at the head of the country. Trump was aware of the Presidential Records Act, which requires all sitting presidents to keep meticulous records of their meetings and phone calls in order to “preserve historically relevant material”. Throwing documents into the toilet doesn’t exactly scream “proud of what I’m doing here”.

But then maybe, when I said a disgraced former reality TV star ended up getting rid of evidence for fear of it appearing in a courtroom, you didn’t think of Donald Trump at all. Maybe you thought of Rebekah Vardy, former contestant on I'm a Celebrity and now surely best-known for her long legal battle with Coleen Rooney. Vardy recently lost that battle after a long back and forth with her former friend and fellow football Wag.

Stationed in New York as I am, I don’t concentrate on the UK news side of things that often – and I’m even less inclined to read about the controversies of footballers’ wives. But the detail that really stood out to me from the Rooney-Vardy trial was when the court ordered Vardy’s agent’s phone should be handed in and searched for particular messages that might have pointed to her selling stories to The Sun about Rooney. Shortly afterwards, the offending phone disappeared, “falling off a boat” in the North Sea. As the “Wagatha Christie” trial wrapped up, it was opined by Rooney’s barrister that Vardy had her agent chuck the phone – and with it, all accessible messages – out the boat during a strangely timed “sightseeing tour”. Most of the public were inclined to agree.

The desperate way in which people seek to cover their tracks while at the same time shouting in public about how they have been victimised really is interesting to see. In Vardy’s case, there was no need to have all these details out in the open. When Rooney first found her out as a source for some unflattering stories in The Sun, there was a flurry of media interest. People found the rivalry entertaining – but news moved on fairly quickly. In an astonishing own goal (pun intended), Vardy then sued Rooney for defamation. That meant a lengthy court case where barristers and a judge sought to find out the truth of the matter. After careful examination of the facts and the messages they were able to access before that phone fell into the sea, it seemed pretty clear to everyone that Vardy had done what she’d gone to court shouting that she hadn’t done. It’s unlikely her public persona will recover from that. What levels of cognitive dissonance did she have to convince herself to go ahead with the legal action?

In a much higher-stakes way, Donald Trump has dug himself a similar hole. As we waited an interminably long time – almost a week – for votes to be tallied up during the November 2020 election, he swung from declaring victory to asking people to “STOP THE COUNT” when votes were no longer in his favour. And then, of course, when it was clear Joe Biden had won, Trump declared the entire election a “steal”. He seems to have encouraged radicalised supporters to storm the Capitol a couple of months later on 6 January 2021. And he abruptly ended his friendship with his own former vice president, Mike Pence, after Pence refused to try and overturn the democratic results and, later, attended Biden’s inauguration.

There is a psychological technique some cult leaders have where they say the most outrageous things so brazenly and loudly that they hope to shock their followers into believing everything they say. It’s the opposite of the “boiling frog” myth: instead of slowly turning up the temperate, such people throw boiling water on you straight away and tell you it didn’t burn. The idea is that if you can stomach that, then you’ll stick around forever.

Followers of the Make America Great Again movement started by Trump have been described by various commentators as similar to members of a cult. What’s clear is that many of them are willing to believe in some truly mind-bending things. Some on 6 January held placards with “Q” written on them in reference to QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory that postulates Trump is trying to save America from a shadowy cabal of Democrat paedophiles. Others thought Trump had been sending them secret messages through his speeches (and, as when he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during one public appearance, they weren’t wrong that he sometimes seemed inclined to do so.) Many – like Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot dead by Capitol police officers while trying to breach the Capitol – travelled across the country because they believed the election had been taken from Trump.

How do you deradicalise people like that? Will photographs of documents floating in toilets be enough? Most likely the people willing to storm the Capitol for Trump will say that anything he does is in pursuit of his noble goal and therefore justified. They have already accepted the idea that an entire election was stolen by groups of nefarious Democrats in every state. What’s a bit of toilet-flushing in comparison to that?

Luckily, Rebekah Vardy has no such base. But she, too, chose the path of no remorse at the end of her court case, releasing a statement that said, in part: “I am extremely sad and disappointed at the decision that the judge has reached. It is not the result that I had expected, nor believe was just.”