Clashes with Pelosi, feuding with Greta Thunberg and a new low for Iranian relations

In the 16th instalment of our series recapping an unprecedented presidency, Joe Sommerlad looks at battles lost to ‘Nervous Nancy’, basic spelling, Canadian soft rockers and the teen climate activist

Greta Thunberg glares at Donald Trump during the Climate Action Summit (Reuters)

Donald Trump’s impeachment dominated the news cycle throughout the autumn and winter of 2019 and into 2020, but it’s worth rewinding to cherish several vintage episodes that coincided with the congressional inquiry, hearings and trial.

After dismissing John Bolton in September, Trump’s October began with “another beauty”, as the president himself might have put it, when The New York Times reported that his plans for the border wall were even more fantastical than previously disclosed.

Owing a debt to both Wile E Coyote and Dr Evil, the president had apparently pondered the possibility of having a team of snipers stationed along it to blast impoverished asylum seekers in the legs as they approached.

Even nuttier, he had also dreamed of a medieval moat running along its near-2,000-mile course populated by ravenous alligators and snakes (presumably “ill-tempered”) to devour anyone unlucky enough to fall in.

Incredibly, these were not even original ideas: both Barack Obama and Stephen Colbert had previously joked publicly about conservatives proposing such measures.

In his haste to issue a heated denial on 2 October, Trump accidentally referred to the fiendish water trap as a “Moot” on Twitter, his second-greatest typo after “Covfefe”.

On the same day – what a peach it was – Trump also tweeted the words “LOOK AT THIS PHOTOGRAPH!” accompanying a Nickelback-inspired music video attempting to incriminate the Bidens.

What’s worse than a Nickelback meme? Being ordered to take one down for copyright infringement.

Moral viral embarrassment came when a press shot surfaced of Nancy Pelosi hectoring him in the White House Cabinet Room during a 16 October briefing on his latest moves to pull American troops out of Syria prematurely, a meeting she and her fellow Democrats had marched out of soon after.

“Nervous Nancy's unhinged meltdown!” was how Trump captioned the picture of the House speaker, the only woman at the table, standing up and pointing an accusing finger at him.

But the spin didn’t stick.

Pelosi was clearly the one in control of the situation and enjoyed the photograph so much she made it her Twitter banner, saying later that it was Trump – a master of denial and projection – who had suffered a “very serious meltdown” and turned the gathering into “a nasty diatribe” by calling her “a third-rate politician” when she questioned his failure to plan for a resurgent Isis in the Middle East.

As the impeachment drama ran on, the process frequently attacked by Trump as a “coup d'etat” and by his lawyers as “illegitimate”, the president went about his business as best he could, hosting foreign leaders, rallying his base and triumphantly announcing the death of terrorist leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on 27 October (he had long envied his predecessor bagging Osama bin Laden).

Trump would make a great show of congratulating Conan, a dog involved in the operation, first tweeting a classified picture of the Belgian Malinois, then revealing his name, before posting a Daily Wire meme of himself tying a medal around its neck, the canine Photoshopped over the image of James McCloughan, a life-saving Vietnam medic presented with the Medal of Honour in 2017.

Trump tells the media about how Conan is a hero and said he presented the animal with a medal and a plaque (Getty)

Conan would be welcomed to the White House on 25 November but the president – no animal lover – appeared frightened of him, hiding behind Mike Pence and Melania.

In the interim between the hearings’ conclusion and the house drawing up the articles of impeachment, Trump mysteriously posted a meme on 28 November of his face affixed over Sylvester Stallone’s, in character as Rocky Balboa, as the country sat down for Thanksgiving.

While the media chewed over the meaning of this between slices of pumpkin pie on an otherwise slow news day, the president suddenly turned up in Afghanistan delivering turkey dinners to American servicemen stationed at Bagram airfield, north of Kabul.

The tweet turned out to be part of an elaborate distraction plan to fool the press into believing he was still at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida and sitting on social media, whereas he had in fact been on a 16-hour military flight.

The ploy was clever and achieved its aim, but there was also something smugly cynical about the West Wing’s certainty that it could manipulate the day’s news agenda and revealing about the self-awareness it betrayed concerning Trump’s Twitter habit.

The president was yet again making waves on social media on 12 December when he failed to conceal his jealousy after Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year for her climate activism.

“So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!” he tweeted.

The ploy was clever and achieved its aim, but there was also something smugly cynical about the West Wing’s certainty that it could manipulate the day’s news agenda

Thunberg responded by changing her account’s bio to mimic Trump’s words before, 11 months later, responding to one of his messages crying “STOP THE COUNT”, refuting his election defeat, with: “So ridiculous. Donald must work on his Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Donald, Chill!”

Revenge is a dish best served cold, after all.

Trump had previously attacked Thunberg – who had toured the world by sea, road and rail in 2019 to warn against the dangers of global warming – by ridiculing her impassioned address to the UN in September when she harangued world leaders for their inaction.

"She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see," he had smirked on Twitter, his sarcasm making a mockery of his own wife’s #BeBest anti-bullying initiative.

All of this was even more outrageous given his own administration’s abysmal record on climate, having withdrawn from the Paris accord, rolled back regulation across the map in support of fossil fuel extraction and dismissed the advent of devastating California wildfires as the consequence of poor forest management only.

Before his impeachment trial could get under way in the Senate, Trump tossed the world into fresh conflict with Iran in the new year when he ordered the assassination of its top general, Qassem Soleimani, on 2 January in response to the killing of a US contractor in Iraq, the command duly carried out with a deadly airstrike on Baghdad airport.

Speaking from Mar-a-Lago, where he had spent the Christmas holidays, Trump explained that intelligence had discovered Soleimani was “plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel”, hence his “termination”.

It would later emerge that Mike Pompeo, new defence secretary Mark Esper, and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley had visited the president and given him a list of options on how to respond to rising tensions in the Perisian Gulf, offering the killing of Soleimani as the most extreme response on the table but never for a moment expecting him to actually choose it.

Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward reported that Republican senator Lindsey Graham had subsequently tried to talk Trump out of it over a round of golf but failed in the face of the president’s determination not to look weak again, having bottled his last offensive against Tehran in the summer.

With Trump threatening further strikes if Iran retaliated, 2020 had begun in turmoil – just as it intended to go on.

Read the full The Trump Review series here