Don’t be fooled that Donald Trump's advisers can tame him in the White House – he stopped listening months ago

Trump’s core belief is in himself. He takes a bit of advice from family members, and that is it

Trump delivers his acceptance speech during his election night event at the New York Hilton Midtown this morning (Getty)

Just to remind ourselves, before polling day Donald Trump said that on his first day in office he would label China a “currency manipulator” and, that done, he would withdraw the US from the North American Free Trade Agreement and place a 35 per cent tariff on Mexican imports.

And, taking his words literally, if there was still time before the White House closed down for the night, he would ask Congress to repeal Obamacare. This would remove health insurance from 24 million Americans. Then, just before the last light is turned off, he would get on with deporting more than 2 million “criminal” illegal immigrants.

People say this was all fantasy. It was meant as razzmatazz. Once in the White House, Trump would be surrounded by intelligent, experienced staff who would persuade him to sober up, slow down and reflect carefully before announcing any policy decisions. But I am afraid I don’t accept this reassuring scenario.

Why not? Because when reporters went behind the scenes during the presidential campaign in its latter stages, they found a disorganised and all-over-the place Donald Trump – even though nothing could have been more serious for him than winning the race for the White House. In an interesting piece entitled “Inside Donald Trump’s Last Stand”, the New York Times discovered that he struggled to suppress his “bottomless needs” for attention. What he had around him was a “band of squabbling and unfireable advisers, with confusing roles and an inability to sign off on basic tasks”. A plan to encourage early voting in Florida went unapproved for weeks.

The result was chaotic. “Advisers cut loose from the campaign months ago… still talked to the candidate frequently, offering advice that sometimes clashes with that of the current leadership team… not even staff members who volunteered to be dismissed were let go.” Trump won’t change these working habits. So in practice the White House staff would be no more capable of restraining the newly elected President with all the prestige that goes with the office than were his campaign crew – particularly as he would have just achieved an historic victory with his supposedly casual methods.

Trump’s core belief is in himself. He takes a bit of advice from family members, and that is it. So it will be Trump untamed in the White House.

Then the argument is put forward that Trump can huff and puff all he likes, but that Congress must approve much of what he wants to do. And it can refuse a President’s requests – indeed, it has often done so in the past. Well, to start with, the Republicans will continue to control the Senate and the House of Representatives. Democratic Party opposition could not be effective. But would the Republican Party really want to use its control of the Senate and the House of Representatives to thwart a newly elected Republican President?

Instead of “Brexit means Brexit” we would have “Trump means Trump”. The 2016 exit polls show that the quality that mattered most to voters was the ability to bring needed change. Almost four in 10 voters cited this. Trump won these voters by a huge margin. By contrast, only about one in five voters cited experience and good judgement as the most important qualities.

More than that, Republican members of Congress would probably fear that any defiance of the new President would bring retribution for senators and House members back home in their states, districts and precincts. During the campaign, for instance, Representative Warren Davidson of Ohio warned Republican leaders to proceed cautiously on the issues most central to Trump’s candidacy: trade and immigration. “You can’t ignore what millions and millions of people have expressed in this election cycle,” Davidson said.

The reality is that only what we might loosely call “events” are going to slow down Trump. In the lead would be the financial markets. Indeed, earlier today, as soon as a Trump victory looked likely and well before counting was over, the futures markets indicated that American shares were likely to fall precipitously in value as soon trading opened.

The dollar would weaken dramatically if, as the new President has promised, he left government entitlement spending alone and cut taxes, thus boosting the Budget deficit. Foreign investors in the dollar and in US bonds have a strong attachment to fiscal rectitude. Meanwhile, a cheaper dollar would soon translate into higher inflation at home.

That in turn would immediately impact on Trump’s natural supporters, such as the average Joe lucky enough to have a job but has seen his pay stagnate over a long period. In the US, average household income adjusted for inflation was barely higher in 2014 than it had been at the beginning of the 1990s. But once inflation surges, the average Joe’s spending power would decline. He’d become poorer. That is what inflation does.

Then let us take one more example: deporting illegal immigrants and building the famous wall. Exit polls showed that seven out of 10 voters believed that most undocumented immigrants working in the United States should be offered a chance to apply for legal status. And a majority of voters rejected building a wall on the southern border with Mexico. I don’t say that the unpopularity of these measures would stop Trump in his tracks. But there would be a reckoning.

So what lies ahead for the United States and for the rest of the world is an increase in turbulence. Trump will push forward with his extreme ideas. Vested interests, by no means all of them bad, will push back. To find the most accurate description of what is coming, I turn to, of all people, an Italian neo-Marxist theorist and politician writing before the Second World War, Antonio Gramschi, who I have quoted before. He perceptively commented, speaking of his own times: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” That is exactly where the Western democracies now find themselves.