Weekend Essay – Keeping America safe in the age of Trump

In 1990, during a trip to the United States, I took my son, then aged eight, to visit Washington DC. We peered through the railings of the White House, where at the time, to the best of my knowledge, Bill Clinton was not having sex with an intern in the Oval Office; we gazed up at the Lincoln Memorial, where hope and rectitude prevail; and we paused to salute the statue of Churchill outside the residence of the British ambassador on Massachusetts Avenue.

We also visited the Capitol Building, home of the United States Congress, which at the time could be accessed by the simple expedient of walking up the front steps, and carried on in the direction of Statuary Hall. At one point, having exited the Small Rotunda (not to be confused with the Great Rotunda), we walked along a corridor, through a set of open doors and found ourselves on the floor of the Senate, where a debate was going on.

It took me a moment or two to realise where we were, at the conclusion of which a silver-haired Senator looked round and motioned to us to leave. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he whispered.

“Oh,” I said. “My mistake. Terribly sorry.”

It is probably worth pointing out that I was not wearing a set of horns at the time. Nor was I carrying a Confederate flag. Even so, you’d have to say that security was not exactly top notch.

It was the same nine years later, before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when my wife and I flew into Washington from New York aboard a rickety, propeller-driven aircraft that was required to circle the city before being given permission to land. At one point, we flew almost directly over the Pentagon, so that we could see people moving about in the centrally-located plaza, known ironically as Ground Zero in the belief that it would be the number one target during a nuclear attack. Had I brought a bomb onboard (not difficult in those innocent days) and been inclined to hijack the plane, I could easily have made a name for myself in US history, albeit posthumously.

But if it’s audacity you’re looking for, here’s a story, from the mid-1980s, told to me by an Italian friend, by the name of Antonio, then newly appointed as Washington Correspondent of the Rome daily, La Republica. Antonio was attending a cocktail party in the Reagan White House when he was caught short and asked one of his American colleagues for directions to the nearest loo. “Down that corridor over there,” he was told, “door at the end on the right.” A minute later, having walked into what turned out to be not the loo, but the Oval Office, he was jumped on and wrestled to the ground by a pair of Secret Service agents. When Reagan was told what had happened, he laughed good naturedly, which was his way. But what if my Roman pal had been a member of the Mafia?

More than two decades on, security has been tightened up considerably, and it is now impossible to threaten the infrastructure of American democracy. Except, of course, that it isn’t. If I had joined the Trumpists yesterday, I, too, could have taken my turn on the Speaker’s chair or posed in her office, with my feet on her desk. I, too, could have chased a police officer up a set of stairs used by Senate staff or placed a Trump 2020 flag in the hands of a dead luminary in Statuary Hall.

Security, my ass! Maybe it’s time the Capitol Police, or the Washington PD, or the National Guard, or the FBI, or the US Marshals Service gave the security guards at Belfast’s George Best Airport the contract to come up with what I’m sure are known in DC as “enhanced protocols”. They’d know what to do. They certainly did when I attempted to board a flight to Manchester with two sets of scissors in my sponge bag. Is it any wonder the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan by US forces went so horribly wrong? The world is watching, which is more than could be said for America’s finest.