For those of us on this side of the Atlantic who associated Donald Trump with chaos and disruption and disorganisation, it’s a surprise to hear from an insider that his White House was a very stable place.
Manisha Singh was an assistant secretary for economic and business affairs in the US state department when Trump was president, and a political appointee to boot.
“I think if you look at Trump administration policies, they’re actually very predictable,” she recalls now.
“My view of the world is conservative, right-of-centre, and a limited government approach. [Trump] said we’re going to cut regulations, we’re going to manage taxes, build up infrastructure, make sure the United States is first in research and innovation and development.
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“All of those things are generally what I consider to be conservative principles. I think there’s this idea that there was a lot of unpredictability or mayhem going on, but I can tell you as someone who sat in, who was in the White House, who was in the Situation Room quite often ... there was a structure, there was a debate.”
Singh reported to secretary of state Mike Pompeo between 2017 and 2021. “There was a chain of events that followed the usual structure. It’s the same sort of structure in the Biden administration,” she says.
Her job was to manage economic policy and commerce in the state department. A lawyer from Florida, and the daughter of Indian parents, Singh has spent much of her professional life in Washington, working on Capitol Hill, and with republican administrations.
As a Republican, her perspective on Trump is a positive one. “If you look at the economics of the United States at the time, we were in really good shape, regardless of how anyone feels about President Trump.
The view of Trump from within the Republican Party tends to ignore or downplay the crazier stuff, such as his recent claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pet dogs and cats.
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“If you look at the policies and everything that he was implementing, it was good for the economy. We had record low unemployment, inflation was manageable. Our energy gas prices were lower. We were energy independent. From an economic perspective, we were in really good shape.”
It’s my belief that if the American people look at the economic successes and foreign policy successes of the first Trump administration, that the choice should be clear
— Manisha Singh
Singh stayed with the administration until the end, and was nominated to become the US representative at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2020, but Capitol Hill hearings were suspended because of Covid.
Asked if she would do it again, she unhesitatingly says yes.
She instances a programme to encourage female entrepreneurs, which Trump backed very strongly. Until 2016, only 3 per cent of venture capital funding went to women-owned start-ups and Singh set about changing that when she was under secretary.
“Bridging that opportunity gap was something that President Trump very much supported,” she said.
Her assessment of the current campaign is that Trump has lost little of his appetite. “The man has now survived two assassination attempts. The energy is there and the ideas are there,” she says.
“It’s my belief that if the American people look at the economic successes and foreign policy successes of the first Trump administration, that the choice should be clear.”
On foreign policy, she says Trump has appropriated “the Ronald Reagan mantra” of peace through strength, and her view is he achieved success with it.
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Manisha Singh was in Dublin to speak at an international business summit to mark the fifth anniversary of the Irish office of US law firm DLA Piper. She built up a good working relationship with former Irish ambassador to the US, Dan Mulhall, in Washington DC and also met Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe when he visited.
“I’m speaking from a potential conservative administration perspective. I understand that sometimes in the EU generally, or in Ireland, there may be some anxiety around what the next Trump administration will do,” she says.
“I’m giving my own personal view, of course, but as someone who did serve in the last Trump administration ... [it gives me] the opportunity to come here and just have a conversation about how important the US-EU relationship is.”
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