‘If we’re strong together we’ll overcome this together. I love you,’ she wrote to her Duck, even though she may have discovered Bashar’s infidelities. He responded with a love heart and some country-and-western lyrics: ‘I’ve made a mess of me / The person that I’ve been lately / Ain’t who I wanna be.’ In 2013, returning from an end-of-Ramadan party, Assad and Asma were attacked by rebels. They survived, but now Maher was unleashed to crush the rebels, while their sister Bushra gave advice and her husband Assef Shawkat, one of the intelligence chieftains, clashed with him. Maher shot and wounded him. Later Shawkat was killed in a rebel bomb attack. Maher lost his leg in another assassination attempt. Soon afterwards Bushra al-Assad, widowed by the killing of Shawkat, left for Dubai. But Asma stayed. After the death of the matriarch Anisa, Asma became official First Lady. ‘The president is the president of all Syria,’ she announced. ‘The First Lady supports him.’ The family held on, just as the greatest democratic dynasty was subsiding.
‘She was a striking woman in her sixties,’ was how Obama described Sonia Gandhi in November 2010, ‘dressed in a traditional sari with dark, probing eyes and a quiet, regal presence.’ Sonia Gandhi had recovered from the murder of her husband, Rajiv, to assume leadership of Congress, and Obama was impressed by her ‘shrewd and forceful intelligence’ in the service of ‘the enduring … family dynasty’. After winning two elections, Sonia chose not to become premier herself, appointing an ex-finance minister, Manmohan Singh, India’s first Sikh leader.
Nicknamed Mona Lisa, Sonia dominated from behind the scenes for a decade, but Obama was less impressed by her son, Rahul, the heir. Obama wondered if this was the end: ‘Would the baton be successfully passed?’
Four years later, Rahul was routed by a Hindu nationalist from Gujarat, Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In an India long ruled by dynasty, Modi represented a self-made Hindu middle class; he liked to say he had once sold tea at Vadnagar railway station. As a boy he joined the paramilitary RSS, a believer in Hindutva. Joining its youth wing at eight, Modi became a full-time pracharak – organizer – so devoted that although he went through an arranged marriage as a boy, he never lived with his wife: politics was his sole passion. The Nehrus were declining thanks to decades of corruption, entitlement and failure to confront India’s inequalities.
The BJP’s rise was accelerated by a campaign to raze the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya, supposedly built by the first Tamerlanian emperor at the site of a Hindu shrine believed to be the birthplace of Rama. Holiness is always infectious, the holier and more hallowed for one sect, the more so for its rival. In 1992, a national campaign had mobilized a Hindu crowd to attack the mosque and demolish it, sparking riots that killed 2,000 people.
In 1998, the BJP managed to form a coalition government. In February 2002, in Gujarat, where Modi was chief minister, elected after a campaign promoting Hindutva, a train bearing Hindu pilgrims to Ayodhya caught fire – probably after a Muslim mob set the coaches alight. Modi declared it a terrorist attack by Muslims and did little to defuse the tension. In the following days, Hindu mobs killed around 2,000 Muslims, some of them burned alive, women raped and mutilated, while police stood by. Promising free-market reforms, in 2014 Modi won the first of two general elections, but his autocratic style, bias against Muslims in his Citizenship Act and clumsy economic reforms revealed that he was as careless as the Nehrus, only less tolerant of minorities.
At 2 p.m. on 2 May 2011, as the Arab Spring gathered momentum, the calm of a walled mansion in north-eastern Pakistan, not far from the capital Islamabad, was broken by the distant whirl of helicopters.
WHERE LIONS AND CHEETAHS LURK
Two US Blackhawks bearing, in Obama’s words, ‘twenty-three members of the Seal team, a Pakistani American CIA translator and a military dog named Cairo’ were taking part in Operation Neptune Spear. Obama joined his staff in the White House Situation Room as the choppers flew low over Pakistan. As they approached the mansion, one of the helicopters went down.
It was Obama’s hardest decision. The CIA had informed him that at a mysterious fortified house, linked to Osama bin Laden by two of his couriers, they had been watching a tall man walk in the tiny garden. ‘We call him the Pacer,’ said the lead officer. ‘We think he could be bin Laden.’ Obama consulted his cohorts: Vice-President Biden ‘weighed in against the raid, given the enormous consequences of failure’. But Obama approved the mission against bin Laden, tactlessly codenamed Geronimo.
At home, Michelle endured the stress of politics. ‘I sensed an undercurrent of tension in her, subtle but constant,’ recalled Obama, ‘like the faint thrum of a hidden machine.’ He saw ‘part of her stayed on alert, waiting and watching for the next turn of the wheel, bracing herself for calamity’. Sometimes ‘the lions and cheetahs started to lurk’, wrote Michelle. ‘When you’re married to the president you come to understand quickly that the world brims with chaos …’
They sensed a coming darkness, a backlash against their liberal values – and they were right. In 2010, a tall, wide-hipped property developer with an auburn tan and a bright-yellow combover started to consider running for president against Obama. Donald Trump, then aged sixty-four, was already the personification of American illusion – grandson of a Bavarian immigrant and gold-rush brothel-keeper, son of a post-war Queens slum landlord. Using his billion-dollar inheritance, he became a developer of luxury Manhattan hotels and Atlantic City casinos, funded by junk bonds, constantly refinanced on the edge of bankruptcy and paying scarcely any tax on his loss-making ventures. In the 1980s, he had promoted the myth of this dealmaking with a bestselling book, The Art of the Deal, which in 2004 won him the job of presenting a TV reality show, The Apprentice. His new fame enabled him to reinvigorate his Trump franchise.
Husband of three glamorous women – a Czech skier, an American model and a Slovene model – patriarch of a business dynasty, lover of a bazzoon of Playboy centrefolds and porn performers, this bombastic bazooka of complex inferiority would put on a fake voice and, claiming to be his own publicist, ring newspapers to tell them that ‘the Donald’ was having affairs with supermodels and popstars. While having an affair with his future second wife, he had quoted her praise of his sexual virtuosity to give the New York Post one of its most memorable headlines: ‘BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD’. He was a fairground huckster, for whom the truth mattered less than the spectacle, and expertise or knowledge were contemptible, but he had a gift for articulating what millions were thinking. As a ‘killer’, never a ‘loser’, he had long coveted power: in 1987, he had taken out advertisements offering to negotiate arms limitation with Gorbachev. Steeped in the seamy dealmaking of New York property, with its hints of Mafia pay-offs, long mocked in New York high society, he had built a Monopoly set of golden tower buildings, altogether achieving much more than most politicians had ever attempted before they came to office.
In March 2011, to the Obamas’ incredulity, Trump floated a racist conspiracy theory that Obama had not been born in the USA. ‘Growing up, no one knew him,’ he said. ‘I want him to show his birth certificate …’ Obama, rattled and astonished, mocked him but realized that Trump ‘was a spectacle and in the USA of 2011 that was a sort of power … Far from being ostracized for the conspiracies he’d peddled, he had never been bigger.’ Michelle felt that ‘The whole thing was crazy and mean-spirited … But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks.’ Yet Trump still seemed to be a reality-show maven who posed no threat.