Christopher Pyne: Trump is a radical and a demagogue. He will lose on Tuesday and he deserves to lose.
A blue wave must claim the White House, House and Senate to save conservatives from Trumpism, writes Christopher Pyne.
Opinion
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While I am sure this column will infuriate conservatives, I would remind them that supporting Donald Trump to remain as President of the United States of America is not a qualification for whether you are a conservative, a Liberal or a Republican.
Trump is not a Republican. He is a Trumpian. He does not share the traits of the best Republican presidents, such as Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon or even the two Bushes.
He is no conservative. He is a radical and a demagogue.
He will lose on Tuesday and he deserves to lose.
Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, Trump had done a sterling job growing the US economy.
He helped enable more jobs, more investment, low unemployment, more exports, lower taxes. The pandemic wiped that out.
Without the economy, Trump doesn’t have a platform for re-election. Everything else he has touched has demonstrated the Midas touch in reverse (if you get my drift).
Trump has been unstable, unpredictable and flaky.
On foreign policy he has treated relationships where the US should hold the line like a real estate deal that can be resolved with a bit of give and take over lunch.
He has failed to maintain a consistent approach to both allies and foes. Trump gave North Korea massive public relations wins and got nothing in return.
He took the US out of the Iranian nuclear deal and imposed genuinely strong sanctions that have hurt the Iranian regime, but he failed to hit back when Iran or its proxies destroyed US airborne assets.
He has waxed and waned on Russia, Turkey and China.
He abandoned the Kurds in northeast Syria. After encouraging an uprising against President Maduro of Venezuela, he failed to follow through.
Trump’s political approach is to divide. He denigrates his opponents — former staff, cabinet members, senior members of the military and doyens of the Republican Party, such as the late John McCain. He is a hater.
The President of the United States needs to be a healer.
It’s not good enough, when a white supremacist deliberately runs over an opposing protester, for the President to blame both sides equally.
The behaviour of the Black Lives Matter movement is far from blameless, but when civil activists have similarly got our of hand in the past, presidents like Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy and Nixon sought to pour balm on troubled waters, not accelerant.
But it is probably Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic that has been his greatest failure, and at the worst possible time in the election cycle — election year.
The US has about 4 per cent of the world’s population, yet it has endured 20 per cent of the world’s recorded deaths. I’m sure it’s true that the real rate of deaths is much higher than we know now and will probably ever know. But even so, more than 229,000 American’s have died already and many more will.
Just last week, Trump was claiming that the US had turned the corner on the worst of the pandemic and was contradicted by Dr Anthony Fauci, the head of his own response team!
The problem for Trump is that older people are, as they are for the Liberal Party in Australia, a usually reliable voting cohort for the Republicans. Not this year. They are terrified of dying.
If the current President can’t be relied on to put community safety at the top of their list of priorities, older voters will look for a candidate that will.
The Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, is not Hillary Clinton.
Where Clinton was a polarising candidate, Biden is not. He is a known quantity. He was Vice President to President Barack Obama for eight years and he was in the US Congress before that for four decades.
Ironically, because Trump has tried to portray Biden as having one foot in the grave at worst and being decrepit at best, all Biden has had to do is remain standing throughout the campaign, and he has done better than that. He bested Trump in the first debate and drew the second.
Unlike many in his party, Biden is a moderate Democrat. The further left-wing Democrats have mercifully retreated because their hatred of Trump is stronger than their myopic focus on their own interests.
The Democrats are out-spending the Republicans. That doesn’t always happen. The Obama Democratic Party machine is out in force for Biden in a way that they weren’t for Clinton.
While the Trump rallies are well attended and passionate, that’s not hard to achieve in a polarising race in a country of 329 million people. It doesn’t mean that much, regardless of how much attention it generates.
I’m not hedging my bets. I predict Biden will win easily.
Let’s not forget in 2016, Clinton beat Trump by three million votes but lost in a few key states. That’s not going to happen in 2020. Biden will win the popular vote and he will win the Electoral College.
In 2020, Biden will win Michigan, Wisconsin and probably Pennsylvania and Florida. Biden will most likely win Arizona and North Carolina. Neither would be regarded as swing states in recent elections. Biden has an outside chance in Ohio and Iowa. None of those states voted for Clinton in 2016.
I predict the Democrats will win control of both the Senate and House of Representatives.
It will be a blue wave. Afterwards, my hope is that traditional Republicans will wake up from the nightmare they have been living since 2016, when Trump smashed the Republican establishment to win the nomination and then the election. I want them to take back their party and return to the mainstream.
If I’m wrong? Well, next week you will read about me eating a large helping of grandma’s traditional humble pie. If I’m right, I’m looking forward to a better United States.