Donald Trump is a wild card for President

TRYING to explain why American presidential campaigns are as they are to an Australian is a bit like briefing a Yank on Question Time.

TRYING to explain why American presidential campaigns are as they are to an Australian is a bit like briefing a Yank on Question Time.

Both rituals, particularly to outsiders, feel like exercises in carnival politics: undignified, frustrating and with more than a touch of the Jerry Springer Show.

That is particularly the case this year as the world looks at the US, scratches its collective head, and thinks … President Trump? Really?

What, one would be forgiven from asking, is that all about? Well, it’s complicated.

Despite being ahead in early polls there is essentially nil chance that, come January 2017, the property developer, casino mogul and occasional corporate bankrupt will take the oath.

The world will be spared the spectacle of dignitaries arriving at the White House to find the traditional Marine Guard cashiered and Evander Holyfield acting in the role of “celebrity greeter”.

And you can bet the house that the Map Room will not be fitted with baccarat tables in the hope that highrolling creditor nations might lose some of their stores of Treasury notes back to the US Federal Reserve.

That said, it would also be foolish for anyone with an interest in what is happening in the US to dismiss this episode as a mere freak show.

Here’s why.

What Trump represents — and what the subtle genius of the length of a long presidential campaign season allows — is a blowing off of steam. Trump’s early popularity suggests that, for the moment, he is giving voice to a feeling of a large number of Americans that something isn’t right even if, ironically, they’ve gone to a blackjack dealer to hear that the deck is stacked against them.

This is particularly the case when it comes to questions of immigration and what can be broadly termed the culture wars, issues where large numbers of middle Americans feel big decisions have not only been made without their input, but without their interests at heart.

When Trump talks about “building a wall” to stem the flow of illegal arrivals from Mexico or declares that “America is too politically correct” he is giving voice to those who worry about losing their jobs to low-paid migrants and to those who shake their heads at the perpetually outraged media and academic class that seems ­determined to censor the culture even as they work to make it more crass.

He’s not trying to convince or spin voters with carefully crafted messages designed not to get anyone off-side — that’s what politicians do. Instead, Trump is trying, like the salesman that he is, to close them.

A career politician has every reason to lie, so the logic goes. An outsider can tell it like it is.

Here Trump is just the other side of the same coin as self-described socialist and Democratic party rival Bernie Sanders, who is causing increasing amounts of grief for Hillary Clinton with a hard-Left campaign aimed squarely at the true believers.

Trump’s message is that the game is rigged by immigrants, their supporters, and the smartypants set.

Sanders says it is rigged by bankers and billionaires. Republican or Democrat, they are saying, the elite is screwing the little guy.

This is a debate which has been going on since Thomas Jefferson’s small-government, agrarian republicanism clashed with Alexander Hamilton’s urbane, connected, commercial classes. The tension has never resolved and, while that means that at the best of times America gets the best of both worlds, the fact this fight is again rearing its head so explicitly suggests that the old Left-Right ­divides no longer apply.

But it is early yet and anything can happen. Clinton is under investigation by the FBI for mishandling classified information while serving as secretary of state, leaving even Joe Biden now putting out feelers for a run.

Meanwhile other Republican candidates, and many Republican voters, will hope that having indulged their present frontrunner on a long track such an early leader will fail to finish.

Meantime, if Trump’s present popularity is truly a result of a broadbased gut feeling then that feeling is indigestion. Fortunately for America, indigestion passes.

James Morrow is a New York-born, Sydney-based writer and consultant. Twitter: @pwafork