As a red-state American, I’m asked one question in Australia more than any other

As an American living in Australia, there is one question I get asked more than any other. Put bluntly, it’s “What the f--- is going on in the US?” The underlying issue: How does a hateful, lying, criminal, vulgar and chaotic person like Donald Trump remain a viable presidential candidate?

While the American political scene is very complex, there is, when it comes to this particular question, one overriding simple answer. It is this: the Democratic Party, over the years, has allowed itself to be culturally branded in a way that makes it very difficult for it to make inroads into big parts of the US population.

Donald Trump’s continued appeal is a mystery to the world outside the US. But he won in 2016 and can win again in 2024 against Kamala Harris.Credit: AP

I grew up in the very red state of Arizona – among conspiracy theorists, soi-disant psychics, antisemites and more (and that was just in my own family). I then spent a career in places like San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, DC. Then, for family reasons, I moved back to Arizona – and was reminded what real America is like.

Outside of Democratic enclaves in the city centres of Phoenix and Tucson, you could just feel something in the water. It wasn’t that everyone there was a right-wing lunatic, though many certainly fit that bill. It was that people were Republican, culturally. Everyone knew that Democrats were free-spending, weak on defence, anti-religion, and overly concerned with black people (particularly black people on welfare, which in this world was almost a redundant phrase). I could go on, but you get the picture. There was an inbred suspicion of the Democratic Party.

None of this is really true and, of course, the Republican Party vision of itself as populated by country-lovin’, Godfearin’ “good Americans” was, and is, delusional. The Democratic Party let itself get branded that way, has run scared ever since, and is now in the position of fighting against ingrained norms. And it’s all reinforced crudely on Fox News and right-wing radio 24 hours a day, literally.

It’s not like the Democrats don’t have material to work with! Republican presidents (Reagan, Bush, Trump) run up deficits, and Democratic presidents (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden) come in and try to bring deficits down. Republican presidents have embarked on preposterous and harmful foreign-policy initiatives (Contragate, the Iraq War, Trump’s bromance with Vladimir Putin), left the country vulnerable (9/11) and botched crises (Hurricane Katrina, COVID).

The Democrats have struggled with the rise of Trumpism going back to 2016.Credit: Bloomberg

It gets worse. When the right has already convinced a good segment of the country that the other side is suspicious from the start, consistency or even coherence isn’t needed.

Accordingly, the standards that Democratic administrations are held to are fungible and inconsistent. We hear that voters were upset with Biden because of inflation. Well, Obama cleaned up the mess George W. Bush left and led the country through eight years of prosperity. He saved the motor industry, the economic backbone of the Midwest. And gas prices were at historic lows in 2016.

What happened? Voters turned their backs on the Democrats (particularly in the Midwest) and elected a calamitous president, in Trump. We heard that Ronald Reagan was a “Happy Warrior” whose optimism contrasted with his opponents’ doom and gloom. Let me tell you: Hillary Clinton ran an optimistic and positive campaign, too, against a dark and vengeful Trump, and we know how that turned out.

Of course the Democrats do their best to give as good as they get, and they certainly have targeted Trump for his unique unfitness for office. But to my ears, too many of the Democrats’ attacks miss obvious targets, and even when they don’t, they feel effete, based on jargon, and miss the human element.

Remember Nikki Haley’s lancing jabs during the Republican primaries at the way Trump ran up the national debt as president? Why wasn’t Biden talking about that from his first day in office? Republicans regularly talk about crime. Why doesn’t every American know that they are a lot more likely to get murdered in rural red states like Oklahoma and Arkansas than they are in New York City?

Democrats use jargon like “LGBTQ+ rights” instead of talking bluntly about gay people being beaten up, shunned or not allowed to adopt children. They talk about helping the working and middle classes but seem incapable of making the simple point that the purchasing power of the nation’s already low minimum wage has declined almost by half in the past few decades.

Here’s just one example: Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ vice-presidential nominee, offered a deeply felt argument for school children to get free breakfast and lunch. The trouble is, to a big section of America, that just means “feeding poor black kids with my money”. He needed to take the argument a step further. He needed to say that hungry kids are troublesome kids, who drop out of school, who later get caught up in the justice system. Non-hungry kids do better in school, graduate, get better jobs and pay taxes, breaking the cycle of poverty. He could then make a concluding hyperbolic statement: “Every dollar we spend on feeding a hungry kid pays off tenfold down the line!”

It looks like Harris’ poll numbers are ticking up at least a bit after the presidential debate. The Democrats navigated the potential disaster of Biden’s departure with (uncharacteristic) aplomb – and her campaign, plainly, is trying to combat some of these deep-seated stereotypes about her party.

We can close our eyes and fantasise that we are seeing the beginning of a movement to dispose of Trumpism once and for all. But let’s not forget how preposterous it is that, were the election held today, the most manifestly corrupt and searchingly incompetent president America has ever produced could very well find himself back in office.

How crazy is it that, to a large part of the country, the Democratic Party is simply not seen as an attractive alternative? More than anything else, that failure has enabled Trumpism.

Bill Wyman is a former arts editor and assistant managing editor of National Public Radio in Washington. He teaches at the University of Sydney.