US election 2020: Cult of Trump is not going away

Illustration: John Tiedemann

Donald Trump had a brief moment of reflection last week. “Could you imagine if I lose?” he told a large crowd in Georgia, “maybe I’ll have to leave the country.” His critics will be cheering but they won’t be alone.

If he wins in two weeks we will all need to strap in for the wildest of rides. If he loses he will continue to be a massive influence on US politics. He will be the leader of a political cult movement that has tens of millions of members. He will still be a disruptive force on the centre right. Over time, even his current allies and colleagues will be encouraging him to make a move to Christmas Island.

No single figure in modern American history has had more unwavering support from such a large proportion of the country. Both Trump the candidate and Trump the President have managed to harness that energy behind the patriotic grab, “Make America Great”. People have forgotten that it was used by many leaders including Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Only Trump has weaponised it successfully against fellow Americans who don’t support his agenda. Trump owns the American flag, the anthem and patriotism. His rallies are all red, white and blue.

Even so, Trump has not won a single significant poll that would indicate he could win on November 3. Despite this, he can still rely on a hard vote of at least 35 per cent of the voting population.

They are believers in their man no matter what the critics throw at him. Why? Because Donald Trump has consistently advocated for those voters, even at the cost of ceding the middle ground to a centrist like Joe Biden. It’s a political theory that’s unusual and risky.

As part of that “protect the base” strategy, Trump has advocated policies like closing the borders, lower taxes, less red tape and the abandonment of international trade and climate agreements. In fact, many middle-ground voters support those policies. But when it comes to moral leadership Trump is headstrong and inflexible.

When new rounds of police brutality emerged this year, Trump had to be dragged kicking and screaming into a mild criticism of the “bad apples” working across the 16,000 law enforcement agencies in America.

When white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 to defend white nationalism and protect the statues of Confederate figures, Trump said there were “good people on all sides”. Three people died and the President’s remark was used as an endorsement of sorts by white supremacists. More recently he has refused to criticise other white supremacist group like Proud Boys (“Stand back and stand by”) or the proponents of QAnon who are advocating a conspiracy theory that high-level Democrats like Biden, Hillary Clinton and the Obamas are running pedophile protection racquets.

That’s not stubborn, it’s crazy. His defiance is more important to him than winning the middle ground. That’s why for four years he has focused on feeding his base through rallies and social media. He would be in a much stronger position if he made more of his social justice successes, like his war on opioid addiction or his criminal justice reforms that went some way to addressing the horrible small-crime incarceration of thousands of African-Americans.

Don’t believe him when he says he may leave if he loses. Trump will monetise the disruption he has started. He will continue to tweet, hold rallies and embrace as many of his supporters as possible.

It’s widely expected that one way he will utilise his brand is by setting up a Trump media network. There were whispers of that in 2016. Some people said to me his run for president was only a bid to revive his brand post-The Apprentice. I never fully bought that.

But if TNN, or Trump News Network, comes to fruition, it would be competing directly with Fox News and would work in sync with smaller right-wing media outlets like Breitbart and the Daily Caller. It would likely cover cable television and talkback radio. And it will probably work because it will continue to advocate for Trump’s policies. He will have 24-hour news and endorsements without the restrictions of the White House. It will also have daily cannon fodder from a new Biden administration.

In order to keep the political narrative fresh Trump will feed speculation that he will run for the presidency again in 2024. All this has the capacity to tear the Republican Party further apart. It would be the equivalent of the DLP split from the Labor Party in Australia in 1955 that kept the party out of office for nearly 20 years.

A new Axios analysis of elected Republicans in congress found more than 85 per cent of members and senators have largely stood by Trump over the past four years. If elected officials defied the President, they have either been defeated in ballots or resigned from elected office. This is very unusual in the US system. Somewhere, somehow, most elected officials like to qualify their support for the leader. Especially when the leader engages in some non-mainstream behaviour. But today’s Republicans know Trump is going to hang around.

If Trump is badly defeated, it will not be business as usual in the Republican Party. The biggest challenge for moderate conservatives is that they have no leader. Paul Ryan has left and state governors such as Greg Abbott in Texas, Charlie Baker in Massachusetts or Larry Hogan in Maryland are happy blazing their own state trails. Some others, like Vice-President Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley will definitely be running for the 2024 nomination and will need to find ways to fill the vacuum.

In the meantime Trump is doing very little to win over the undecided voters. His rallies have energy but there is just no policy cut-through that will help him win swing voters.

I do believe there is a large group of shy Trump voters in the community. But there aren’t enough to close the current gap with Biden. Moreover, the fact that more people watched Joe Biden in a virtual town hall at the same time as Trump was holding his town hall suggests that Trump fatigue is real despite his loyal base.

I still haven’t written off Donald Trump. The current US news cycle is moving at 16x what it was in 2016. Trump certainly has the capacity to fill that monstrous demand for content. He has a mountain to climb and he won’t be giving up.

Joe Hockey is a former federal treasurer and ambassador to the US. He is president of advisory firm Bondi Partners.