2020 race: ‘Normalised’ Trump flicks switch to discipline and leaves Biden looking weak

Donald Trump just took a giant step towards re-election and the anxiety among pro-Biden commentators is palpable.

US President Donald Trump gestures at the conclusion of the the final day of the Republican National Convention from the South Lawn of the White House on August 27.

Donald Trump took a giant step towards re-election at this week’s Republican National Convention.

If Trump does manage to pull off another miraculous come-from-behind victory, the two party conventions — Democrat and Republican — will be seen as a turning point. In his 70-minute convention speech, Trump went a long way towards defining Democrat challenger Joe Biden as an agent of his party’s left wing, soft on law and order, and whose policies would spread violence and disorder in American cities.

You could hear the anxiety in the voices of the pro-Biden CNN commentators straight after Trump’s speech. They had to process in real time, on air, the same uneasy realisation from Vice-President Mike Pence’s speech the night before: these were effective indictments against Biden.

A little later, one of the most stridently anti-Trump hosts on CNN was calling for Biden and his vice-presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, to go out on a platform somewhere other than Biden’s basement, demand an end to the violence in cities and tell looters and rioters they would be arrested and prosecuted.

CNN’s reaction is not important in itself. But it’s a straw in the wind.

Trump’s most devastating line: “No one will be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

This echoed Pence’s killer line from the night before: “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

Trump has several different personas at his disposal. At the Republican convention it was Disciplined Trump. Consequently, he was at his most effective.

There are many riddles at the heart of the Trump political phenomenon. One is this: It seems to be the very coarseness and crassness with which Trump approached politics in 2016 that led to his breakthrough with working-class voters in the Midwest, with NASCAR followers, wrestling fans, Unlimited Fighting Championship devotees (the UFC boss spoke at the convention). Trump’s very coarseness helped him break through with these folks. It convinced them he was not a Washington insider. He shared, even if in wildly exaggerated form, some of their cultural style; maybe he would fight for their interests.

Trump won partly because he got people to vote for him who generally didn’t vote at all.

If Trump loses on November 3 it will be in large measure because he failed to normalise his presidency. It was not necessary to keep firing cabinet secretaries, and to keep on with undisciplined, narcissistic, petulant media displays and wildly self-indulgent tweets in order to keep those new voters with him.

By failing to normalise his presidency, give it a more stable look, he lost legitimacy with a large cohort in the middle, who are deeply uneasy at Democratic policies and values.

What you got in this Republican convention was a normalised Trump, disciplined and effective, and a normalised Republican Party.

Biden remains intensely vulnerable. Most media commentators around the world had their respective convention columns effectively written in advance, with the Democrats portrayed as the party of sweet reason and the Republicans a wild group of extremists, conspiracy theorists and Trump cultists.

In fact, that was the reverse of how the conventions unfolded. The Democratic convention was entirely centred on emotion and almost not at all about policy. It was at the Democrat convention, wallowing in its Hollywood imprimatur, where Julia Louis-Dreyfus made crude and silly jokes about Mike Pence’s name; where Barack and Michelle Obama attacked Trump personally. In all my decades of watching American conventions it contained the least policy of any I’ve seen. It did not mention some key issues at all, notably China’s strategic challenge or the violence afflicting many US cities. Biden’s speech had very little policy and bizarrely used whole slabs of the speech he gave on becoming Obama’s vice-presidential candidate in 2008.

The Republicans, whether their policies are all wrong or all right (or a mixture of the two), spent most of their time on policy. They ran a slick version of a traditional political convention.

Republican politicians, community leaders and a selection of ordinary folks gave speeches. Some of course were highly emotional. And rather a large number of Trump family members spoke, although even then they mostly addressed policy. Nominating conventions with a sitting president are generally dominated by the president.

Naturally, the speakers over-boomed Trump’s record and overstated the Democrats’ faults, but that is all within the normal framework of rational politics and competing policy programs. The Democrats seemed to be obsessed by two fatal ideas – that Trump and his universe are uniquely, wholly evil without any redeeming features, and, in contrast, Democrats represent an angelic movement whose virtue is manifest and need only be celebrated. At the Democratic convention there were a few boilerplate promises repeated — greater access to healthcare, more social programs, more government spending – but these were almost never developed beyond the sophistication of a tweet or meme.

If Trump does win, the Trump Derangement Syndrome afflicting his opponents will be a big part of it.

With Trump so far behind, the Republican convention had a lot of work to do.

It needed to address his weakest point, his handling of COVID. His record, and the US performance overall, is not as bad as the critics claim, nor as good as the Trump partisans pretend.

The response to the virus was mainly a state responsibility and the two states that did worst by far, New York and New Jersey, are ruled by Democrat governors. The US death rate per million is still well below that of numerous big European nations.

There are measures on which the US does slightly better. One is the statistical measure of overall excess deaths; that is, more deaths than you would statistically expect in a given period. This has some appeal as a metric as it gets past the difficulties of trying to measure what is actually a COVID death. Similarly, the US death-per-infection rate flatters the US, though this is mainly a function of how many tests are carried out.

Nonetheless, with 180,000 deaths, the US performance has been poor. Partly this is because of a failure by some key institutions, such as the Centres for Disease Control. Trump did not cause such failures but they happened on his watch so he bears political responsibility.

On COVID, Trump let himself down by his wildly undisciplined mouth. If he loses on November 3, his inability to control himself at press conferences when talking about COVID will be a huge factor. For a president, he simply made too many contradictory and often enough wrong statements, such as that the virus would disappear, the Democrats were exaggerating the virus, that the US had it totally under control, that he had the power to decide when states and cities shut down and opened up, that masks were no use, that masks were a lot of use, etc.

Trump’s actions were better than his words (sound familiar?). He banned travel from China, then Europe. He organised the rapid manufacture of ventilators and so on. But because he was so undisciplined in message control, his political enemies have defined him on COVID.

A lot of speakers at the Republican convention ignored the virus altogether. That was a mistake. Trump and Pence mounted a serious defence of the administration’s actions. They won’t win the issue but to win the election they must substantially reduce it as a negative.

The Trump and Pence speeches gave their troops a narrative to fight with.

A negative for the Republicans will be that they had a big live audience for the last night of their convention and although it was outdoors there was no sign of effective social distancing. That undercuts the idea they are taking the virus as seriously as they should.

But it was on the economy and on crime, and also on a range of social issues, where Trump and the Republicans painted a devastating contrast with the Democrats.

Biden says he does not support the slogan “defund the police”. But as Trump pointed out, when Biden was asked if he favoured taking money away from police forces to give to social programs he replied “absolutely”.

Almost every Republican speaker who mentioned the law-and-order issue, and certainly Trump and Pence, said that when police engage in brutality or exceed the law, they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Countless Republicans, including many black Republicans, acknowledged racism in US history and pledged their total opposition to any racism.

But you don’t combat racism by destroying the police, they argued. A powerful speech was delivered by the head of the New York Police union, which is enthusiastically endorsing Trump. “Nobody hates bad cops more than good cops do,” he said, and then made a heartfelt plea for support for police who were being killed in city violence around the country.

Trump mounted a devastating case against Democrat policy. In four Democrat-controlled cities this year 1000 African-Americans have been murdered. The 10 most dangerous cities in America are all controlled by Democrats.

This sort of argument is by no means watertight intellectually, but it has a powerful, simple, commonsense appeal. If Democrat policies of liberal policing, heightened racial sensitivity and less aggressive use of force are the right policies, why are their results so calamitous in practice?

Here Republicans will use the Democratic convention against the Democrats right up until election day. Democrats are coming out to condemn violence in the streets by rioters and protesters now, Trump said, because their poll numbers on the issue are tanking, but for the four days of their convention they had nothing to say about it. That’s who they really are.

On the economy, Trump told the simple truth. Biden plans massive new taxes and he wants to abolish fracking and fossil fuels. Trump wants to cut taxes and extend America’s energy independence and lucrative energy exports.

On China, Trump and many Republican speakers called Beijing out for its trade manipulations, interference in other nations and its domestic dictatorship. Beijing wants Biden to win, they said. Trump unleashed a surely effective hit when he said that for 47 years Biden took donations from blue-collar people, gave them hugs and kisses, said he felt their pain, then went back to Washington and shipped their jobs to China. Biden and the Democrats may have a better approach to China, but we cannot know because they said nothing of substance about it at their convention.

Trump is less an outlier in international centre-right politics than he looks. A nearly demented column in The Financial Times by Ed Luce painted him as the destroyer of all political coherence. But the column revealed more about how much at sea Davos Man — who animates every breath of the FT — is with the new politics of today. Luce essentially defines a legitimate centre-right approach as requiring the social manners of San Francisco, the climate policies of the EU and the free-trade rhetoric of past Republican presidents.

It is partly Beijing’s ruthless, sustained exploitation of the global trading system, combined with the security challenges of China-dominated supply chains, that has caused the breakdown of the old consensus on free-trade rhetoric, which rhetoric of course was never fully implemented.

Meanwhile, as centre-left parties move further to the left, they abandon their working-class
constituents culturally and on economic policy — think manufacturing and mining — so centre-right parties are pitching for the working class. And Biden looks so feeble. Nancy Pelosi is the latest Democrat to advise him not to debate Trump. But if he dodges the debates, Biden will look irredeemably cowardly.

Still, the centre right has to be broadly credible in making such a pitch. Whether Trump can maintain the tone and substance of this effective Republican convention for the rest of the campaign will surely play a key part in the ultimate result.