Democrat blunders revive Trump’s fortunes, but can he close the deal?
It’s not so much that Americans must choose the lesser of two evils but that they face the evil of two lessers. After this exhausting, unbelievable contest, the momentum is with the strange guy with orange hair.
It looks like Trump! After this exhausting, unbelievable contest, the momentum is with the strange guy with orange hair. Kamala Harris could still win, there’s still a strong chance of that in this statistically tantalising race, but the polls, and the wind, seem to be at Donald Trump’s back.
It was the best of campaigns – for drama; it was the worst of campaigns – for substance. It was a campaign of reason – in the vice-presidential debate; it was a campaign of madness – in the presidential debate. It was the campaign of hope – for each side as it surged; it was the campaign of despair – for each side as it was eclipsed. It was the campaign of constant movement – with more variables and moving parts than a moon shot; it was the campaign of monotonous sameness – the polls like a giant waterfall, always changing yet always the same.
We are all going direct to heaven, according to Trump, so long as America elects him. In that case, we are all going directly the other way, says Harris. But if we elect her, we will be surprised by Joy, so the Harris campaign proclaims. But if America does that, we are all going direct to hell, according to Trump, and from there there’s no redemption.
America is intensely polarised, full of mutual hatreds and recriminations. Each side is as bad as the other when it comes to ripping up the rule book and violating previously sacred norms. Each side – whether partisan Republicans of the conservative, cultural, nationalist, conspiracist or even libertarian inclination; or partisan Democrats obsessed with identity politics, green fantasies, racial reparations payments, Western and American historical, racial, economic and sexist perfidy, gender theory, policing speech, whatever – sees the other side as the embodiment of all evil.
Harris, her vice-presidential running mate Tim Walz, President Joe Biden and their designated surrogates accuse Trump of being a fascist, and routinely compare him to Hitler and his movement to American Nazism. This is clearly insane, but Democrats have talked themselves into this dark fantasy.
If Trump were a Nazi, it’s not his supporters but his opponents who would have gone to jail. If he were a Nazi, he wouldn’t have the support of the overwhelming majority of Orthodox Jews, not to mention a majority of Catholics, and rising support among Hispanics and blacks. If he were a Nazi, half of America wouldn’t be preparing to vote for him.
But because they see him as a Nazi, the Democrats believe anything is justified in stopping him, such as court cases that are a flagrant abuse of process, with astronomical financial penalties that are equally an abuse of process, or media bias of a stunning severity and consistency, and countless straight-out lies.
There have been two assassination attempts on Trump during this campaign. In one he took a bullet to the ear. It’s surely the height of irresponsibility and norm-breaking to label him the modern Hitler.
Trump, for his part, is as bad, calling Harris variously a Marxist, a bum, a low-IQ person, persisting with his demented lie that he actually won the 2020 election but it was stolen from him by ballot fraud, and that the Democrats could well steal this one too; and that if Americans should elect Harris, the nation will never recover, it may be the last election people get to vote in. Oh, and illegal immigrants are eating domestic cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. Like the Democrats calling Trump a new Hitler, this stuff is insane.
It’s not so much that Americans must choose the lesser of two evils but that they face the evil of two lessers.
Yet Trump and Harris are both plainly sane people; most Americans are perfectly sane, America is generally a sane, friendly, productive society. Some amalgam of the dizzy fact-free fantasies of social media, combined with the dominance of celebrity dynamics everywhere, the modern bias against seriousness, the plague of distraction, the hydra-headed growth of multivalent conspiracy communities, the plain mediocrity of so many institutions, the collapse of belief in transcendent truth, or any kind of truth, the hollowing out of education – all of these things together have produced this weird campaign, disconnected from reality and floating free above the mundane earth, blown by unpredictable cosmic breezes of random malevolence.
The story of the campaign is surely completely implausible. If the script writers of Homeland had juiced up their conspiracies a thousand times they couldn’t have come up with this sequence.
After the 2022 midterm congressional elections, Trump looked a busted flush. The Republican candidates most closely aligned with him, most backed by him, did poorly, much less well than more conventional Republicans. Republicans barely took the House of Representatives and made no impression in the Senate. At that stage, Trump was being well out-polled among Republican likely primary voters by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
A Democratic district attorney in Manhattan then took the single most ludicrous legal case against Trump – that he misrecorded the nature of hush money his organisation had allegedly paid to porn star Stormy Daniels – and turned it, unbelievably, into felony charges. This is a blatant and grotesque abuse of the legal process.
Initially Democrats got what they wanted, making Trump the centre of attention, leading Republicans, rightly enraged by the sick cynicism of the case, to rally around Trump, running other Republican contenders out of the contest. It was also meant to fatally damage Trump with the broader electorate. It failed at that.
But Trump was Biden’s only chance. Biden has been a poor President with a dismal record. America’s budget deficit is near enough 7 per cent of GDP, year after year. This year the US spent more on servicing debt than it spent on defence.
“A great power which spends more on debt than on its military doesn’t stay a great power for long,” according to British historian Niall Ferguson. US federal debt today is more than $US35 trillion ($53 trillion).
Biden’s wildly extravagant spending, while unsustainably juicing up the macro US economy in the short term, led to savage inflation that hit the wealth, such as it is, of both low-income and middle-class Americans.
Biden has been weak internationally. He didn’t deter the Taliban in Afghanistan, nor Russia’s Vladimir Putin, nor Iran, nor China’s Xi Jinping from militarisation and aggressive actions in the South China Sea, and in the air and waters around Taiwan and Japan. But all these dictators deterred Biden.
Worst, Biden, unlike any previous Democrat president, but in thrall to the left wing of his party and determined to reverse Trump’s controversial actions, abandoned any serious attempt to control America’s southern border so that millions of illegal immigrants, drawn not just from Latin America but all over the world, walked into the US.
Even Biden, well certainly his handlers, realised he couldn’t run on that record, so he decided to manoeuvre Trump into the candidacy, then make the election not a referendum on Biden, as most attempts at a second term are a referendum on the incumbent, but a referendum on Trump.
Harris has inherited Biden’s strategy in full. This has led to one of the remarkable paradoxes of the campaign. Trump won in 2016 because many of the populist things he said were true and resonated with ordinary Americans – why have we sent so many of our factories to China, why are old industrial and mining towns economic wastelands, why are these limousine liberals always mocking America, why doesn’t someone call out China for its trade cheating, why are our allies military freeloaders?
By 2020, Trump had a defensible record as president, even taking account of Covid. But all through that campaign he talked about himself – his persecution at the hands of congressional Democrats and their sympathisers in the media, the machinations of the so-called deep state, the lies told about him, the persecution of his allies.
As a result, not enough people heard a compelling reason to vote in favour of Trump. They didn’t hear anything about how he was going to make their lives better.
Now, in 2024, it’s as if the two campaigns have switched sides. Harris and the Democrats talk only of Trump, their only political rationale to demonise and oppose him. Theirs is a two-word slogan: Not Trump!
Although the Democrats have hundreds of millions of dollars more campaign money than Trump, and the overwhelming support of the media/entertainment/academic woke-industrial complex, it doesn’t seem to be enough.
Early on in the campaign Trump began to hurt Biden badly by calling him out on three key issues – illegal immigration, the cost of living, and crime. Further, Biden was manifestly unfit to serve as President. Trump opened a small but significant lead. In the first presidential debate, on June 27, Trump performed a political assassination. Each candidate had his respective microphone turned off when the other guy was scheduled to speak.
Biden was at his absolute incoherent worst, failing to finish sentences, thoughts completely muddled. Trump’s (enforced) silence enabled Biden to strangle himself. For the only time in his life, Trump showed not only wit but restraint.
“I have no idea what he said just then,” Trump remarked after a Biden sentence had collapsed, “and neither does he.”
Then the first assassination attempt was made on Trump and, miraculously, a bullet grazed his ear. Whatever you think of Trump generally, he showed great personal courage through this. Then Iranian agents tried to hire a hit man to kill Trump. This was revealed by intelligence agencies run by Biden’s administration and confirmed in court. Yet hardly anyone seemed to take any notice.
At that point Trump looked a certain winner. This led to two moments of hubris from Trump. The Republican convention was brilliantly staged, right up to the 30th minute of Trump’s acceptance speech, which to that point was gracious and magnanimous. But then, as ever, Trump’s instinct for self-sabotage kicked in and he spoke at inordinate length and in his old rancorous tone.
The other moment of hubris was choosing JD Vance as his running mate. At first Vance was disastrous because of some foolish things he’d said on cable TV. In due course, he turned out to be a major asset for Trump, but not initially.
Finally, Biden was humiliated and badgered into standing down. Biden endorsed Harris, his Vice-President. Barack and Michelle Obama and their team were working for her behind the scenes. On paper, Harris was a pretty terrible candidate. She’d achieved nothing as Vice-President and made a mess of the southern border when for five minutes she had responsibility for it. Biden had chosen her in part because she was so mediocre and had been so insignificant in the Democratic primary that he thought she would never be an alternative to him.
But then the overwhelming relief of all the Democrat establishment flowed into positive energy for Harris, who was crowned as the candidate even though she had never won a vote in a Democratic primary.
She then became a media celebrity creation. She was allowed to avoid all press conferences, long-form interviews, any scrutiny at all, really.
Hollywood manufactured her as the contemporary feminist woke version of Mr Smith Goes to Washington. She was running on the vibe. For one crazy moment her slogan was “Joy”, as vacuous as any slogan could be.
Trump was his old overbearing self in their one televised debate. The TV moderators relentlessly presented Trump as a pathological liar and Harris as the saint of all virtue. Momentum switched to her. Trump got grumpy, foul-mouthed, forgot his key messages and spent his time complaining.
But Trump is protean. Nothing with him is permanent, even bad performance. He changed the dynamics. Robert Kennedy, of the Kennedy immortals, running as an independent, dropped out and endorsed Trump. b Vance clobbered Walz in their vice-presidential debate. Vance did two critical things: he put the Biden-Harris record front and centre, and he stopped the Harris momentum.
Then Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, not only endorsed Trump, not only gave his campaign desperately needed cash in huge quantities, but became Trump’s most enthusiastic backer.
Trump did a pretend shift at a McDonald’s, serving fries. The invocation of American popular culture drove Democrats mad. No, no, no, they railed, he’s not an authentic person. Harris claimed she had really worked at McDonald’s, but no one could work out where or when. Was this a case of the stolen valour of the french fries?
But as Bob Carr once remarked, Trump is a genius without talent. So he was all set for a triumphant Madison Square Garden rally but some idiot on his staff booked a comedian who told a racist joke, calling Puerto Rico garbage.
It looked as though Trump once more had sabotaged himself, his genius as lethal to his own interests as to those of his opponents. Yet the fates seem with Trump this time.
Biden rode to Trump’s rescue, labelling Trump’s supporters garbage. Biden had wanted to do a joint campaign appearance with Harris but she treated him like he had the plague. Biden could not more effectively have sabotaged Harris than with the garbage line, recalling Hillary Clinton dismissing Trump’s supporters as “a basket of deplorables”.
Neither Trump nor Harris has remotely grappled with America’s immense fiscal, social or geo-strategic challenges in this bizarre campaign. Both presidencies are utterly unpredictable. Harris has implausibly promised to implement many of Trump’s policies, while everything Trump says is, at best, a starting point for negotiation. But deplorables have a tendency to rebel, deplorably.
You can’t be sure, but it looks like Trump.
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