Donald Trump is killing Joe Biden, even from court
It’s one of the most astonishing performances in modern politics. Right now, beset by dozens of legal charges, unable to travel the country, Donald Trump is winning the US election campaign.
It’s one of the most astonishing performances in modern politics. Right now, from inside a courtroom, beset by dozens of legal charges, unable to travel the country, massively outspent by his opponent, Donald Trump is winning the US presidential election campaign against Joe Biden.
The situation is epic in its incongruity. Never before has a former president been on criminal charges or faced so many ruinous civil law suits, yet politically Trump is besting Biden by a large margin.
As ever with Trump, the combination of grotesquerie and deadly political consequence is implausible. Trump is on trial over the payment of $US130,000 in hush money to former porn star Stormy Daniels so she wouldn’t reveal an alleged sexual tryst between them. Trump denies the tryst.
But big dynamics are rolling badly for Biden. The legal prosecutions against Trump are collapsing under the weight of their own absurdity and partisanship. Biden’s presidency is also collapsing. His support among blacks, Hispanics, non-college-educated men and other key demographics is in free fall. Biden’s personal ratings are terrible. Americans have concluded he can’t cope, physically and mentally. His continued surrender to the Democrats’ left wing has alienated too many mainstream Americans. Voters think him weak and ineffective, whereas Trump, for all his sins, projects strength, vigour.
It’s diabolically hard for Biden to change the narrative. He won’t get any younger, or more commanding, between now and the election. Biden’s mental incompetence continues to astound. Twice this week he claimed inflation was 9.1 per cent when he came to office and he brought it down to 3.5 per cent today.
In fact, Trump had achieved a low inflation figure of 1.4 per cent by the 2020 election. Inflation averaged under 2 per cent under Trump. It rose to 9.1 per cent in June 2022, nearly two years after Biden was elected. White House spinners, trying valiantly to retrieve something from the wreckage of a Biden sentence, explained the President meant the underlying causes of inflation took some time to manifest. The problem with this explanation is it’s nonsense, and it’s not what Biden said.
Trump’s supporters, it was once said, take him seriously but not literally. That’s now what Biden officials ask: you know what he says is often nuts, but his heart’s in the right place. No modern president has been this feeble.
I have spoken to insiders who know Biden and they swear he’s generally compos mentis but dreadfully slow. His mind wanders. He meanders unpredictably in speech. He can only really work a few hours a day. If he’s well rested, well rehearsed, with teleprompters and other visual cues, he can indeed sometimes get through quite a substantial public appearance.
Not since Dwight Eisenhower was recovering from his 1957 stroke has a president been so verbally and mentally challenged.
If today’s trends continue, Biden will lose in November. It’s too early to make a strong prediction, but it’s Biden now who needs disruption. So he has made his boldest move yet, agreeing to two televised debates with Trump, one on June 27 on CNN, another on September 10 on the ABC network.
This is risky for Biden. It’s perhaps approaching desperation. It was expected that Biden would dodge a debate. In 2020 Trump managed to lose the debates by constantly shouting over Biden. This shielded Biden from potential verbal gaffes. But Biden’s public appearances now are so rare, so controlled, that exposing himself to the spontaneity of a live debate is very dangerous.
In fairness to Biden, it must be acknowledged that Trump says his full quota of insanely weird things. After a week in the Manhattan court, he held a huge rally in New Jersey with perhaps 100,000 in attendance. This was terrifying for Biden. The enthusiasm gap in Trump’s favour is great. At this rally Trump hit many familiar themes. He also remarked on “the late, great Hannibal Lecter, a wonderful man”. To remind, Hannibal Lecter was the serial murderer in Silence of the Lambs who ate his victims. Yikes!
Generally, though, Trump, himself 77, is more consistently coherent than Biden and he’s not afraid to spend time on the campaign trail in unscripted appearances.
The degree of Trump’s current lead is remarkable. The RealClearPolitics average of polls has Trump a bit more than 1 per cent ahead in the national popular vote. If that’s borne out in the election it will be an incredible achievement for Trump, for he lost the popular vote in 2016 to Hillary Clinton and in 2020 to Biden. In 2016 Trump won a majority in the electoral college by narrowly prevailing in several battleground states. In 2020, achieving the same popular vote percentage as in 2016, a bit over 46 per cent, he lost the electoral college by narrowly losing battleground states.
More than 150 million Americans voted four years ago. This time the number could be greater. But the main contest will be over half a million voters in the battleground states. Here the news for Biden is terrible, just terrible.
There are six or seven key battleground states. The New York Times, which hates Trump, a few days ago published the results of its battleground state polls. Trump leads in Nevada by 12 percentage points, in Georgia by 10, in Michigan and Arizona by seven and in Pennsylvania by three, while Biden leads in Wisconsin by two. On those numbers, Trump wins the presidency convincingly.
The RealClearPolitics electoral college calculation has Trump winning 312 to 226.
Other formerly pro-Biden states, such as Virginia, also seem to be in play.
Biden still has some big advantages. The main one is money. US elections are now held over weeks, including huge numbers of postal votes with, in some states, very loose identification and authentication procedures. An enormous amount of money means the Democrats will have the superior so-called ground game.
But all the polls are troubling for Biden. In 2016, Trump got 8 per cent of the black vote, in 2020 he got 12 per cent. Polls now have him at 23 per cent of the black vote, mainly young men. The trend is even stronger among Hispanics. In the battleground states, Trump is now tied with Biden among Hispanics. Even among 18 to 29-year-old Hispanics he’s only four points behind Biden.
Biden’s overall job approval rating among the whole population has been about 38 per cent for months, sometimes rising to 40 per cent, with 60 per cent disapproving. Polls now show that voters think the Trump presidency was more beneficial for America than the Biden presidency has been. Some polls show a plurality of US voters now think a second Biden term would be a greater threat to US democracy than a second Trump term.
On immigration, defence and managing the economy voters think, by large margins, that Trump would perform better than Biden. When Trump was president, his approval rating never rose to 50 per cent. Last month a CNN poll showed 55 per cent of Americans think Trump’s presidency was successful.
So there are two related but separate questions. Why has support for Biden collapsed so spectacularly? After all, at the last election Biden won the biggest vote in US presidential history. Conversely, why have popular views of Trump risen so much?
The truth is, on key criteria, Biden’s presidency has been a failure, somewhere between mediocre and disastrous. On every significant issue he has moved to the left, a sign of his tremendous weakness as a politician. He lacks the vigour, skill and commitment to define and defend a centrist position. He seems to stand for more or less nothing.
Biden markets himself as a highly religious Catholic and often showcases his rosary beads. I’ve made it a practice never to criticise any politician’s religious commitment. But Biden actually displayed his rosary beads and made the sign of the cross at a rally in favour of legalised abortion up until the minute of birth.
This may be a defensible public policy position. But it stands against every aspect of Catholic teaching over centuries. Even most advocates of liberal abortion regard very late abortions as, at the least, extremely challenging ethically. For much of his public life Biden was resolutely anti-abortion. He changed, as the zeitgeist changed, without a second thought. But to ostentatiously parade Catholic symbols in this way seems grotesque.
More important politically, almost all left-wing policies hurt working-class and lower-middle-class people. Biden caving in to the left on so many policy areas has helped drive these folks, among them working-class African-Americans and Hispanics, into the arms of Republicans.
Take a couple of issues one by one. Biden has presided over effectively an open border with Mexico. This is a policy position miles and miles to the left of that which Biden supported under president Barack Obama, and has led to millions of illegal immigrants flooding into the US.
The people who feel the pressure of consequently depressed wages are blue-collar workers, folks without a university degree, not working in the services industry – truck drivers, retail clerks, factory hands, night watchmen. They also live in the less wealthy neighbourhoods illegal immigrants tend to congregate in and they suffer the consequent crime.
Biden’s climate change obsessions also hurt most the middle and working-class American, not employed in Hollywood, Silicon Valley or Wall Street, or indeed by government.
Like the Albanese government, the Biden administration is determined that Americans will buy electric vehicles. But they’re too expensive, Americans don’t want to buy them, and forcing Detroit to substitute their manufacture for the manufacture of normal vehicles has cost thousands of well-paid, working-class, union jobs.
Now Biden is imposing a 100 per cent tariff on imported Chinese EVs. Most Americans may well support that, but it doesn’t make EVs cheaper or more popular.
Biden is trying to restrict US fossil fuel development but because renewables can’t power a modern economy (again the comparison with Australia is obvious) he’s also begging Saudi Arabia to increase its oil production. Americans don’t like high energy prices.
Inflation is a killer for presidents. Under Biden, US government spending is wildly out of control. The US is going further into debt by trillions of dollars every year. This has produced high, persistent inflation, just lately starting to rise again (yet more comparison with Australia). Inflation really hurts working people lower down the scale.
Biden is confused, inconsistent, changeable and lacks credibility. He is trying to walk on both sides of the Israel-Hamas war.
At first he was passionately supportive of Israel, as he has been all his life. But then the campus demonstrations against Israel grew bigger and bigger. Socialist senator Bernie Sanders said Biden’s support of Israel could be his Vietnam, referencing Lyndon Johnson’s support for the South Vietnamese that led to massive anti-Vietnam demonstrations and convinced Johnson not to run for re-election in 1968.
The demonstrators, the activist class of the young, and almost exclusively Democrat voters, called Biden “Genocide Joe”. He did what he always does, he caved in, banning the export of various types of US weapons to Israel.
But polls show a big majority of Americans still support Israel. Not only that, the average American hates demonstrations and lawlessness. Big left-wing street demonstrations almost always lead to the electoral triumph of conservatives.
When John Howard sent troops to Iraq, this produced some of the biggest street demonstrations against the government in history, but Howard increased his majority at the next election.
So it’s clear enough why people have soured on Biden. Why are they embracing Trump again?
By the time of his re-election bid in 2020, Trump had a presidential record that had good and bad in it.
He had a good economic record. He had increased defence spending more than any Democrat would have done. He had overseen the historic Abraham Accords in the Middle East, by which Israel and several of its neighbours established diplomatic relations. And of course for four years he had also behaved like a boorish lout, very strange for an occupant of the Oval Office.
The episode that counts most against Trump came after the 2020 election in which he disputed the result and morally, if not legally, encouraged the January 6 rioters. These are grave moral derelictions by Trump. But Biden’s own moral derelictions, the way he used office to make his ne’er-do-well son rich, and the colossal policy failures, have wiped out that fundamental distinction.
Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, explores these questions in a fascinating recent web discussion with John Anderson. Mohler is no Trump fanatic.
He fully excoriates Trump for the derelictions of January 6. He argues both Trump and Biden are morally disqualified from being president in normal times. But voters must choose between the two. If the Democrats had an upstanding candidate and poor policies, he argues, that would be difficult. But as both candidates, in Mohler’s view, are equally unattractive personally, voters, in his case Christian voters, are entitled to choose the candidate they think would pursue the better policies.
The Democrats are now full partners with Trump in debauching American institutions, not least through their grotesque prosecutions of Trump.
In the Stormy Daniels matter, Trump’s alleged crime, misrecording the nature of the expense, is a misdemeanour at worst. It was fully examined by Biden’s Justice Department, which decided no action was justified against Trump. The alleged misdesignation of the expense was exactly the same as the way Hillary Clinton’s campaign recorded expenses for producing a fake dossier on Trump’s alleged Russian connections.
The matter was fully examined by previous New York district attorneys who saw no reason to prosecute. The new and vexatious and frankly ridiculous prosecution was launched at a politically strategic time by a partisan Democrat prosecutor.
Trump has thus been able to recruit a series of mainstream Republican figures, senators, former governors and Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, to come to the court and denounce the proceedings.
All this is a tragedy for America. But it validates Trump’s core narrative that there is an evil establishment out to get him, and to prevent him implementing the types of policies his voters support. The quality his voters like most is that he’s a fighter. Democrats have underlined that.
On much foreign policy there has been an effective convergence between Trump and Biden. Both promise de facto trade wars with China. Neither will reduce transfer payments nor raise defence spending, as it needs to be raised.
Biden’s semi-abandonment of Israel once the commitment became politically difficult means he’s nearly as transactional as Trump in foreign policy.
Official Australia is tending privately to panic and foolishly catastrophise about a second Trump presidency. Trump would likely to appoint numerous establishment Republicans plus some MAGA nuts. But for cabinet-level positions, and hundreds of others, he’ll need Senate confirmation. He wants to run a successful government.
There will be a lot for Australia to work with in a second Trump presidency. There’s no reason for any Australian government, or senior politician, to get actively involved in America’s political civil wars. Scott Morrison did good work for Australia by visiting Trump a few days ago and getting his endorsement of AUKUS.
This presidential campaign has a long way to run. Trump is well ahead. Nobody’s going to die of boredom.
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