Sullied brands of both Republicans and Democrats muddy the battle for America
A Trump vs Biden contest in 2024 would be a dismal prospect for the US, with huge majorities on both sides viewing each other as a clear and present danger to democracy.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden should both be finished as prospective presidential candidates for 2024. Yet Biden swears he’ll run again, while Trump constantly hints he will. The two halves of surely the worst presidential choice ever presented to American voters have both suffered what should be career-ending political damage over the past month.
For Trump, it is excruciating, uncontradictable testimony of his closest aides and even family members that he attempted to thwart a democratic election that he legitimately lost, and in doing so used and provoked violence.
For Biden, it’s the mess of the US economy – especially inflation and looming recession, and the contribution to this by his policies of massive expenditure and cutting back on US fossil fuel energy production – not to mention illegal immigration from Mexico. And another astounding train wreck TV interview, this time with late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel, brought the public’s scepticism to a head.
But it is the congressional committee inquiry into the violence on January 6 last year, when a wild mob stormed the Capitol, that hit Trump hardest.
The committee hearings have not changed the basic story. And the Democrats have done everything they can to discredit their own process, with no critics allowed to ask a question.
They have been hyper-partisan, trying to smear all Republicans, and indulged conspiracy theories of their own, such as the idea that Republican congressmen gave advance familiarisation tours to rioters, which turned out to be completely false.
Democrats have told so many lies about Trump for so long that he has a degree of immunity to the truth about him, which is horrible enough. The congressional hearings, televised in prime time, have not been huge ratings winners.
The hearings are hurting Trump but not hurting Republicans generally, nor helping Biden. The RealClearPolitics weighted average of polls now has Biden’s approval rating at 39 per cent, several points below where Trump was at this stage of his presidency.
Generic Republicans are also several points ahead of generic Democrats in congressional voting intentions. Such polls generally understate Republican support. Republicans are all but certain to take the House of Representatives and have a good shot of winning the Senate in November. Republican support is rising steadily among Hispanics and Asian-Americans. These demographics still vote majority Democrat but by much smaller margins.
Hispanics don’t like the Democrats’ anti-religion extreme social wokeness, they don’t like illegal immigration, they don’t like inflation or the US sacrificing the energy independence it had under Trump.
The Republicans this month won a historic South Texas congressional special election with a Hispanic candidate, Mayra Flores. The seat has never been Republican and she will be the first Mexican-born woman in congress.
Yet the congressional hearings are damaging to Trump and may still have critical consequences in US politics. For the first time, most Americans believe Trump should face criminal prosecution for the events of January 6. My guess is Trump, long accustomed to living on a legal cliff in many commercial and political dealings, has stayed just the right side of the law. A politicised prosecution partly for extravagant language would likely damage the rule of law and further polarise America.
The hearings, despite no revolutionary new facts, demonstrate Trump tried to steal the election and wanted others to break the law on his behalf. Three of those closest to Trump – vice-president Mike Pence, Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and his attorney-general, William Barr – figured (though Pence didn’t testify) as central characters condemning Trump.
The testimony establishes that Trump lied about the election, tried to pressure the attorney-general and the US Justice Department to make fraudulent prosecutions of non-existent vote rigging, tried to coerce Pence into refusing to certify the vote, grossly and improperly pressured state officials to tamper with results and connived in setting up slates of false electors to vote him in as president.
Under the US system, each state votes for delegates, known as electors, to the electoral college. They cast electoral college votes in accordance with their state’s popular vote. This is declared in front of congress and certified by the vice-president.
Trump lost the election by losing generally Republican states such as Georgia and Arizona. Votes in those states were counted by officials and overseen by governments that were overwhelmingly Republican. Trump’s bizarre conspiracy theory requires hundreds of conservative Republicans working secretly together to deny him the election by rigging votes.
Barr was Trump’s most loyal and politically aligned attorney-general. He was no Republican in Name Only nor a centrist. Neither did he dislike Trump. Barr is a deep conservative, keen to implement every element of Trump’s agenda capable of being implemented.
But Barr was a patriotic and law-abiding American, unwilling to commit fraud, betray his oath or break the law. Trump instructed Barr to find that the vote was rigged in all manner of states and the election therefore was fraudulent. Barr and his department looked at all the various claims and concluded that they were, in his own words, “bullshit”.
Barr told the committee that if Trump really believed the election was stolen he was “detached from reality”. But it is unclear that Trump actually believed this at all.
Ivanka Trump gave evidence via video that she did not believe her father won the election. She respected Barr and accepted his scrutiny of Trump’s baseless claims.
Trump responded to his daughter’s testimony, saying “Ivanka Trump had long since checked out” of his campaign and that she didn’t know what she was talking about. She was, he said, only expressing respect for Barr, and he was “horrible”.
What a stunning display of Trump’s limitless narcissism. Even his daughter is out to get him!
Now consider Pence. A former congressman and governor, an evangelical Christian of impeccable reputation, Pence brought a great deal to Trump’s presidential ticket in 2016.Like Barr, Pence wanted to serve Trump and implement a coherent version of Trump’s ideas, on immigration, China, nationalist economic policy. Throughout Trump’s presidency, Pence was loyal to a fault.
But after the election Trump wanted Pence to refuse to certify the electoral college votes. In the entire history of the US, no vice-president has ever done anything like that. Pence consulted judges and lawyers. Everyone agreed the vice-president had no such power. His role in certifying the votes is automatic, more or less ceremonial.
In 2000, George W Bush beat Al Gore by 550 votes in Florida. Gore had endless complaints about the Florida vote count. But it never crossed Gore’s mind that once the result was determined he, as Vice Vice President, could refuse to certify the votes and claim the presidency for himself. If Gore had tried such madness, his action would have been reversed by the Supreme Court, 9 to nil, in five minutes, just as Pence would have been.
The committee heard evidence that Trump berated Pence and called him a wimp and “a pussy”. Trump had encouraged demonstrators to come to Washington on January 6, the day electoral college votes were to be counted. He encouraged them to march on congress and “fight like hell”.
When they had already breached the Capitol, he tweeted his condemnation of Pence. The crowd was so enraged it was screaming “Death to Pence” and, as the committee heard, came within 12 metres of Pence himself.
In the second batch of hearings the committee produced testimony from a string of Republican state officials whom Trump tried to entice or coerce into falsifying state results.
Trump phoned Rusty Bowers, the Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, and asked him to replace the Arizona electors – Trump narrowly lost Arizona – with electors who would back Trump. Bowers, who had strongly supported Trump in the election, refused. Bowers kept asking Trump and Trump’s lawyer, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, for evidence of voter fraud, but there was none. Bowers and his family were subsequently subject to vile, dangerous harassment from pro-Trump forces in their state.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, another Republican who backed Trump in the election, was phoned by Trump demanding that he just knock out the required number of Democrat voters or “find” new Republican votes to get Trump over the line.
So, let’s take stock of all this: to believe Trump’s bizarre and grotesque conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from him, it is necessary to believe his closest supporters, Pence, Barr and daughter Ivanka, as well as dozens or perhaps hundreds of previously pro-Trump state officials, all spontaneously changed their lifelong convictions, became anti-Trump and joined together in a giant conspiracy to tamper with votes, More, they kept their vast conspiracy secret and left no evidence.
It’s pure nuts.
Here is where Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chairwoman of the committee, is proving a powerful advocate. Despite the procedural unfairness of the committee, it is producing gripping and undeniable nuggets of testimony, and individual moments of great visual power.
Trump is being completely condemned by the testimony of his closest allies, colleagues and family.
As I say, it’s quite likely that Trump himself does not believe the election was stolen. But running a campaign pretending he believes allows him to continue to benefit from his vast fundraising operation and to continue as the centre of his own reality TV psychodrama. Now the congressional committee has paused while it digests vast new troves of evidence, especially hours of fly-on-the-wall documentary footage, taken, with Trump’s permission, directly after the election. Some of this footage has become public.
Where does this all leave American politics? The answer is in a terrible mess. Some Republicans continue to support Trump enthusiastically. But most congressional and state Republicans simply decline to engage with the work of the January 6 committee and concentrate on inflation, energy security, illegal immigration and all the other issues that concern Americans today.
It would be more courageous for them to condemn Trump, but they believe they will most likely prosper by focusing on issues that concern Americans in their normal lives, just as Trump did in 2016 but did not do in 2020. In 2020 Trump campaigned on himself and although he had a roaringly successful economy, with no inflation to speak of, he lost to Biden by seven million votes.
Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal, argues that while Trump may have been the only Republican who could beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, and did do some good things in office, he was also probably the only one who could lose to Biden in 2020, and would lose to any half decent Democrat in 2024. The January 6 committee has furnished endless, devastating attack ads to use against Trump.
So far, the Republicans who hope Trump will just fade away are doing pretty well. They’re winning elections and are miles ahead of the Democrats in the polls.
Democrats have taken to spending tens of millions of dollars trying to assist the most extreme candidates in Republican primaries, because those are the candidates they would most like to face in November.
The Democrats themselves are a profoundly damaged brand. Their ethical behaviour is almost as bad as Trump’s. It turns out that the great majority of the whole Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory, the idea Trump corruptly benefited from Russian electoral interference, which bedevilled the Trump presidency, was invented by Clinton’s campaign and lawyers, then sold to the FBI. Once an FBI investigation was under way, Clinton used this to argue that the mainstream press should cover the Russia collusion hoax. Clinton used the hoax to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump’s election.
Democrats also convinced the media to play down or ignore, or in social media to censor, stories damaging to Biden, such as the content of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Democrats suggested this was a Russian hoax. In fact it was entirely authentic.
Similarly, Democrats are as open to supporting political violence as any Republican. Biden himself, in his doddery way, has talked of “something makes you so angry if you had the person in front of you you’d just want to pop ’em”.
More than two dozen Democrats voted against giving security protection to US Supreme Court judges whose lives are in danger because they may rule that abortion law should go back to the states. Pregnancy service centres that offer women alternatives to abortion have been firebombed, as have churches.
It now looks like neither side of American politics accepts the legitimacy of the other. Huge majorities of Trump and Biden voters regard officials of the other party as a clear and present danger to American democracy.
Biden was chosen by the Democrat establishment partly because he was so old he had no trace of identity politics in his public persona, though he has foolishly indulged all manner of such nonsense as president. The most telling recent indicator of US politics was the removal by popular recall of Chesa Boudin as San Francisco district attorney, because he was too liberal and too soft on crime.
So here’s the bottom line. Woke politics don’t work and deliver disastrous outcomes. But Trump is manifestly unfit to govern and would be a mortal danger in office again.
The question for 2024 is: can America find a decent non-Trump Republican or non-woke Democrat to be president? And can it avoid the breakdown not just of its politics but of its whole society?
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