Nightmare scenarios of a Donald Trump v Joe Biden contest
The choice between two deeply flawed candidates means trouble for Australia.
If Joe Biden wins the US presidential election, there’s every chance he’ll die in office. If Donald Trump loses, there’s every chance he’ll die in prison.
The nightmare scenario for the Albanese government is if Trump wins narrowly in the electoral college but loses the popular vote heavily, guaranteeing maximum uproar and polarisation within the US.
The American left would declare civil war and bitterly contest Trump’s legitimacy, as would the international left, and the Australian left, inside and outside the Labor Party. The difficulty for Anthony Albanese managing our core national interests in the American alliance would be intense. AUKUS would be in certain jeopardy.
Albanese has had trouble over the politics of Israel, even in staying in lockstep with Biden. Thus the recent trend is for Albanese to issue joint statements with Canada and New Zealand rather than with the US and Britain. A Trump White House would be infinitely more difficult for Labor.
However, election nightmare scenarios extend in all directions. A Biden victory almost certainly means Vice-President Kamala Harris becoming president during Biden’s second term. That’s a disastrous prospect. The presidential term would begin with the oldest, feeblest occupant of the Oval Office ever, then switch to an extraordinarily unsuccessful politician who hasn’t completed a single assignment well for the Biden administration (early on she had responsibility for fixing the illegal immigration crisis on the Mexican border), who would lack electoral legitimacy and be entirely beholden to the Democratic Party left.
AUKUS would be in trouble in that scenario, too. Compared with Harris, it’s better for Australia if Biden stays president.
Both Biden and Trump revealed truly horrible weaknesses this past week.
A report by special prosecutor Robert Hur says Biden is a doddery old man who can’t remember when he was vice-president, when his son Beau died, nor can he read his own notes sensibly. He’s not fit to stand trial for keeping and mishandling classified national security documents after he left the vice-presidency.
Biden denounced this report and its author in a disastrous press conference in which he called the president of Egypt the president of Mexico. Republican lawmakers now demand Biden release the relevant interview video. It’s inconceivable Hur lied about Biden’s memory lapses. Biden is mentally unfit to be president.
If Biden runs in November there’s no chance he’ll debate Trump, or anyone else. In normal circumstances, Biden would be unelectable.
But Trump can never see good fortune, even his own, without messing it up.
He told a rally that a leader of a NATO ally once asked if his country could rely on the US even if it didn’t meet NATO’s minimum budget requirement (of 2 per cent of GDP spent on defence). Trump said he said no. Rather, Trump would encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” against NATO allies who hadn’t paid up.
Trump’s close supporters were quick to offer the familiar explanation: take Trump seriously but not literally. Trump used such words to force manifestly delinquent European nations to do more, they said. But in office he didn’t abandon NATO, or repudiate its article five commitment that an attack on one member is an attack on all NATO. Nor would he do so in a second term.
That’s reasonable enough, but Trump’s words were still appalling. He’s entitled to beat up on delinquent European allies. But saying he would encourage Russia to attack them is grotesque, a moral and strategic obscenity. The global order, and whatever exists of Australian security, rests on the strength of US alliances, US strategic commitments.
This can’t be a one-way street. US allies, assuredly including Australia, must do much more in their own defence. But Trump foolishly threatens to collapse the entire world. He thinks the tension between such wild statements and the deep stability brought about by decades of steadfast US commitment, and the strength of the US system, give him space for outlandish tactical manoeuvre. To some extent, tactically, that’s true, but such an approach undermines every decent instinct of strategic policy, undermines democracy and greatly enhances the strength of America’s adversaries, especially China, Russia and Iran. At the same time, Trump’s episodic truculence and threats can disconcert these powers.
Biden denounced Trump’s remarks as “dumb, shameful, un-American”. So, in quieter voices, did US allies. Trump is producing right-wing isolationism to match the left’s isolationism. Under Trump’s direction, congressional Republicans are holding up $US60bn ($91.9bn) in aid for Ukraine, and $US30bn in aid for Israel, Taiwan and Indo-Pacific nations.
The overwhelming majority of this aid would be paid to US manufacturers to supply weapons and ammunition to allies. Ukraine and Israel are not asking for the intervention of a single American soldier. If Republicans won’t help allies in these circumstances, the US-based strategic order, which shelters Australia, is gravely threatened.
All this incidentally points to the strange similarity at the heart of Biden and Trump as politicians. As wildly different as they seemingly are in every way, they perform the same core political task for their respective parties. They appeal in some manner to white working-class voters in the mid-west and Rocky Mountain swing states.
In a presidential election, any Democrat wins California and New York. Any Republican takes Texas and Florida. The last few elections were close in the electoral college and decided by swing states such as Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and two southern states, Georgia and North Carolina.
Until Barack Obama picked him as vice-president in 2008, Biden had been a perennial and hopeless presidential candidate. But Obama was weak with mid-west white working-class voters. Biden, though he supports abortion until the moment of birth, markets himself heavily as an old-style religious Catholic working man from working-class roots. His slogan was “no malarkey”.
He has combined this old-style Joe Sixpack union guy identity, who would in a ritualistic way often threaten faux-physical violence on opponents – I’d like to take him out behind the woodshed, I’d deal with that guy with a right cross – with obeisance to the changing diktats of wokery.
Occasionally the wokery is insane, but Biden’s heart is never in it. He doesn’t start out trying to offend traditional conservative working-class folks, whom Hillary Clinton famously labelled the deplorables. It’s weird, but Biden is about the only senior national Democrat who somewhat pulls off this double, working-class plus as woke as necessary.
When it looked as if Bernie Sanders could become the Democratic candidate against Trump in 2020, the Democrats panicked and ran to Biden. Trump appeals, with a different political persona, to the same people. Trump won them, narrowly, in 2016. He lost them, narrowly, in 2020. Biden avoids the elite insults of white conservative working people. Trump mocks and abuses the elites on their behalf.
In responding to these voters, Trump and Biden get to a lot of similar policies – huge budget deficits, trade nationalism and industry protectionism, pro-welfare government spending, especially middle-class welfare. Trump called out China before Biden did, but Biden followed soon enough.
On alliances, the two are starkly different. Biden is a man of the 1980s, the Ronald Reagan era. He was never a hawk but he always took national security seriously. He has appointed a fairly good national security team – Antony Blinken as Secretary of State, Jake Sullivan as National Security Adviser, Australia’s friend Kurt Campbell as the lead figure on the Indo-Pacific. Lloyd Austin has been a weak, poorly performing Defence Secretary but is certainly no leftist and does value allies.
This is where Biden, for all his sins, is preferable to Harris. That’s not the team you’d expect Harris to appoint if she’s ever elected in her own right. There are vast tribes of Democratic Party officials and activists way, way to the left of Blinken, Sullivan, Campbell et al. If Trump is to lose, Australia is much better served if Biden rather than Harris is president. If Biden wins and hangs on in office even for 12 months, Harris would probably feel compelled to continue with his national security team and approach.
Biden, like Trump but much less dangerously, faces serious legal jeopardy. The smelly business dealings of his son and brother get ever closer to Biden himself. His own personal and family interests are safeguarded by being in office, just as Trump can pardon himself of all federal offences if he wins. Only if Biden thinks he’ll lose might he give way to a different Democrat.
One scenario sees Biden wait until he has won all the Democrat delegates in the primaries, then, before the party conference in August, announce he won’t seek re-election. The delegates would be free to choose whoever they like as their candidate. But the party would be hard put to throw Harris, the first woman and the first African-American to be Vice President, off the top of a replacement ticket.
But Trump could well win, against Biden or against another candidate. The issues he’s running on – illegal immigration, the cost of living, lawlessness and crime – are huge and real. Trump will defeat himself if he campaigns about the injustices done to him. If he campaigns on issues as the champion of ordinary Americans, he’s got a big chance.
The legal prosecutions against Trump are a travesty, a shocking abuse of process, and seen as such by most Republican voters. But if Trump is convicted of a felony, and if, amazingly, he were to go to jail, that would probably turn off enough independents and women to lose him the election.
Trump is in many ways lawless and dangerous. But he’s being prosecuted entirely by Democrat officials and for matters that a sensible prosecutor could have left alone. Clinton wasn’t prosecuted though she plainly broke the law in her use of a private email server as secretary of state.
Trump is both instinctively talented as a campaigner but also capable of grievous self harm through wildly undisciplined statements – as with NATO – and narcissistic self-absorption.
Trump’s choice of vice-president and his likely cabinet picks are critically important. In his first term, he chose mainly credible people, including a lot of military folks. They kept Trump from disaster and intervened in favour of allies, and the constitution, at crucial moments. Almost all of them subsequently became bitterly critical of Trump.
He will try this time to choose more sycophantic figures from the start. But they can’t be too weird or they won’t get confirmed by the Senate. It was fortunate that Trump chose solid Mike Pence as vice-president last time. He did it to reassure voters and to reach evangelicals.
This time the emotional side of Trump’s brain will want a sycophant, or someone he believes he can make into a sycophant, but the rational side of his brain will want someone who can strengthen his chances of winning. One possibility is South Carolina senator Tim Scott, an African-American and one of the nicest men in US politics. Another is Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a former spokeswoman for Trump. Either of these would be reassuring choices. Both would, in the crunch, almost certainly put loyalty to the constitution ahead of loyalty to Trump, as Pence did when he refused to try to over turn the 2020 presidential election.
Less reassuring possibilities are New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, or North Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. They are both much more intimately involved in Trump’s MAGA universe and have to some extent bought into its derangement.
Conservatives such as Newt Gingrich who think Trump is already unbeatable are wildly optimistic. Republicans just lost a Long Island, New York, congressional seat after the Republican who won it in 2022, George Santos, was impeached. This special election occurred just after Biden’s disastrous press conference and the main issue was illegal immigration. Republicans couldn’t win even then. Trump uniquely motivates Democrat voters.
Whoever is president, Canberra needs to maintain the US-Australia alliance. We have not since World War II made a serious effort to provide for our own defence. The US could leave Asia and still be secure. But if the US leaves Asia, we are not secure. These are the facts of strategic life.
But we persist luxuriating in fantasy. Defence Senate estimates hearings this week were a dismal show of a failed and failing organisation and a government that doesn’t have a clue how to fix the mess, nor the will to try.
We are 4300 men and women below our tiny authorised military strength. We can’t crew our eight antique frigates, our six elderly subs or our 100 fast jets. Right now, we’re not manufacturing a single warship. Yet in just eight years, under AUKUS, we supposedly take delivery of a Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarine. A few years later, we’ll allegedly begin building nuclear subs. There’s nothing in our performance that affords the slightest scrap of credibility to that.
Look from America’s side. The US won’t have one Virginia in 2032 that isn’t in service or production today. If we get one, Washington loses it from its own order of battle. Further, Virginia subs can carry nuclear weapons. They don’t normally but they can. Our subs will never carry nuclear weapons.
Therefore selling us one reduces the lethality of the US fleet. It all looks unreal. Trump would be unlikely to let the deal continue to the end of his presidency. He’d at least want a lot more money. A post-Biden Democrat will be further left than Biden and almost equally unlikely to go through with providing us nuclear subs. We won’t be ready anyway.
Even if through some miraculous sequence everything goes to plan, a tiny fleet of nuclear subs is not a defence force. Missiles in large numbers, drones, sea mines, surface ships, satellites, personnel in numbers, fuel reserves – we have none of these, they cost big money and we’re going backwards. The Albanese government, like Scott Morrison’s before it, has foolishly staked everything on AUKUS subs. Whatever sub we get, we actually need 12, six on each coast.
It would be good to have nuclear subs. They’re vastly more powerful than conventional subs. We’re stronger, more considerable, with them. One role for any nuclear attack sub is to identify, track and if necessary destroy an enemy’s nuclear ballistic missile submarine (the main arsenal of nuclear weapons). The Virginias would put us at the heart of US nuclear deterrence policy, which we are partly already through Pine Gap communications facility and US forces’ extensive use of our territory. But nuclear subs are worse than useless if they never arrive but divert you from real actions you could take.
The US alliance is so far our only defence policy. Whether it’s Biden, Trump or someone else, we must do vastly more for ourselves. Yet just maintaining what we have now will be diabolically complex after November’s election.
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