US election 2020: For decency’s sake, Trump must not be returned

Americans surely won’t reward the incumbent with four more years.

Picture: Tom Jellett

If Donald Trump wins the presidential election in just over two weeks I’ll be staggered. Not because I’ll be surprised: plenty of evidence has accumulated in recent years that anything can happen in politics. I’ll be disappointed because it will mean enough Americans rewarded his bad behaviour and poor performance.

It was one thing when the Democrats were arrogant enough to put forward someone as divisive as Hillary Clinton as the alternative candidate, when Trump was untested and there was a prospect that he might grow into the role like so many others before him. But four years on? Against the far less offensive and more experienced Joe Biden? And after so many examples of Trump acting shamefully?

If we truly do get the politicians we deserve, America will deserve the divisive painful four years coming its way following a Trump return to the White House.

My mother was born in Boston, a daughter of the American Revolution. A member of our family has fought in every war the US has been involved in, dating right back to the war of independence. I hold US citizenship and rarely fail to shed a tear when listening to the American national anthem. Corny, yes, but true. I was raised to be incredibly proud of my American heritage, for the democratic ideals of the US and its relative benevolence as a superpower compared with the way past great powers acted.

I seriously toyed with renouncing my citizenship four years ago when Trump won but decided doing so would be premature and deeply self-indulgent. The US is far bigger than any one president. But the damage four more years of Trump would do to American society, its standing in the world, the Republican Party and conservatism as an ideology isn’t worth thinking about.

Which is to say nothing of Trump’s unsuitability for high office. His mocking of people’s looks, gender, sexual orientation and those with a disability makes him unfit to run a corner shop much less a country.

The damage Trump has done to the Republican Party, as articulated by respected GOP strategist Stuart Stevens in his book published this year, will only intensify if Trump is returned to office. And the cause of conservatives will continue to drift further from what conservatism is supposed to represent: a defence of institutions and respect for process and good governance. Trump is the antithesis of these ideals.

What would it say about American society if it re-elects him? Despite his ongoing (near endless) personal abuse of anyone who challenges him. His profound mishandling of the COVID crisis. Despite the way Trump threatens to tear down institutions and denigrate the fourth estate at every opportunity. All the while bringing American democracy into disrepute.

America arguably deserved (even needed) a bout of Trump in 2016, had he grown into the job. Democrats put forward Clinton, Republicans weren’t united against him, so Trump divided and conquered them all. Both sides of politics had long neglected the mainstream, so an insider masquerading as an outsider was able to rise up, despite his many personal and public failings.

But fast-forward to today, and if America re-elects Trump, even based on a complacency that was also present in 2016, then it isn’t the society I thought it was; the society I still believe it is, which is why I’m hopeful Biden will prevail.

The polls have Trump a long way behind Biden. Unlike 2016, the methodology of the polls has been refined to ensure they don’t underestimate working-class voting tendencies, or what is happening in key states away from the east and west coast media hubs.

Voters over 65 strongly backed Trump in 2016; however, this time they represent one of his weakest voting cohorts, no doubt partly because of Trump’s flippant attitude towards the dangers COVID-19 poses to them. While Trump supporters in the commentariat like to point to his proven capacity to come back from poor polling, his win in 2016 was far more probable than a victory in just over a fortnight.

Even then Trump’s 2016 victory saw him thread the electoral needle; losing the popular contest by nearly three million votes but winning in the states that mattered. He blindsided the Clinton camp by winning the midwestern states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, albeit collectively by fewer than 80,000 votes. Had he lost these three states, he would never have become President.

Today Trump’s polls see him facing seemingly insurmountable odds to recover in all three. And he’ll struggle to hold Arizona too, as Cindy McCain, the widow of Republican senator and presidential candidate John McCain, campaigns for a Trump defeat.

I had the privilege of meeting John McCain when he visited Australia in 2017. He was an honourable man who was deeply concerned about the direction Trump was taking his country and party. A win for the Democrats in Arizona would offset defeat in one of the three mentioned states in the midwest.

But Trump will also struggle to retain states such as Florida and North Carolina, where the polls have him behind Biden. Other Republican-held states such as Ohio, Iowa, Georgia and even Texas are in play, but Democrats don’t need them to prise Trump out of the White House.

It has been one thing for Trump to fail to elevate himself beyond the crassness he wears as a badge of honour throughout his presidency. That can be put down to the limitations of his character. Trump has never been about anything other than his own aggrandisement. But the way so-called conservative commenta­tors and politicians have abided Trump, even spruiked for him, is much harder to forgive. Doing so exposed how shallow their collective beliefs and ideological understanding really is.

As the philosophical founder of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, wrote more than two centuries ago: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Which is why it is so important men and women of all races and creeds turn out to vote on Tuesday, November 3. To show a President who has always been unfit for office that America is great again.

Peter van Onselen is political editor at the Ten Network and a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.