Donald Trump won another huge victory in New Hampshire, and, with that colossal unpredictability and volatility which makes him so weirdly mesmerising, this provoked an outburst of anger.
Trump has fashioned his own version of Winston Churchill’s advice: In victory vituperative defiance, in defeat insanity. Joe Biden is right when he says Trump effectively now is the Republican presidential candidate.
Nonetheless, Nikki Haley came a respectable second. There are two big problems with Haley’s respectable second. First, she lost. And you can’t win if you lose.
Second, she revealed a weakness with a key demographic – Republican voters. New Hampshire oddly allows people who are not registered Republicans to vote in the Republican primary. Most states don’t do that. In most states, only Republican voters participate in Republican primaries.
Haley is trying to win a Republican primary contest with Democrat and independent voters. That won’t work.
New Hampshire was almost certainly Haley’s high-water mark and she didn’t come close.
Barring an act of God, or perhaps imprisonment, Trump is the Republican candidate.
But still the primary reveals weaknesses for Trump as well as strengths. Most Americans don’t want a repeat of the Trump/Biden contest. Biden is a weak and ineffective president with terrible poll numbers. Trump is a temperamentally unstable, pathological liar. Both are manifestly unfit to be president. But life, especially political life, often presents a choice of bad options where the height of wisdom is choosing the least worst.
Haley got creamed among Republican voters. That so many independent voters came out to support Haley indicates a fruitful line for Biden. No one will be interested in supporting Biden for any positive reason. But, just like last time, huge numbers may come out to stop Trump.
It’s impossible to know how the Trump/Biden contest will go. Trump has great strengths and great weaknesses.
So many things he says are untrue, but they often allude to an underlying truth, and create an emotional resonance with voters, which embodies social and policy realities, even if the specific things Trump says are frankly nonsense.
Let me offer two examples. Trump says the last presidential election that he lost was stolen, in that ballots were fraudulently counted. This is untrue. Trump knows it’s untrue. It’s a lie.
Yet it is also the case that some American institutions behaved in a grievously improper fashion to aid Biden. The classic case was the laptop belonging to Biden’s son, Hunter, which revealed clear criminality on Hunter’s part and a lot of questionable dealings on Hunter’s part which involved, at least at the periphery, his father.
Biden senior promoted the idea that the laptop was Russian disinformation. More than 50 former senior intelligence figures endorsed this view. Yet both Bidens knew this was a lie.
Worse, social media companies censored any reporting relating to the Hunter Biden laptop. This was a gross assault on democracy, as bad as Trump. So millions and millions of voters know the votes were counted honestly, but still think the election was in some measure stolen.
Or take illegal immigration. Trump talks repulsively about illegal immigrants polluting the bloodstream of America. I detest talk of that kind. Nonetheless, the southern border of the US is an absolute disaster.
It is an open, effectively unpoliced border. Tens of thousands of Chinese, Russians, Iranians, Indians and people from all over the world journey to Mexico or a nearby Latin American country and walk into the US, there to stay forever.
Republican governors of southern border states are perfectly right to help these illegal immigrants get to liberal Democrat states like New York, where the Democrat city mayor says he cannot cope with this influx and has had to cancel schooling to take over schools to use for temporary housing.
Biden, disastrously, giving in to the Democrat prejudice that anything Trump supports must be the work of the devil, actually runs a much weaker border policy even than Barack Obama did.
So millions and millions of perfectly reasonable Americans may well not like the way Trump speaks about illegal immigrants, but nonetheless feel Trump is more likely than any other candidate, certainly more likely than Biden, to fix the mess on the border.
Trump still has enormous weaknesses. He cannot control his mouth. His rant against Haley was intensely unbecoming. Telling South Carolina senator Tim Scott on stage that he, Scott, must hate Haley, who first appointed Scott to the Senate, demeaned Scott, the most important Republican in South Carolina to endorse Trump.
But Biden, too, has enormous weaknesses. His approval ratings are justifiably awful.
This presidential election looks like an Irish joke: how do you choose a good US president? Don’t start from here.
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