War in Ukraine fuels momentum for Trump comeback

The former president is enjoying an unlikely surge in the polls on the back of war dissatisfaction.

Former president Donald Trump’s rambling speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, contained ‘kernels of a powerful political strategy’. Picture: Getty Images

Last year I forecast Donald Trump would easily win the Republican nomination, but ultimately be trounced in the presidential election, whomever he was up against. I’m not so sure anymore – about the second part.

The prospect of a severe recession as the Federal Reserve imposes ever higher interest rates to crush chronic inflation, at the same time as the war in Ukraine draws the US ever closer to a dystopian confrontation with Russia and China, won’t buoy President Joe Biden’s re-election chances.

After a rocky start in November, making a slew of unforced errors including hosting racists at his home and making dumb comments about the constitution, the former president has shot back up in the polls, repeatedly besting his most likely opponent, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, by double-digit margins and growing.

President Joe Biden still wins most of the hypothetical rematch polls but, shockingly in the wake of January 6 and uncountable scandals, not all of them. In January, Trump won 44 per cent of respondents compared to Biden’s 41 per cent, according with an Emerson College poll. In February, the 76-year-old won 46 per cent of those surveyed by Harvard University, to 41 per cent for Biden.

These polls were conducted by the de facto Democrat establishment, and Trump practically never led Biden in national polls in the lead-up to 2020. Trump’s near two-hour speech in Maryland on Sunday AEDT included a lot of predictable, rambling nonsense, but also contained the kernels of a powerful political strategy: opposition to embroiling the US in the Ukraine war in the face of overwhelmingly elite support for it, and strident defence of popular social welfare programs typically championed by Democrats: Medicare and Social Security. The canny populist declared himself the “anti-World War III” candidate to multiple standing ovations, seeking to tap into a powerful strand of isolationism in American history, especially in relation to European wars.

Over the past 12 months support among Republicans for helping Ukraine militarily has dropped markedly to less than 50 per cent, even as most Republicans in congress support the Biden-led coalition to impose a “strategic defeat” on Moscow, as the administration has put it.

Biden’s over-the-top rhetoric against Vladimir Putin and Russia has foolishly hitched the US to Ukraine’s fortunes regardless of how the war pans out.

Trump understands most Americans care little beyond emoting on social media. As Russian forces advance slowly on the city of Bakhmut, defying predictions of Russian collapse or Putin’s demise, the war is on track to become an albatross around the President’s neck as Americans go to the polls in 2024.

The war in Ukraine is marked by extraordinary asymmetry of determination. Russia sees keeping NATO out of Ukraine, and a land bridge to the Black Sea, as existential to its survival as a great power. This, like Cuba was for the US, is its backyard.

Biden has promised no American troops, but he also promised no tanks and fighters. Tanks are on their way and fighter jets, only ruled out “for now”, the President said last week, could be too.

And as the war drags on it could become harder for Biden to sustain the view that Ukraine is winning, as more of its cities are turned to rubble, its young men are slaughtered and millions of citizens permanently emigrate.

At the same time, fentanyl continues to stream across the southern US border, killing more than 70,000 young Americans in 2021, a quarter more than in 2020, and more than all the US deaths in the Vietnam War – shocking optics for the White House incumbent.

A lengthy US-financed war isn’t the only factor I didn’t foresee last year. The ruling party fought tenaciously to obtain Trump’s tax returns, which turned out to be a total nothingburger. The various investigations into his poor behaviour on January 6 still amount to nothing.

The so-called documents scandal, which could have seen the former president indicted and humiliated, has blown up in Democrats’ faces, humiliating the President, who has been caught with documents himself in various of his houses and offices.

And, finally, the lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, which Trump reluctantly endorsed as president and then railed against throughout Biden’s presidency, have come to look more and more disastrous.

Even Bill Maher, the popular Democrat-aligned late-night comedian, with millions of left-wing viewers, conceded last week that sceptics of medical authoritarianism were now “looking pretty good” in hindsight.

If all that’s not enough, Trump was castigated as “racist” for early on claiming Sars-Cov2 most likely leaked from a Chinese virology lab in Wuhan, a theory that is now the leading contender among the best US intelligence agencies, including the FBI and Department of Energy (which oversees US research labs into viruses and bioweapons). In short, Trump’s media opponents are looking increasingly stupid, having passionately retailed nonsense for years.

Meanwhile, Biden determined to run, notably moving recently to the political centre, quashing a far-left criminal justice reform passed by the Washington DC self-governing politburo, the first time in decades a president has threatened to do so.

A Trump return to the White House is still unlikely, and undesirable for a raft of reasons; no former president has been so hated by so large a minority of the American populace.

But Biden’s bumbling decline doesn’t instil confidence, even among Democrats, and any internal challenge is bound to fail, as it did against a similarly unpopular Jimmy Carter in 1980.

How bizarre it will be if the Republican Party, under Trump, becomes the anti-war party, a position once associated with the left. Even if he loses, Biden is going to find it harder to prosecute the war in Ukraine with Trump as opposition leader.