Donald
Trump’s shocking victory in the 2016
US presidential election was described as a leap into the political
unknown. This time there is no excuse. America knew that he was a convicted
criminal, serial liar and racist demagogue who four years ago attempted to
overthrow the government. It voted for him anyway.
The result is a catastrophe for the world. It saw Kamala Harris’s competence
and expertise, her decency and grace, her potential to be the first female
president in America’s 248-year history. It also saw Trump’s venality and
vulgarity, his crass insults and crude populism, his de-humanization of
immigrants that echoed Adolf
Hitler. And the world asked: how is this race even close?
But elections hold up a mirror to a nation and the nation
does not always like what it sees.
Future historians will marvel at how Trump rose from the
political dead. When he lost the 2020
election to Joe Biden, people gathered outside the White House to
celebrate, brandishing signs that said, “Bon Voyage”, “Democracy wins!”,
“You’re fired!”, “Trump is over” and “Loser”. There was a tone of finality, a
sense that, after four grueling years, this particular national nightmare was
over.
For many, there was the comforting idea that moral order had
been restored. It was Trump who was the aberration, not Barack Obama, the
first Black president who had preceded him. Hope, not fear, was the national
default. Now America was back on course after its unfortunate zigzag of
history.
Then came Trump’s ultimate disgrace, the deadly insurrection
at the US Capitol on 6
January 2021. He seemed at peace with the idea that his own
vice-president, Mike Pence, might be hanged by the rampaging mob. He had
finally gone too far. “Count me out,” Senator Lindsey
Graham of South Carolina, once a devout Trump loyalist, said in an
impassioned speech on the Senate floor.
But the political obituary writers forgot that 78-year-old
Trump is the luckiest man in the world. A series of opportunities to snuff out
his political career, banishing him to golf courses in Florida for the rest of
his days, were squandered.
Trump was impeached, for the second time, by the House of
Representatives. At his Senate trial, Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who
has called Trump
“stupid” and “despicable”, could have instructed his colleagues to convict,
barring him from ever running for office again. But McConnell choked and Trump
was acquitted.
Trump immediately began regathering political strength.
Representative Kevin McCarthy, who had initially denounced him, made a
pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago and bowed the knee. From that moment on, it was clear
that the Republican party was still the Trump
party. Not even electoral defeat and its violent aftermath could break the
fever.
Trump failed again at the ballot box in the 2022
midterms, throwing his weight behind a parade of grotesques and misfits who
lost winnable races. Again there was a shaft of light, a moment when
Republicans could have course-corrected. But would-be challengers such as Ron
DeSantis and Nikki
Haley were steamrollered by the “Make America great again” movement.
Trump got lucky again on 13 July this year when a would-be
assassin’s bullet struck him in the ear at a campaign rally in Butler,
Pennsylvania. A last-second tilt of the head to look at a chart showing
immigration figures spared his life.
A photo of Trump standing with blood streaked across his face
as he raised his fist and shouted “Fight!” became the indelible image of his
campaign. Still, the man who lost his first popular vote by 3m, and his second
by 7m, had to convince America that he was worth a second look.
His next stroke of good fortune was to be initially up
against Biden, an incumbent even older than himself, who was given little
reward by voters for his significant legislative and economic achievements.
In panic, Democrats swapped Biden
out for his vice-president, Kamala Harris,
with only about a hundred days to go. They claimed that her campaign was not a
case of having to build the plane in midair but rather the same plane with a
different pilot. Either way, she faced concerns over inflation and the daunting
task of defining herself to the electorate as neither Biden-lite nor overly
eager to throw her boss under the bus.
She was up against a man who drove wedges between men and
women, Black and white, urban and rural, young and old. As a woman of color,
she was held to a different standard by a nation grown numb and indifferent to
Trump’s excesses. “He gets to be lawless. She has to be flawless,” CNN senior
political commentator Van
Jones observed.
Many voters spoke of the Trump presidency with a rosy
glow of nostalgia, apparently overlooking its 400,000 coronavirus deaths,
worst year for jobs since the second world war and systematic effort to divide,
not unite, the American people. He could do no wrong in the eyes of his
cult-like following, a freakishly resilient appeal that has three main
components.
First, there is the celebrity and successful businessman
persona, fashioned over years by his book The Art of the Deal and the reality
TV show The Apprentice. Harris recruited numerous big-name endorsers such
as Taylor
Swift and Beyoncé;
Trump was star of his own show.
Second, Trump has understood that, whereas Ronald Reagan and
Obama resonated in an era of aspiration, this is an age of anxiety. The
upper-working class and lower-middle class fear loss of status and yearn for a
safety blanket. Young people worry they will be worse off than their parents’
generation and unable to buy homes. Many, wrongly, perceive Trump as an
economic populist because he rails against elites and “says it like it is” or
“speaks how they feel” or “doesn’t give a fuck”.
Third, there is Trump the culture warrior. For nearly a
decade he has tapped into America’s id: a long and painful racial history of
progress and backlash, stoked anew by the election of Obama and white
Christians finding themselves in the minority. Xenophobia is at the heart of
his political identity. In addition, his campaign spent millions on ads fueling
hysteria about transgender rights (“Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you”).
Together, with a sinister assist from billionaire Elon
Musk, it was enough to eke out victory. Now brace for another Trump
inauguration – American
carnage redux – and another fantastical claim about his crowd size.
Brace for norms to be trampled, institutions to be undermined, opponents to be
targeted for retribution. Brace for an Oval Office occupied by a malignant
narcissist without guardrails this time. Brace for unhinged all caps tweets
that trigger news cycles and move markets. Brace for national anxiety off the
charts and global tremors from China to Ukraine. Brace, also, for a new
resistance and surge of anti-Trump energy.
How did it happen here? America had plenty of opportunities
to stop Donald
Trump but blew it each time. It will not become an autocracy overnight
but there is now no doubt that this is a democracy in decay. As Oscar Wilde
never said, to elect Trump once may be regarded as a misfortune; to elect him
twice looks like craziness.
-David Smith, The Guardian
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