American presidential elections are likened to marathons for good reason. The first caucus and primary elections for the respective parties’ nominations (Iowa and New Hampshire) take place in January, seven months before their conventions and eleven before election day. But campaigns tend to begin even before then and often long-shot candidates seeking name recognition, and the massive funds required to compete effectively set up ‘exploration committees’ two years in advance. So, small wonder that the great bulk of voters not involved in the nominating process tend to “tune out” until they have to.
With that in mind, the voting populace tends to pay attention after the summer holidays, when the kids are back at school and the evenings tend to carry the cool crispness of autumn air. Labor Day, the first week of September, is the “official” start of the “real” campaign, when the Democratic and Republican parties have selected their standard bearers, and the marathon transforms itself into a headlong sixty-day sprint to the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November (blame the constitution’s founding fathers for that particular quirk).
So begins the final phase of this cycle's "presidentiad."
Americans will once again be compelled to scrutinize this year’s crop of aspirants to the Iron Throne. Which means that they have to come to grips with the character and personality of Donald Trump – he of the last two election cycles. And with Trump, things are never what they seem, for he is the perfect example of the message being muddled with the messenger.
Despite what else you might have heard from the breathless pronouncements of American “mainstream” media, barring a significant shift in the polls (and his obstinately self-defeating manner), it is at worse even money that Donald Trump will again be the next president.
Lord help us, his opponents lament. What should those of us who have consistently opposed him do? How are they to stop someone that has weathered more storms and controversy than any other presidential candidate in modern (post-WWII) history, bestriding the political landscape like an orange Godzilla?
Well, the simple fact is that you can’t defeat an opponent if you refuse to understand what makes him formidable in the first place. Too many people, especially progressives, fail to think deeply about the enduring sources of his appeal — and to do so without calling him names, or disparaging his supporters, or attributing his resurgence to nefarious foreign actors or the unfairness of the Electoral College.
Let’s begin with some fundamentals. During all three of his campaigns Trump has consistently got three big things right — or at least more right than wrong.
Arguably the single most important geopolitical fact of the century is the mass migration of people from south to north and east to west, causing tectonic demographic, cultural, economic, and ultimately political shifts. Trump understood this from the start of his first presidential candidacy in 2015, the same year Europe was overwhelmed by a largely uncontrolled migration from the Middle East and Africa. As he said: “A nation without borders is not a nation at all. We must have a wall. The rule of law matters!”
Many of Trump’s opponents have persistently refused to see virtually unchecked migration as a problem for the West at all. Some of them see it as an opportunity to demonstrate their humanitarianism. Others look at it as an almost inexhaustible source of cheap labor. They also have the habit of denouncing those who disagree with them as racists. But enforcing control at the border — whether through a wall, a fence, or some other mechanism — isn’t racism. It’s a basic requirement of statehood and peoplehood, which any nation has an obligation to protect and cherish.
Only now, as the consequences of Joe Biden’s surprisingly lackadaisical approach to mass migration have become depressingly obvious on the sidewalks and in the shelters and public schools of liberal cities like New York and Chicago, are Trump’s opponents on this issue beginning to see the point. Public services paid by taxes exist for people who live in the US, not just anyone who makes his way into the country by violating its laws. A job market is structured by rules and regulations, not just an endless supply of desperate laborers prepared to work longer for less. A national culture is sustained by common memories, ideals, laws and a language — which newcomers should honor, adopt and learn as a requirement of entry. It isn’t just a giant arrival gate with prominently posted ‘Welcome!’ signs for anyone and everyone who wants to take advantage of American abundance and generosity. That’s just an insult to the millions who came to its shores legitimately.
Kamala Harris is vulnerable on this issue, for it wasn’t so long ago that Biden charged her with coming up with a solution to stem the Border Crisis. That he gave his vice president very little scope or clear targets is of little import. She should have taken the initiative, seized the opportunity to provide herself with a policy win by at least proposing some sort of solution rather than have the entire focus peter out. But it’s a measure of her good fortune that Trump has gone for the lazier option of making progressively wild or questionable statements rather than take the harder but arguably more politically wise course of calling her out on this failure.
It said something about the self-deluded state of Western politics when Trump came on the scene that his assertion of the obvious was treated as nothing less than a moral scandal, at least by the stratum of society that had the least to lose from mass migration. To millions of other Americans, his message, however crudely and grossly he may have expressed it, sounded just like plain common sense.
The second big thing Trump got right was about the broad direction of the country. Trump rode a wave of pessimism to the White House — pessimism his detractors did not share because he was speaking about, and to, an America they either didn’t see or understood only as a caricature (remember “deplorables?”). But just as with this year, when liberal elites insist that things are going well (or at least better than the dark days of the pandemic) while many Americans say they are not, Trump’s unflattering view has potential to somehow capture the mood of the country once again.
In 2017, the US faced persistently sluggish economic growth and a plunging labor-force participation rate that had never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. There was a rising death rate among middle-aged white people and declining life expectancy at birth, in part because of sharply rising deaths from suicide, alcoholism or drug addiction. More than 12 percent of all adult males had a felony conviction on their record, leaving them in the shadowlands of American life. And there was a palpable sense of economic decline, with fewer and fewer younger Americans having any hope of matching their parents’ incomes at the same stages of life.
Far too little has changed since then. Labor-force participation remains essentially where it was in the last days of the Obama administration. Deaths caused by despair keep rising. The cost of living has risen sharply, and while the price of ordinary goods may finally be coming down, rents haven’t. Only a minority of voters think the American dream still holds true, according to a recent survey, down from almost half in 2016. If anything, Trump’s thesis may be truer today than it was the first time he ran on it.
Finally, there’s the question of institutions that are supposed to represent impartial expertise, from elite universities and media to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the F.B.I. Trump’s detractors often argued that his demagoguery and mendacity did a lot to needlessly diminish trust in these vital institutions. But we should be more honest with ourselves and admit that those institutions did their own work in squandering, through partisanship or incompetence, the esteem in which they had once been widely held. Their inability to control, even to acknowledge hate speech and antisemitism was evidence of this, much less the hopelessly ineffective inability of their leaders to convincingly condemn all forms of racism.
How so? Much of the elite media, mostly liberal, became openly partisan in the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections — and, in doing so, not only failed to understand why Trump won but also probably unwittingly contributed to his first victory, near-victory and possible victory. Academia, also mostly liberal, became increasingly illiberal, inhospitable not just to conservatives but to anyone pushing back even modestly against progressive orthodoxy. The F.B.I. tested the limits of its authority with dubious investigations and salacious leaks that led to sensational headlines but not to criminal prosecutions, much less convictions.
The C.D.C. and other public-health bureaucracies flubbed the pandemic reaction, with (mostly) good intentions but frequently devastating consequences: “If you’re a public-health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life,” the former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins acknowledged last month. “You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way they never quite recovered.”
Trump and his supporters called all this out. For this they were called idiots, liars and bigots by people who think of themselves as enlightened and empathetic and hold the commanding heights in the national culture. The scorn only served to harden the sense among millions of Americans that liberal elites are self-infatuated, imperious, hysterical, and hopelessly out of touch — or, to use one of Trump’s favorite words, “disgusting.”
A few readers might nod their heads in (partial) agreement. Then they’ll ask: What about the election denialism? What about Jan. 6? What about the threat Trump poses to the very foundations of our democracy? All dismaying, perhaps even disqualifying but not in the American Constitution’s view, for there is legally nothing to prevent either a convicted felon or a certified lunatic (Trump is factually the former but hardly proven to be the latter) from taking the oath of office and assuming the presidency. But it’s also important to stretch one’s mind a little and try to understand why so many voters are unimpressed about the “end of democracy” argument.
For one thing, haven’t they heard it before — and with the same apocalyptic intensity?
In 2016, Trump was frequently compared to Benito Mussolini and other dictators. The comparison might have proved more persuasive if Trump’s presidency had been replete with jailed and assassinated political opponents, rigged or canceled elections, a muzzled or captured press — and Trump still holding office today, rather than running to get his old job back. The election denialism is surely problematic, but it isn’t quite unique: Prominent Democrats also denied the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s two elections — the second one no less than the first. Trump did not invent the “Not my President!” protests.
Many rank-and-file Republicans regard the Jan. 6th assault on the Capitol as a disgrace and the lowest point of Trump’s presidency. But they also believe that it wasn’t so much an insurrection as it was an ugly temper tantrum by Trump and his most rabid supporters, which never actually had a chance of succeeding. One reason for that is that the judges Trump appointed to the federal bench and the Supreme Court rebuffed his legal efforts — and he had no choice but to accept the rulings. An American version of Vladimir Putin he simply is not.
That’s why warnings from Biden, Harris, and others about the risk Trump poses to democracy are likely to fall flat even with many moderate voters. If there’s any serious threat to democracy, doesn’t it also come from Democratic judges and state officials who are using never-before-used legal theories — which even some liberal law professors like regard as dangerous and absurd — to try to kick Trump’s name off ballots in Maine and Colorado? When liberal partisans try to suppress democracy in the name of saving democracy, they aren’t helping their cause politically or legally. They are merely confirming the worst stereotypes about their own hypocrisy.
Which doesn’t impress that increasingly small sliver of the electorate – the truly ‘independent’ voters who actually decide elections – as they are forced to decide through the shrill protestations of either the ‘Woke’ ultra left or the ‘MAGA’ hard right. These are the folks who used to be part of what Richard Nixon once labelled the “great Silent Majority”, quietly living their lives, paying their taxes, taking their kids to daycare, and doing their jobs without fanfare or complaint.
As it is, the 2024 election will not hinge on questions of democracy but of delivery: Which candidate will do more for voters? That will turn on perceptions of which candidate did more for voters when they were in office. Harris’s supporters are convinced that the vice president has a good story to tell. But they also think that Trump has no story at all — only a pack of self-aggrandizing lies.
That’s liberal self-delusion.
Excluding the pandemic, a once-in-a-century event that would have easily knocked almost any sitting president sideways, Americans have reasons to remember the Trump years as good ones — and good in a way that completely defied expert predictions of doom (in much the same way that Trump himself warned of stock market crashes should Biden then and Harris now, be elected). Wages outpaced inflation, something they also have under Biden; unemployment fell to 50-year lows (as it has been under Biden); stocks boomed; inflation and interest rates were low.
He appealed to Americans who operated in the economy of things — builders, manufacturers, energy producers, food services and the like — rather than in the economy of words — lawyers, academics, journalists, civil servants. And he shared the law-and-order instincts of normal folks, including respect for the police, something the left seemed to care about on Jan. 6th but was notably less concerned about during the months of rioting, violence and semi-anarchy that followed George Floyd’s awful murder.
As for foreign policy, it’s worth asking: Does the world actually feel safer under Biden — with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s assault on Israel, Houthi attacks on shipping in international waters, the Chinese open threat to invade Taiwan — than it did under Trump? Would it feel safer under Harris? Trump may have generated a lot of noise, but his crazy talk and air of unpredictability seemed to keep America’s adversaries on their guard and off balance in a way that Biden’s instinctive caution and feeble manner simply do not. Trump grasped that in a world peopled by thugs and those who give lip service to western democratic values understands only one thing: violence or the threat of it. The Madman Theory does work, especially when he is the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in the world.
Ordinary voters care typically about results. What many care less about is Trump’s purported offensiveness. It’s at least worth asking whether his verbal howlers and insults are any more obnoxious than the incessant offense taking, finger wagging and fake prudishness of his opponents. Many of the same people who seemed to have suffered fainting spells when the notorious “Hollywood Access” tape came to light were, only a few years before, utterly indifferent to much more serious allegations of sexual assault by fallen movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. You can fault Trump for coarseness, but you can’t pretend we don’t live in a coarse age.
And his foes keep missing another Trump reality: he is a showman, and their constant holier-than-thou prognostications and outraged reactions at his bromides just serve to further egg him on. He won’t let up on his verbal assaults because he knows it bothers them to no end. Polarization suits him as it has always been his strategy to play to the base, whip them up into such a frenzy that their high turnout in critical ‘battleground’ states might tip the difference in his favour. It’s no use to Harris in her attempt to reconstruct Barack Obama’s sprawling coalition of differing interests if they don’t actually vote while Trump’s largely monochromatic support holds.
Furthermore, if GOP voters think the central problem in America today is obnoxious progressives, then how better to spite them than by shoving Trump down their throats for another four more years? For many of them, the visceral satisfaction of liberal anguish at a Trump restoration more than makes up for his flaws.
But there’s a deeper reason, too, one Trump’s opponents ought to consider in thinking about how to beat him. Brokenness has become the defining feature of much of American life: broken families, broken public schools, broken small towns and inner cities, broken universities, broken health care, broken media, broken churches, broken borders, broken government. At best, they have become shells of their former selves. And there’s a palpable sense that the autopilot that America’s institutions and their leaders are on — brain-dead and smug — can’t continue.
It shouldn’t seem strange to Trump’s opponents that a man whom they regard as an agent of chaos should be seen by his supporters as precisely the man who can sweep the decks clean. Many people happen to think that’s wrong — you don’t mend damaged systems by breaking them even further. Repair and restoration are almost always better than reaction or revolution. But it’s challenging to see how Trump’s opponents can decisively make lasting headway against him until they at least acknowledge the legitimacy and power of the fundamental complaint. If you’re saying it’s “morning in America” when most Americans think the country is on the wrong track, you’re preaching to the wrong choir — and the wrong country.
Trump’s opponents say this is the most important election of our lifetime. If that is true, then should we try to look beyond the messenger, to at least try and listen -- not judge -- to the message? After all, isn't understanding the key to dialogue? And dialogue is the only way for all sides to clasp hands across this seemingly unbridgeable chasm.
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