Can Trump Do It Again?

In May 2020 I posted a blog reflecting on whether President Trump could win a second term later that year. < https://www.mikeberrywriting.com/mike-berry-blog/2020/5/30/can-trump-do-it > I eventually and tentatively concluded in the negative. I turned out to be right, he didn’t win – at least that was the view in the eyes of a majority of Americans and virtually all analysts and commentators. Some two-fifths of the population, however, bought Trump’s grand lie that he had won, and the election was stolen from him. This is a position he and his tribe continue to fervently espouse eighteen months later. The hope that he would, if not fade quietly into civilian obscurity like the handful of his still-living former predecessors, go back to the entertainment world with an occasional reassertion of his foiled victory, was rudely shattered with the breaking of glass and forcing of doors in the Capital Building of the US Congress in January last year.

Since then, Trump has continued to use the grand lie to keep his base in tow and seek to punish any Republican official or hopeful that dares question its veracity, as he toys with the decision as to whether to have a third crack at the White House in 2024. So, there are two, no three, questions here.

First, will he or won’t he? Will he risk a third run? At the moment he can luxuriate in Trumpworld, situated not too far from that other parallel universe of illusion, Disney World, and forever proclaim his rightful claim on the Crown. But running again and losing would stretch even the Donald’s capacity for gaslighting. To have one election stolen from one could be considered a misfortune. To lose two looks more like carelessness. Far better to quit while claiming to still be ahead. That at least is a position likely to attract rational and prudent people. But as we all know, the man is neither rational nor prudent, even in his own best interest. He has raised the strategy of doubling down to the level of an Olympic sport. The word ‘loser’ is not in his lexicon, only his nightmares. If he doesn’t run it will probably be because his health fails, or he is in gaol. Otherwise, he’s all in.

So, second, assuming he runs can he win as in 2016? Sane reflection suggests a negative answer. There are many pointers to this conclusion. Nationally, he is steadily losing the support of moderate Republicans, although he continues to lock in his diehard base. In the wake of the January 6th insurrection, long-time supporters like the Murdock media empire are turning against him. He is having trouble building a war chest to fight another national election. Incumbency has given the Democratic Party a natural advantage not likely to be wilfully sacrificed as Trump did leading up to 2020. The Democrats managed to finally use its tenuous control of Congress to pass President Biden’s ‘anti-inflation’ legislation that also addresses vital  issues of social and environmental concern. Although this will help Trump whip up rage within his base, a clear majority of voters appear to support the move.

On the other hand, President Biden’s popularity is low, leading into what looks like being the defining event of his first term, the mid-term Congressional elections for both Houses. Nationally, victory for the Republican Party would sink the prospects for any further progressive legislation, turning Biden into the lamest of ducks, reprising Obama’s experience in his first term. But it’s at the state level that the real danger to the Democrats and the future of American democracy lurks. If the Republicans hang on to and even extend their hold over the legislatures and executive offices in a majority of states, the nightmare briefly glimpsed in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 presidential race may resurface with a roar – slates of electors to the Electoral College casting their votes in 2024 for Trump against the majority vote in their states.

And there is the ever-present talent of the man to cast himself as the victim of a deep state conspiracy, the target of an unrelenting witch hunt by a woke coalition of ‘un-Americans’. This latter group comprises journalists, editors, academics, senior bureaucrats, CIA and FBI agents, judges, lawyers and bicycle riders. Why bicycle riders? Why the rest? Go figure. To qualify for membership of the cabal one has only to express a view different from the Donald. Republican hopefuls are held to a particularly severe standard of toadying, that the recent round of party primaries has demonstrated is being faithfully upheld.

There are, however, mixed signals emerging from the scrum of mid-term related shenanigans. The popular response to the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v. Wade has not to date played out to the Republican’s advantage, even in true-red states like Kansas. Trump’s campaign to remove officials who thwarted his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential result in Georgia failed. Trump faces legal jeopardy on multiple fronts. Can the Democratic Party rally sufficient resources and concentrate them in the right places to stem a Trump resurgence? Its leaders and supporters certainly have a strong, indeed existential, interest in doing so. A Trump victory would go a long way to entrenching the Republican Party as the permanent party of government, thanks to the combination of an anachronistic electoral system dreamt up by a bunch of seventeenth century grandees and the ruthless subverting of that system by their modern descendants. Swing states currently held by Democrats like Michigan loom large in the campaign strategies of both parties. The result in Pennsylvania will also figure prominently in what comes later. The Trump stacked ultra conservative Supreme Court is unlikely to offer robust protections against the gathering storm.

There are too many uncertainties, too many unknowns, including the perilous state of the American and global economies in the lingering grip of pandemics and the Russian and Chinese aggressions, to even offer a conditional answer to Trump’s prospects in 2024. But let’s assume he doesn’t win. This raises the third and most critical question – what then?  Will we see a repeat of January 6th? Will an enraged crowd of Trumpites mobilise and march on the seat of government – again? This would signal to the nation and beyond the end of the modern world’s first democratic experiment. There is reason to think that this time around the Trump insurrection would succeed or go close to. The make-it-up-as-you-go insurrection of January 6th, 2020 would likely be replaced by a more carefully orchestrated plan to install Trump, carried out by groups better financed and coordinated, picking up the pieces left over from a series of rolling riots fuelled by white supremacists with automatic weapons. The various legal efforts to investigate Trump underway, in particular the ‘raid’ on the heart of Trumpworld, Mara-a-Lago, is stoking that fire. Trump can keep that pot boiling over for the next two years leading up to the 2024 elections.

It then becomes a fifty-fifty proposition as to whether the hard rails of American democracy can defuse the insurrection. In the frontline will stand the plethora of election officials, state administrations and law forces responsible for ensuring a fair election process. They will be subject to intimidation on a grand scale. But in the final  instance It may come down to whether the national armed forces command is willing to obey the orders of the sitting President, if it means firing on Americans mounting an armed insurrection against the state. Two insurrections, the first a bust, the second a steal. We’re talking civil war here. Reversing Marx’s famous comment on the elevation of Napoleon’s nephew Louis Napoleon to French Emperor, it would be a case of history repeating itself, the first time as farce, the second as tragedy.

If the train derails and Trump is carried shoulder high back to the White House, we will all be in a new and very scary world. As an ultra-isolationist, Trump’s America will cease to be a geopolitical pillar counterbalancing the aggressive postures of Russia and China. Putin and Xi will play him like a piano. The recent American pivot to the Asia-Pacific – of vital concern to those of us in Australia – will likely wither and embolden China over Taiwan and aid the attraction of Pacific islands into its orbit. Worst of all the nuclear trigger will again be in the clumsy small hands of a megalomaniacal incompetent.

There is a famous 1930s Australian cartoon that has a construction worker hanging from an iron girder by his fingertips many stories up. Hanging onto his legs is another worker clutching trousers that are gradually being pulled down. The caption reads – “For Gorsake, stop laughing – this is serious”. Hope – pray if so inclined – that America doesn’t have its pants pulled down in coming years.

This is serious. Stop laughing.