Who will take a tilt at Trump?

Plans for the 2020 US election are gathering pace, with Hillary Clinton, rising star Beto O’Rourke and even Oprah Winfrey being positioned as presidential challengers. Philip Delves Broughton sizes up the Democrat hopefuls

The contest will be the political equivalent of an MMA cage fight

With the midterms behind them and the presidential election still two years away, it is a moment for the Democrats to fantasise. The old familiars, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, are lining up, dreaming that they might out-duel a weakened President Trump.

But what the party is really looking for is someone with a touch of political magic, a candidate who won’t just beat Trump but humble him.

Ever since President Obama dropped the mic on his presidency, Democrats have been missing his swagger.

George Clooney is one such Democrat dream candidate. He and his wife, Amal, have made substantial donations to progressive causes in America, including $500,000 to a student-led march against gun violence this spring.

The $200m Clooney earned selling his Casamigos tequila company last year, in addition to the fortune he has made in Hollywood, has given him the financial clout to sustain a campaign through the early rounds of primaries without the fundraising challenges faced by others.

Clooney was a passionate supporter of Barack Obama and many of his films have dealt with political themes, but while he has joked about running for the presidency, he has also

❝ Oprah said she found the realities of politics too ugly

belittled the idea that celebrity alone justifies a candidacy.

Last year, he said of Trump: “I think that having a celebrity as president, who has a star on Hollywood Boulevard, will exorcise our need to have someone famous in office. And maybe we’ll find someone who knows how to make policy.”

Another Democratic fantasy candidate is Oprah Winfrey. Like Clooney, she has both the fame and the fortune to transform the 2020 election.

At the Golden Globe awards in January, she gave a memorable speech about Trump’s assaults on the Press and the historical significance of the #MeToo movement that stoked speculation she might run.

Trump responded cryptically to the speculation by saying that Winfrey would find campaigning against him a “painful experience” as he knew “her weakness”.

Over the summer, Winfrey ruled herself out when she told Vogue that she found the realities of politics too ugly. “In that political structure — all the non-truths, the bull **** , the c**p, the nastiness, the backhanded backroom stuff that goes on — I feel like I could not exist,” she said.

“I would not be able to do it. It’s not a clean business. It would kill me.” Of all the professional politicians likely to run, the generating the most heated interest for now are Hillary Clinton and Beto O’Rourke, who fell just short in his bid to win election to the Senate in Texas but energised Democrats nationwide with both the style and content of his campaign.

Mrs Clinton remains a deeply divisive figure, even among Democrats. Many simply can’t believe she would run again after losing out to Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016.

But others remain committed to the idea her political journey can only end in one place: the Oval Office.

Last weekend, her long-time pollster and strategist, Mark Penn, co-authored a piece in The Wall Street Journal, laying out the conditions of yet another Clinton candidacy. “Expect Hillary 4.0 to come out swinging,” he wrote.

He anticipates that Democrats will see Mrs Clinton now as “strong, partisan, Left-leaning and all-Democrat — the one with the guts, experience and steely-eyed determination to defeat Mr Trump”.

To which Kellyanne Conway, a Trump advisor, tweeted: “Dear God, please, yes.”

Many Republicans, including Trump and his team, think that there is no surer guarantee of his re-election than Mrs Clinton winning the Democratic nomination again.

O’Rourke has momentum and, at 46 years old, reminds Democrats of the youthful potwo litical stars who have delivered them the White House in the past, from John F Kennedy to Bill Clinton and Obama.

He raised $70m in individual donations from across the country for his campaign in Texas and proved an adept user of every form of media, from staged events before rabid crowds to social media and viral video.

His fans believe ‘Beto-mania’ can work at the level of a presidential campaign.

O’Rourke has certainly revved up the Democratic base, which plays such an important role early in the campaign season. The Democrats of Polk County, Iowa, the largest county in the first state to vote in the Democratic primaries, have just invited O’Rourke to come and speak to them.

Sean Bagniewski, the chairman of the Polk County Democrats, said O’Rourke was “unapologetically progressive”. “He wasn’t afraid to be himself. He was more authentic in a way that people haven’t seen since Barack Obama, so he connected with people nationwide in ways that some of our more cautious leaders haven’t.”

That assessment is bad news for old warhorses like Joe Biden, the former vice-president, and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, girding up for yet another campaign.

But it might encourage other younger challengers, such as senators Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey. Harris’s parents are Tamil-Indian and Jamaican, Booker’s African-American. Both candidates are likely to have long futures at the top of Democratic politics. They have already attracted the support of wealthy donors in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Money certainly won’t be a problem for Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York. In New York he was elected as both a Republican and an independent, but he loathes President Trump. If he were to run in 2020, he would do so as a Democrat.

In the most recent mid-term elections, he gave $80m to Democratic campaigns, which helped flip control of the House of Representatives.

He has also championed causes such as gun control and fighting climate change — popular among Democrats.

Few doubt he would be an excellent executive, but it is not clear that he wants the hassle of campaigning. He has toyed with a presidential campaign before, only to back off when the odds seemed against him.

Taking on Donald Trump in 2020 will be the political equivalent of a mixed martial arts cage fight. For Bloomberg, as for Clooney, Winfrey and Clinton, the grief may not be worth it.