IS TRUMP DOOMED... OR ON HIS WAY TO A SECOND TERM?
A year ago this Wednesday, Donald Trump caused the biggest electoral earthquake in modern history by winning the US Presidency – against seemingly all predictions. Well, not quite all: in summer 2015, our writer predicted the Trump surge. Now, a year into
FINGERS on the buzzers… your starter for ten: who’s the bookies’ favourite to be the next President of the United States of America? Is it… hard-hitting Democratic Congresswoman Elizabeth Warren? ’Fraid not: she’s the highest-rated Democrat, but still out at 12-1.
Could it be Mark Zuckerberg, the allconquering boss of Facebook? Er, no: he’s a 25-1 shot. New England Patriots star quarterback Tom Brady? An interesting but ultimately hopeless bet at 33-1. Former wrestler turned movie star Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson? At 16-1, he’s ahead of most politicians, though still rather unlikely. Failed former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton? Not a chance, though the bookies are generously still offering her at 20-1.
Nope, the red-hot favourite to be elected the 47th President of the USA is a former reality TV star called Donald John Trump. Yes, that one: the one who’s currently President now. Across the board, he’s the 2-1 favourite to win a second term. Despite everything. Of course when you tell people those odds, they simply don’t accept it. They’ll turn their backs to you and Google it, right there and then: too polite to call you a liar, but certainly unprepared to accept that a notion so crazy could possibly be the truth. How, they scream silently inside themselves, could that be possible? Given everything that Trump has said and done over the past year, how on earth is his re-election even a possibility?
And theirs is not an unreasonable point of view. Let’s recap just a few of the lowlights of that extraordinary year, which to any neutral observer looks like an apocalyptic disaster comedy directed by an eight-year-old on a sugar high.
HAVING arrived into the Oval Office unprepared and desperately casting around to fill key jobs, Trump started having to fire new appointees almost as quickly as her hired them. There was his National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, fired for not telling the truth about his contact with Russians.
There was White House Communications Director Michael Dubke, who went in May: he was replaced by the explosive hedge fund boss Anthony Scaramucci, whose appointment sparked the departure of White House spokesman Sean Spicer – already notorious for his ‘alternative facts’ about the crowds at President Trump’s inauguration.
Next to go was Reince Priebus, the former head of the Republican National Committee who had been serving as Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, but who fell out with Scaramucci. Weeks later, Scaramucci was himself fired after unleashing an unhinged, expletive-filled tirade about Republican colleagues to a New Yorker reporter. And then just weeks later Steve Bannon, considered by many to be the intellectual heartbeat of the Trump movement, was also fired amid furious rows between White House staffers.
Oh, and in the meantime, Trump also fired the head of the FBI, James Comey, who was heading an investigation into the campaign’s links to Russia, and various Obamaera officials who opposed his policies.
While this bizarre in-and-out farce was ongoing, on the political front Trump tried and repeatedly failed to have Obamacare scrapped; publicly feuded with senior Republicans; publicly feuded with the grieving family of a killed US serviceman; publicly feuded with most of the US media (in one special incident he got into a row with two MSNBC morning TV show hosts, saying one was psycho and the other was ‘bleeding badly from a facelift’). Most worryingly of all, he publicly feuded with North Korea, warning them of ‘fire and fury and frankly power the likes of which the world has never seen before’.
The lowest point, though, was when Trump refused to condemn supporters of a neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, which ended with an antifascist protester dead at the hand of a pro-Nazi thug. Large numbers of administration advisers from the worlds of business and the arts quit in protest.
And then there’s the criminal side. Last week, key Trump aide Paul Manafort was charged by the FBI with laundering tens of millions of dollars from Russian-backed politicians in the Ukraine. The charges predate Manafort’s involvement with Trump, but are still likely to open up a string of new leads about the presidential campaign’s connections to Russia.
To many observers, the FBI investigation is starting to look more and more like the Washington Post’s probe into Watergate – which started with a few Republican hangers-on but crept closer and closer to the White House until it revealed the involvement of the President himself. And, while all of this was going on, Trump still didn’t build a wall.
SO how, you may very well ask, is it possible that anyone could consider the possibility of Trump being re-elected – far less have him installed as favourite? Have we truly gone
that far through the looking-glass, into a world where bad is good and down is up?
The answer, essentially, is yes: and the looking-glass in question is called television. When I predicted in summer 2015 that Trump would win the Republican nomination and potentially the presidency, it was largely on the basis of his excellence on camera. As I said then, a man doesn’t have 14 seasons of a US network show without being good on TV.
The political primacy of television isn’t a new concept, but it’s still overlooked by most politicians and political analysts. They still believe that policy matters most: in fact, it’s TV. If you doubt me, just ask how the state of California – the biggest, most liberal and supposedly thoughtful in the US – elected Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor? His election, every bit as much as Trump’s, proved that a celebrity who’s good on TV will always have a giant head start over every traditional politician in the race. Equally, Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Barack Obama and David Cameron all rose to the top with dizzying speed on the back of brilliant TV performances. Even our own Leo Varadkar owes much of his elevation to the fact that he looks good on The Late Late Show.
For all the drama, Trump remains good on TV. His press conferences, while always combative, are great theatre. While we’re busy watching the political machinations, he’s using his TV appearances to hammer home his key message: the economy. And that, more than any of the White House chaos, is what’s resonating with Middle America right now. The US stock market, fuelled by the tech giants, is hitting record highs. Economic growth has had its strongest two quarters since 2014. And, critically for the Trump ‘dream’, the unemployment rate is sitting at its lowest level since 2001. Consumer sentiment reports last week showed US households are at their most confident for almost 20 years.
It is this powerful economic performance which, if continued over coming years, could propel Trump into a second White House term. Ultimately, he was elected on a promise to restore growth to the economy and deliver jobs to bluecollar states: and while the latter is hard to engineer, a buoyant economy would make a great many Americans feel that they are on the right path. On top of that, Trump is now aggressively pursuing a new tax-cutting plan which he and his advisers believe could boost growth even further: while economists are divided, it certainly seems to be creating an environment where businesses and employers feel confident about investing for the future.
THE opinion polls, meanwhile, are showing something extraordinary. No, Trump is not polling as high as he was when he won the presidential election (and even then he lost the popular vote): but equally, his key support bases are remaining absolutely rock-solid. In polling terms, Trump is the ‘stickiest’ president in US history – ie people are less likely to change their minds about him than about anyone else. That makes it hard to win new voters, but it also means your base is rock-solid: and a solid base is the launch-pad for any campaign.
On top of that, the process of choosing a presidential candidate suits Trump down to the ground. He wiped the floor with his Republican rivals last year: in the interim, nobody has emerged who would put up a better fight than Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz. No sitting president has lost his party’s nomination since 1858: that’s unlikely to change now.
Moreover, the candidate is chosen by the Republican grassroots: and those grassroots love Donald Trump. In their eyes, every time he fires someone he’s just living up to his TV persona: a leader who’s not afraid to throw incompetent people overboard.
Every time he clashes with Washington politicians, he’s proving that he’s an outsider. And every time he starts a row on Twitter, he’s simply gaining attention… which ultimately might just transform into votes.
Moreover, they don’t care if his team looked to Russia to help dig dirt on Hillary – they know that’s just what modern campaign teams do. And by 2020, Trump will have put up enough sections of wall – even if they’re mostly prototypes – to claim he’s on his way to delivering that promise, if only he’s re-elected.
And if Trump is the Republican candidate, who will the Democrats put up against him? Bernie Sanders will be 80, and probably still too much for many Middle Americans who’d rather be led by a racist than a socialist. Elizabeth Warren is barely known and has no TV presence. Mark Zuckerberg is famous, but hopeless on camera. The best outside bet is probably Howard Schulz, the chairman of Starbucks: he worked his way out of extreme poverty to create one of the world’s biggest brands; he has a phenomenal track record of success, is a great salesman, and is a billionaire. Even then, he doesn’t have the level of personal fame a modern-day presidential candidate might need.
AND of course there’s the power of incumbency. Only four elected presidents have ever lost a re-election battle: George Bush Sr, Jimmy Carter, Herbert Hoover and William Taft. (The first three were up against exceptional opponents at times of economic crisis, while Taft had his Republican vote split in half by Teddy Roosevelt running as an independent). If Donald Trump runs against a weak Democrat with the US economy buoyant, there’s every chance he can defy the critics again.
Now, of course, when you’re through the looking-glass like this, you must accept that anything can happen. The FBI probe could uncover direct evidence linking Trump personally (or a family member) to Russian interference in the campaign. At that point, Republicans in Congress might just abandon him, using it as an excuse to impeach a man they dislike intensely – but who delivers votes for them in a way they can’t ignore.
And with a man like Trump, anything else is possible, too: even the National Enquirer couldn’t fantasise some of the possible headlines that could emerge over the next three years.
The Democrats might discover a brilliant candidate who can unite the party and enthral them enough to get them out to vote. (Michelle Obama, who gave the two best speeches of the presidential campaign by far, would be the standout possibility – but she remains unlikely to be persuaded.) Or, fearing possible defeat, Trump might decide not to stand again.
Nothing is certain in the post-Trump, post-truth world of alternative facts.
But a year into his term, I’ll repeat what I said two years ago: bet against this man at your peril. He’s perfectly capable of triumphing again just to spite you.