Don’t worry, Americans will dump Trump
Donald Trump has almost no chance of being the Republican presidential nominee. If he is, he’ll lose, says Tim Montgomerie.
When I asked a few American contacts what would happen if The Donald makes it to the Oval Office I was assured it would never happen – and not just because voters will eventually realise that a Trump presidency would be a car crash.
One contact predicted a literal car crash. Another suggested ‘‘they’’ would inject Trump with a drug that would induce a fatal heart attack. Another predicted ‘‘they’’ would shoot him, JFK-style. ‘‘They’’ being the CIA or other shadowy organisations that Americans brought up on a diet of conspiracy theories have come to believe are the real powers in the land.
But what if neither the American electorate nor the Langley Illuminati stop Trump? What happens if, God forbid, some terrorist outrage or economic crisis leads enough voters to conclude they need a strongman in the White House? What happens if Sarah Palin (one of the few politicians in the United States who can make Trump look statesmanlike) becomes Secretary of State, keeping an eye on Russia from her Alaskan vantage point?
If Trump did half of what he has suggested he might do, there is no doubt his presidency would be a calamity. The only question is which of his most outrageous policies would be most calamitous.
How about his idea of slapping 45 per cent tariffs on Chinese imports? With China, a motor of the world economy, already slowing down, even the threat of such a move could chill markets and investors. Proud politicians in Beijing would almost certainly retaliate. The Smoot-Hawley tariff bill of 1930 helped to deepen the great depression of the pre-war years. World trade shrank by 66 per cent as nations engaged in round upon round of beggar-my-neighbour retaliations. We mustn’t go down that road again.
A second candidate for the most calamitous Trump idea is his proposal to deport 11 million illegal immigrants.
The cost would be more than US$10,000 per head but the political and personal cost would be greater. The spouses and children of between a third and a half of illegals are US citizens.
Deportations would produce waves of civil unrest as families are torn apart.
Barack Obama has come under fire for his limited policy of returning trafficked migrants to their home countries but at least he has the benefit of the doubt from vulnerable minorities.
He hasn’t tweeted out incendiary and entirely fictional claims from a neo-Nazi organisation that 81 per cent of white murders have been perpetrated by black people. The correct statistic is 15 per cent.
And then there’s Trump’s plan to kill the families of Isis members: in breach of the Geneva Convention. His temporary ban on Muslims entering America: unconstitutional. His proposed sequestration of Iraq’s oil revenue to compensate the US for its military involvement in the region: illegal under international law.
As I list crazy idea after crazy idea I worry I’m scaremongering but I’m not exaggerating.
Trump has floated all these policies at least once.
A President Trump either delivers them and chaos results or he reneges on them in office and deepens the disillusionment about US politics that he professes to want to change.
Disillusionment is inevitable because the US president does not have a fraction of the power that Trump’s favourite dictators have. The executive orders of Vladimir Putin, for example, who Trump has praised as a ‘‘highly respected’’ leader, are not overturned by the Russian equivalent of the US Supreme Court. North Korea’s Kim Jongun, ‘‘amazing’’ and ‘‘incredible’’ according to Trump for the way he’s wiped out opponents and proven ‘‘he’s the boss’’, does not require approval for his actions from an independent-minded House of Representatives.
Last year, I nailed my colours to the mast and declared that Trump ‘‘won’t be America’s next president. He won’t even be the Republican nominee’’.
Doubling down, I still think that – even in the face of six successive and unprecedented months of him beating Ted Cruz (Trump without the charm), Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and the other would-be challengers to a Hillary Clinton presidency. I still think that because as much as America often baffles us, it didn’t become the richest, most technologically innovative and militarily powerful country on Earth by putting clowns like Trump in power.
At some point American voters who are attracted by Trump’s legitimate dislike of the political donor class, his plans to strengthen border policing and his opposition to cuts in the equivalent of US state pensions, will realise much of his agenda is as dangerous as it is impossible.
If Republicans nominate someone like Rubio, they have a good chance of victory and America will move in a decidedly conservative direction. If Trump is the nominee, Hillary wins.
And if it’s her or him, this conservative columnist prays that she does.