EVEN IF HE FALLS, THE ANGER HE EXPLOITED WILL BURN ON
THE horror movie that is Donald Trump was scheduled to climax on US election day, November 8. Instead, however, we seem to be previewing the outcome four weeks early. For this monstrous presidential candidate is unlikely to survive these video images of him branding the entire female sex as his playthings, to be exploited at will.
Republicans who have acquiesced in Trump’s racism, lies, financial chicanery, economic innumeracy and crazy world-view, are finally rising in revolt against his Stone Age take on women.
Last night’s second presidential TV debate had originally been billed as a big event that might turn a close election. But following the revelation of Trump’s misogynist remarks, it merely provided Hillary Clinton with a stage on which to share her opponent’s discomfiture with a nationwide TV audience.
The rest of us can mop our brows. Though we are not Americans, and have no votes, the character and policies of a US president influence the lives of us all.
Barack Obama has been a disappointment in the White House, an astonishingly passive leader of the free world despite his marvellous rhetoric. Yet nobody doubts his grace, intellect and commitment to civilised values. He was never going to plunge the world into a trade war, never mind a nuclear one. Donald Trump is capable of doing so.
Those who know him best avow that he is quite as brutish, untrustworthy and reckless as he seems. Yet 13million Republicans voted for him in their party primaries, and, for months, opinion polls have shown the presidential race to be alarmingly close.
Until recent days, it seemed perfectly possible that Trump could achieve a supreme triumph for the celebrity culture, by capturing the White House on the strength of mere TV notoriety uncompromised by a single day’s experience of governing.
Now, though, despite Hillary Clinton’s unpopularity, a few minutes’ video footage seems to have handed her the presidency.
Yet it is sobering to consider that if that proves so, the US electorate will have rejected Trump not because of his lunatic policies, but merely because of his personal depravity.
Once we stop rejoicing at the man’s eclipse, it’s vital we should think hard about the electoral mood that has carried him so close to power.
Popular anger and frustration are as conspicuous in the European democracies as in the US. Voters believe the established order is failing them – that they have been betrayed by politicians. Thus, they succumb to snake-oil salesmen who promise the earth, who hold out a prospect of wafting them back to the dreamy days when Judy Garland sang Over The Rainbow.
AMONG Trump’s declared supporters, 81 per cent say they believe that life in America for people like them is worse than it was 50 years ago. Statistically, this is nonsense. Like us Europeans, they are richer, healthier, safer, longerlived than were their parents. But people find it hard to believe as much, amid social changes they deplore.
The most obvious manifestation is immigration. Trump has made himself the voice of white America and its concerns over the growing influence of Latinos, blacks and Muslims.
The conventional wisdom a few years ago was that no politician of any party could prosper on a declared racist ticket. Trump has proved them wrong.
The message for every politician in the Western world is that voters insist upon a right to an honest debate about migrants and politicians must display a respect, that has hitherto been absent, for citizens’ right to decide the scale of permitted immigration.
Beyond raw numbers, it is scarcely surprising that they become nervous of Muslims, when Islamic extremism represents a genuine threat.
Trump also touched a nerve with his attacks on big business, and especially banks. He said it was a scandal that the people who created the 2008 financial crisis are still rich and free, and he is right. As long as capitalism continues lavishly to reward fatcats who fail, how can workers on stagnant incomes be blamed for their bitterness?
His appeal to isolationism also struck home. After failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, together with the Libyan shambles, Americans ask: why should we spend billions defending people who display no gratitude, alongside Nato allies who refuse to pay their share?
Isolationism will not go away if Trump loses next month.
Above all, the issue that boosted Trump is economic insecurity. He made himself the standard-bearer for ‘forgotten America’, the decent white lower middle-class that sees its jobs vanishing at a terrifying rate.
Trump tells people that they should blame free trade and Chinese ‘job theft’. In truth, technology and irresistible global forces are responsible, and he has no credible remedies. I wrote from Washington back in February that one of the weirdest aspects of the Trump phenomenon is that he tapped into a national delusion that Amer- ica is going down the tube, when most foreign visitors remain awed by its achievements.
Clinton and her political kin have a mountain to climb after the election: they must rebuild faith in the capacity of the system to make things better; to generate hope of new jobs, new lives, a new deal, in place of the despair that drives Trumpery.
She must strive to wean Americans off the hate that suffuses too many, especially in the southern states, and exemplified by the loathing of Obama.
Republican leaders who allowed Trump to hijack their party, deserve every smidgen of the embarrassment and indeed humiliation he has now inflicted upon them.
SINCE 2008, Republicans have paralysed the process of government in obedience to their own grassroots extremists, rejecting the compromises inseparable from all policy-making.
Whether the Trump shipwreck will bring them to their senses is, alas, by no means assured.
This story will not end on polling day, because the forces that enabled this pseudo-Republican to become the most despicable major party candidate in US history will still be out there. No one can celebrate the manner of Trump’s undoing over the past few days, which merely emphasises his essential squalor.
But we in Britain, as well as every civilised American, can sleep easier through the coming month, because the nightmare of a Trump presidency is receding, if not yet quite banished.