Hillary won by a mile. But furious, irrational voters could still put this lunatic in power
THIS was irresistibly gripping political theatre: the two contenders for the richest prize on earth, the presidency of the United States, clashing before an American TV audience estimated at 100 million people.
The event, I suspect, left much of the world quaking at the notion that the one with the bouffant orange hair might reach the White House.
Hillary Clinton may be unlovable, untrustworthy, almost inhuman, but it is hard to doubt that she is also rational, informed, experienced.
Donald Trump’s performance, by contrast, highlighted some of the thousand reasons that he is less fit to become America’s president than North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.
In the first of three debates in the runup to the November 8 election day, he refused to answer the question of why he has not joined every other modern presidential candidate in releasing his tax returns.
He lied in denying his support for the 2003 Iraq War, blamed President Obama for the country’s gun violence, promised to lead American forces into the Middle East to ‘knock the hell out of Isis’, and pledged massive tax cuts — heedless of estimates they could add $5trillion to America’s groaning debt pile.
In other words, he unashamedly lived up to his record as Mr Irresponsibility.
Clinton, by contrast, delivered a poised, fighting performance, throwing punch after punch at her opponent to which he offered no credible responses: ‘This is a man who has called women pigs, slobs and dogs.’
His refusal to disclose tax returns means ‘it must be something important, even terrible, he wants to hide’.
Nuclear
As an employer, there are ‘thousands of people you have stiffed over the course of your business’. On nuclear weapons ‘his cavalier attitude is deplorable’. On his claimed ‘secret plan’ to defeat Isis: ‘The only secret is that he has no plan.’
It was devastating stuff, to which Trump could respond only with bluster: ‘I have much better judgment than Secretary Clinton — there’s no doubt about that. I have better temperament. I have a winning temperament. It’s about time this country had someone running it who knows something about money.’
He even sought credit for an appallingly shameless volte face, admitting that President Barack Obama was born in America after years of asserting that he was not: ‘I was the one that got him to produce the birth certificate, and I think I did a good job.’
Yet, though two-thirds of Monday’s massive TV audience judged Clinton the winner, it would be wildly mistaken to suppose that this has ensured her victory in November, even if the two debates yet to come end the same way.
For we have entered a frightening era of ‘post-truth’ politics, in which many voters have such contempt for the political class and the traditional media that they are willing to support a candidate who asserts things both he and they know to be drivel.
Powerfully influenced by social media, which enables impassioned minorities — gunowners, evangelical Christians, global warming-deniers, flatearthers — to communicate exclusively with like-minded folks, without any intervening editorial or fact-checking process, around 40 per cent of Americans embrace Trump because he says things they wish to believe.
Alienation
He asserts that violent crime is rising, even though Hillary Clinton rightly said on Monday that it is not. He questions Russia’s responsibility for leaking a mass of hacked emails from prominent Americans, even though Western intelligence agencies are sure President Putin is responsible.
He claimed repeatedly ‘our jobs are fleeing the country . . . We have to stop our jobs being stolen from the U.S... other countries are using our country as a piggy bank’ — while not mentioning that the brilliant American digital technology industry is one of the biggest factors in destroying traditional jobs.
Trump has tapped into the alienation that is the result — in the past two decades — of a housing crash, a technology bubble bursting and then the biggest financial crisis in living memory in 2008, followed by a period of weak growth.
This is allied to the sense that America’s power in the world — both military, political and economic — is waning.
All that has created a voter class which is ready, apparently, to risk driving the U.S. off a cliff in their bloody-minded desire for change.
I have just returned from a protracted trip to the U.S., where — after years of strife — economic statistics actually show the nation is doing pretty well, with unemployment below five per cent, middle-class earnings rising slightly after that long period of stagnation, and the economy growing, albeit slowly.
Yet the popular mood is bleak, especially in ‘rust belt’ states such as Ohio, which Clinton needs to win in November.
Many Americans in such
states have persuaded themselves that Trump is a magician who can wave a magic wand and bring back past prosperity.
The nostalgia is alarming. A recent poll in North Carolina, by no means an ultra-conservative state, showed 80 per cent of voters backing Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the country, with 33 per cent believing public worship of Islam should be illegal, and 38 per cent wishing the South — the old heartland of slavery — had won the American Civil War.
Such are the people who respond to Trump’s repeatedly recited mantra that he’ll ‘make America great again’, by shutting out migrants, somehow punishing China for its economic and trade successes, and obliging European Nato members to pay a fairer share of the defence burden that is overwhelmingly carried by the U.S.
Most Americans are baffled and angered that Muslim extremists — who have carried out a spate of attacks on U.S. soil — wish their country ill.
To exploit this, Trump disingenuously claims that President Obama and Mrs Clinton unleashed the chaos that reigns in Iraq and Syria by withdrawing U.S. troops from the region too quickly. Most Americans know sufficiently little about the complexities of the Middle East that Trump can say just about whatever he wants on the subject and get away with it.
Even though Hillary is deemed to have won the encounter on Monday, such is the mistrust of Washington politicians in general (and the Clintons in particular) among white working-class and even middle-class Americans that many will simply not have heard what she actually said on screen.
They will have stared through this smart-ass, heartless, liberal woman, unimpressed by her extraordinary recitals of numbers and mastery of detail, seeing only a human being utterly remote from themselves and their concerns.
By contrast, Trump scores with an audience that applauds his willingness to say things that sound outrageous, but which echo their own sentiments, aspirations and prejudices. In this, he really does have much in common with our own Nigel Farage.
One of the few veteran Republicans openly to renounce Trump has found himself a pariah in consequence. Iowa state senator David Johnson quit, saying: ‘I can’t be a member of a party where the man who leads the party has this abysmal record. It’s the day of reckoning. This is no longer the party of Lincoln. It’s the party of Trump.’
But Trump articulates fears and issues that loom large in the minds of tens of millions of Americans, whose eyes glaze over when Clinton talks about making the U.S. clean energy capital of the world.
Clinton concluded her performance by addressing voters, saying: ‘This election isn’t about us — it’s about you.’ She was dead right: a Trump victory in November would say something very scary indeed about the mood of the American electorate.
It is impossible to predict how serious the economic and strategic consequences could be if he ever implemented his policies, especially those relating to confrontation with China and mass expulsion of 11 million illegal immigrants.
Recently, I viewed in an online archive the 1960 presidential election TV debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Those two men hated and despised each other.
Yet they argued with unflagging courtesy about real problems and credible alternative responses to them. Neither men’s declared policies were disreputable nor indeed repugnant, as those of Trump are. In the 21st century, politics has moved on — almost entirely for the worse. Neither candidate in Monday’s debate dared to tell Americans that many of the ills the world faces are beyond the ability of any tenant of the White House to cure; that they can only be managed.
What sane politician would be remotely honest about the intractability of the problem of mass migration from the southern to northern hemisphere?
Instead, Trump is inviting Americans to join Alice in Wonderland in believing six impossible things before breakfast, and many voters remain in a mood to accept.
Trump is a fresh thing, and his country loves things that look fresh on the supermarket shelf, even if they prove to stink once you have got them home to the kitchen table.
If Trump prevails on November 8, as is still entirely possible even after this week’s setback, the presidency will fall into the hands of a man less fit to hold office than any previous candidate in America’s history.
The world’s greatest democracy may be resilient enough to survive such an experience, but few foreigners who watched Trump on Monday night would care to bet on it.