STEVE HILTON
In a blistering critique triggered by the US election stalemate, former No10 supremo STEVE HILTON says...
IN BRITAIN, the idea of not knowing who won an election for weeks after voting ended would be considered some kind of prank or joke. But in the United States, such a laughable collapse of one of the most basic functions of government has become normalised. ‘Be patient – it takes time to count all the votes!’ is the dishonest explanation amid claims that the delay will prevent election deniers from spreading conspiracy theories. But in practice it does the exact opposite. longer it takes to announce election results, and the more the authorities try to pretend that this is normal, the more likely it is that people will question the integrity of the whole system.
No wonder that exit polls from last week’s mid-term elections showed that 75 per cent of Americans think their country is headed in the wrong direction.
Yet the results themselves, with Republicans winning only a small fraction of the seats in Congress they were expected to, have been seen as a green light for President Joe Biden’s Democrats to keep going in exactly the same direction they’ve been going for the past two years: further and further to the Left.
Seventy per cent don’t want Biden to run for a second term, and yet last week’s election outcome was interpreted as all but guaranteeing the nomination for him if he wants it.
The top campaign issues – inflation, the economy, crime and the chaos of uncontrolled immigration – were ones on which Republicans hold huge leads. And yet it’s the Democrats who are celebrating, while the Republican Party tears itself apart in recriminations.
Not to mention the first shots being fired in what is shaping up to be a brutal, if inevitable, uncivil war between former President Donald Trump and the man who was all but anointed by the media as his Republican successor: the youthful Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.
To add to the confusion, it turns out the Republicans’ overall share of the vote was 52 per cent, compared with the Democrats’ 46 per cent.
In America these days, there is no longer an ‘Election Day’. Oh no, that is much too simple and old-fashioned.
Now we have an entire election season, with early voting starting weeks before the official polling day, postal votes counted even if they arrive a week or more after, and a rash of new voting methods replacing the civic ritual of people going to their local school, library or other public building to cast their vote in person.
In California, for example, every voter is sent a ballot in the post. And as multiple reports have shown, many non-voters receive them, too, including people who have died or long since moved out of the state. There are accounts of ballots piling up in hallways, addressed to people who are no longer there.
Assuming you are indeed alive and eligible to vote, you can return your ballot in the post. Or you can hand it in at one of the remaining polling stations. Alternatively, you can put it in one of many unattended drop boxes. You can give it to someone else to hand in – a friend or family member. Or a ‘ballot harvester’.
Yes, ballot harvesting is now legal in 31 states, and allows volunteers, party activists, union officials or paid workers to go from door to door collecting ballots.
There is no upper limit on the number of ballots any one person or organisation can harvest. Indeed, there have been reports of individuals arriving at polling locations bearing hundreds of them.
ON TOP of all this, expensive new technology has replaced the timehonoured system of marking ballots with a pencil or pen. In new Voting Centres, electors are invited to make their selections on a screen with a stylus.
Even ballots completed at home in the traditional way are scanned into a machine and counted electronically, rather than by hand.
Thanks to all these complicated procedures, vote-counting in many states has turned into an extended, and highly embarrassing, shambles.
By contrast, we have seen countries such as Brazil and France hold elections without a hitch this year, with definitive results declared within hours.
Apart from the obvious effect on the American people’s confidence in the democratic process, the ongoing election fiasco illustrates one of the most pernicious trends of our time: the centralisation of power in the hands of ‘experts’ who pretend they know what they’re doing but in reality turn out to be clueless.
Politicians too often defer to ‘experts’ instead of exercising their own judgment and common sense.
The most recent example, of course, was the madness of the pandemic lockdowns, which obviously did much more harm than good.
We’ll be forced to live with the consequences for decades as we struggle to pay off the vast debt built up to compensate people for economic losses that should never have been imposed in the first place.
Politicians everywhere seem to have lost all sense of reason and grip.
For example, over the past few months the world has looked at Britain in disbelief. A country respected for seriousness and stability has seen two governments collapse into a farcical political pantomime thanks to the self-indulgent whims of panicky Conservative MPs.
After the eviction of an electionwinning Prime Minister over some bizarre, and to the outside world, incomprehensible micro-scandal, came the Truss debacle: attempting to unleash a radical – and it must be said, generally sensible – policy revolution with apparently zero preparation, consultation, communication or plan for implementation.
How could this even happen? How can one of the world’s leading nations be so casually destabilised, practically overnight?
It’s not just government and politics, though. Look at the rapid destabilisation of one of Silicon Valley’s most high-profile tech companies, the social media platform that, for good or ill, now plays a central role in public debate: Twitter.
Mass firings, new products announced, delayed, implemented
The reassuring leadership that America offered is now a distant memory
and withdrawn all within the space of a week, advertiser and senior executive defections – now new owner Elon Musk warning: ‘There’s a massive negative cash flow, and bankruptcy is not out of the question.’ Wait, wasn’t he supposed to save Twitter?
Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley giant Meta seems to be faring no better, with him announcing massive job cuts and yet again apologising that he ‘got this wrong’.
The world seems to be spinning out of control.
Putin invades Ukraine. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un revives and expands his rocket tests. Xi Jinping makes himself president for life and hints that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could be imminent. Where are the grown-ups who will steer us through these troubled waters?
The reassuring leadership that America once offered seems a distant memory: with the non-stop rage and drama of the Trump years to the constant embarrassments of the feeble and clearly senile Biden mumbling and bumbling his way through his public appearances. Our enemies must think, if he’s like this in public, imagine what he’s like in private.
Faith leaders, business titans, sporting figures – those who we might have looked to for steadiness and solidity in our unsettled world – instead offer the same menu of vapid virtue-signalling and melodramatic public emoting as the shallowest Instagram-addicted celebrity or reality ‘star’.
All of this has left people lost, bewildered and angry.
We see it in the frightening narcissism and derangement of the Just Stop Oil protesters, ludicrously invoking the end of the world to jus
tify their cruel, attention-seeking and totally counter-productive stunts. We see it in the vicious hate and intolerance of the gender activists, branding anyone who dares to even question their extremist ideology a bigot who must be silenced and shamed.
We see it in the way that important debates about equal opportunity and racism have devolved into simplistic shouting matches and ineffective sloganising ever since the social upheavals following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in 2020.
Worse, the people who we entrust with the task of trying to address these problems, and bring us together, seem incapable of doing anything but further exacerbate our divisions.
Just in the last week in America, one of the Democratic Party’s most senior leaders, Congressman James Clyburn, warned that a Republican victory in the mid-term elections would be the same as Hitler coming to power in the 1930s.
A once-respected historian, Michael Beschloss, claimed that if the Republicans won, American democracy and the free press would end and ‘children will be arrested and conceivably killed’.
A host of one of the most highprofile daytime television shows compared women who vote Republican to cockroaches.
Instead of trying to turn down the rhetorical temperature, as he promised, Biden has thrown fuel on the fire, preposterously arguing that democracy in America would end if Republicans won the mid-term elections, and recklessly riling up voters over that most divisive of all issues, abortion. As a result, America, much more than ever, seems disastrously atomised and paralysed. People retreat to their online echo chambers, screening out anything that might challenge their world view. Those who disagree are no longer just wrong, they are ‘evil’. An election that should produce clarity and a mandate instead delivers gridlock in Washington, ensuring that almost nothing gets done for at least two years.
I fear we are witnessing an escalating sense of anxiety as the world fast-forwards at a terrifying pace – driven by government incompetence, reckless populism, climate catastrophe and global instability. Underpinning the chaos and confusion is all-pervasive technology that enables alienation as well as communication.
The problem is, it’s not just America. As so often, what happens in
We embrace technology... and abandon what should matter the most
the United States is a harbinger for the rest of the world.
We’ve seen enormous technological progress in the past few decades, and no one would dispute the many benefits it has brought.
But I can’t help thinking, as we witness what appears to be an unravelling of society, that at the heart of our malaise is one simple fact. As we have embraced technology, we have too often abandoned the more human things that should matter to us most: family, friendship and community.
We may not be able to make our political system give us strong, inspiring leaders. We may not be able to do much about the arrogance and incompetence of the ‘expert’ class.
But what we can do is spend time with our children, away from screens. Go for a walk in nature with our friends. Look out for our neighbours.
This may not sound as dramatic as a politician’s new initiative or the latest celebrity ‘launch’ – but it might just be the best antidote to all the anger and anxiety of our modern world.
DONALD TRUMP walked his youngest daughter Tiffany down the aisle yesterday after what one friend described as a ‘week from hell’ for the former US President.
He looked gloomy during a wedding rehearsal on Friday at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, but was all smiles on Friday night as he posed with wife Melania and his ex-spouse Marla Maples, Tiffany’s mother.
Mr Trump saw his plans to return to the White House thrown into disarray earlier last week after several of his hand-picked Republican candidates lost in the US midterm elections to Democrat rivals.
Reports in America claimed the former leader had planned to announce his bid this week to run in the 2024 presidential election but was left ‘ranting and raging’ as many of his candidates were trounced in the polls.
‘It has been the week from hell for him,’ a source close to Mr Trump told The Mail on Sunday. ‘He hasn’t been in the greatest of moods and that clearly showed in some of the photographs from the wedding rehearsal. But being around family has cheered him up. He is one proud father.’
Tiffany, 29, a lawyer, married Michael Boulos, 25, at Mar-a-Lago yesterday in a wedding that reportedly cost £2.1million.
Mr Boulos, who earned a master’s degree in London, is the son of a Nigerian who runs one of Africa’s largest motorcycle dealerships, with operations in ten nations.
He was born in Lebanon but as an infant moved to Nigeria – which Mr Trump has described as a ‘sh**hole’. He is heir to the family business, which is reportedly worth billions. The couple met in 2018 in Greece, and Mr Boulos proposed at the White House in January 2021 – hours before Mr Trump moved out after losing the 2020 election.
Marla Maples, 59, and Mr Trump, 76, were married from 1993 to 1999. He began an affair with the former model while married to first wife Ivana. Tiffany was born two months before her parents tied the knot.
Mr Trump has children Don Jr, 44, Eric, 38, and Ivanka, 41, from his marriage to Ivana, and a son Barron, 16, with Melania.