In a recent opinion piece for this paper, I have argued that the next president of the United States – be it Donald Trump or Joe Biden – is offering little hope for the rest of the world which must suffer both, no matter what. They were, in my words, “different shades of grey”.
This reflected my deep disappointment in Biden’s illiberal trade policies, his confrontational attitude towards China, and his glaring foreign policy weaknesses in Afghanistan and now Israel.
Yet Biden is a politician, supported by a professional government and competent advisers. Trump is not a politician. He is not even a businessman. He is a pompous reality-show host and an obstinate know-nothing.
Bad-tempered, revengeful and infantile, he will surround himself with yes-people, sycophants and hitmen. With the mindset of a recalcitrant toddler, he is impervious to good council and indisputable facts. He will discredit the Western World for good.
Never have we seen a US presidential candidate calling for the storm of the Capitol, inviting Russia to invade NATO countries while condoning her appropriation of a sovereign Ukraine, and finding laudable words about the Ku Klux Clan and Hitler. Trump’s grotesque personality, his warped morality and anti-social behaviour is garnished with lies and a flood of daily insults. This all cements his credentials as a man of the people. And so do his 91 criminal charges, ranging from tax fraud to rape.
We can safely assume that Trump will reverse even modest attempts to cope with climate Armageddon. He will wreck free trade irreversibly. He would stand by if China invaded Taiwan. He will ruin American democracy for good. We therefore see in Biden the incommensurably lesser evil. This is why we follow the ramp up of the current US election battle we cannot influence with nail-biting apprehension.
So far, things do not look good. Countless surveys, polling firms and opinion research institutes, often commissioned by news outlets, see Trump leading Biden by a significant margin. Fox TV and the Wall Street Journal talk of a two per cent plus, CBS News of four per cent and the respectable New York Times, in a survey collaboration with the Franciscan Siena College, sees Trump leading by five per cent. Realclearpolitics.com, a platform aggregating the results of all available surveys while adjusting them for perceived accuracy, calculates a Trump lead of 1.7 per cent.
A lot of things are stacked against Biden. For most voters, the biggest issue is his age. According to one finding, 73 per cent of interviewees find Biden too old or somewhat too old, against 42 per cent in the case of Trump. When Biden muddles a sentence, it proof of his senility. When Trump babbles along incomprehensively, everyone is used to that. After many years of absurd, garbled comments, he has a jester’s licence.
Economists, like the Nobel-laureate Paul Krugman, like to point out that inflation is coming down, salaries are rising in real terms (amply compensating for inflation) and unemployment is at historic lows. This is all correct.
The US economy is humming along enviably well when compared to most of Europe. But this is not how the majority of the US electorate sees it. Even if inflation would moderate to two per cent, as was the case for two decades – and it is not far off now – things are still 20 per cent more expensive than they were before COVID. Particularly essentials like food and most necessary staples.
Donald Trump is not a politician. He is not even a businessman. He is a pompous reality-show host and an obstinate know-nothing- Andreas Weitzer
Yes, the stock market is lifting fortunes for many. But the poor, who cannot cover their cost of living easily, live from credit-card debt, which is now – with higher interest rates – cripplingly expensive. For them, nothing gets cheaper. Least of all costs of shelter and the exorbitant cost of higher education.
The war in Gaza, shocking in its devastation and human suffering, is alienating Biden’s left core and his Muslim voters. Afro-Americans too are reminded of apartheid in South Africa and racial segregation in the not-so-remote US past. Many young voters, and there are 20 million more of them since the last election, seem to prefer Trump, despite his adoration for Netanyahu and the chain-saw-ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salam. Remember his sable dance with the late king?
White female voters, according to opinion polls, prefer Trump, no matter how misogynist, as do voters with Latino roots. The latter are hoping perhaps that Trump will keep his promise to close the border to Mexico for good and export all illegals, bettering their standing as old arrivals. How many see the “rule-based order”, justice, property rights and the noble promise of democratic rights staked against them?
To some extent, gauging the popularity of a candidate by survey can be misleading. Americans do not elect their president directly. They elect candidates for an ‘Electoral College’. Its 538 members, the electors, will nominate the next president. They can even do so at free discretion. The count of electors in each state, like its senators, reflect a historical past when America’s union of states was much loser, distanced by incomparably weaker communication and infrastructure. This distorts the popular vote.
In Wyoming, for instance, only 190,000 votes are sufficient to nominate a single elector, while in California 680,000 votes are needed. And then there are the “swing states”, where blue and red voters are almost even. Only very few votes are needed to tilt the scales. Al Gore lost by only 537 votes in Florida against George W. Bush in 2000. A recount was stopped by the courts.
These peculiarities have led in past US elections to (for us) puzzling results. Hilary Clinton garnered 48.2 per cent of all votes, or 2.8 million more than Trump (46.1 per cent), but only 227 votes of the Electoral College (Trump: 304). In the last elections, Biden got seven million more popular votes (306 College votes), but was still accused of election “theft” by Trump, who tried everything in his power to overturn the results and stop Biden’s certification. In the end, Trump and Giuliani let the mob storm Capitol Hill.
The hope that judicial justice will catch up with Trump has been squashed by the Supreme Court of the US, whose judges he helped to install. The fact that Biden’s campaign finance dwarfs Republican resources is little solace. (Whatever Republican donors still contribute will be redirected to Trump’s defence lawyers and to finance his dues, as daughter-in-law Lara Trump had let the world know.)
You can’t buy voters with ads, no matter how well directed (Malta’s PL is more hands-on!). My last fading hope is that, at least, some US Republicans will remember Reagan’s vision of the US as the “shining city on the hill” and recognise the garbage heap under way. Peace in Europe and our prosperity depends on the outcome of this spectacle.