On Tuesday, the US votes for a new president. Well, it’s been voting for some weeks already but the national nail-biting begins on November 5.
And the result, when we get it, in a week or two months, is likely to make this, for Europe, the most consequential US election in decades – although not necessarily in the way you might think.
Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are deeply flawed candidates. He is cruel and she is vacuous. And the election is too close to call – which does not mean the result will be close but that it’s difficult to predict. As I write, Trump is favoured to win but it will come down to voter turnout.
Given the unpredictability, we’ve seen both campaigns pull out the stops to convince the five per cent still undecided on whether to vote. As a result, we’ve seen more of the electoral machinery in action than we usually do, and we’ve also seen much experimentation and innovation.
The conventional wisdom is that who wins will make a great difference to international relations. I’m not so sure. There was great continuity between Barack Obama and Trump and the latter and Joe Biden.
Biden kept Trump’s tariffs on China. Even though Trump is said to be friendly with Vladimir Putin, he actually armed the Ukrainians, which Obama stopped short of doing. Biden has talked up NATO membership for Ukraine while, in practice, slow-walking it.
Trump is considered friendlier to Israel by the majority of Israelis but it’s difficult to see how any president in the past year could have been more pliant than Biden.
Harris hasn’t even hinted she’d be different, even though the issue is hurting her electorally with Muslim and Arab American voters.
On Iran, Trump breathes more fire but, again, it’s difficult to see how he’d be substantially different. He doesn’t want to get bogged down in another Middle Eastern war. The US pundits who are in favour of bombing Iran are all supporting Harris.
Some observers argue that Trump’s first term can’t be used to predict what he’d do in a second term. In 2017, he had to rely on the establishment advisers, who reined him in. In 2025, he’s coming in with a new circle.
It is true that Trump is paying closer attention to personnel this time. His running mate, J.D. Vance, is said to be cultivating a circle of America First foreign policy thinkers, some with senior State Department experience. But America’s geopolitical constraints are constant. The choice of president might speed up or slow down some processes but not necessarily translate into radical changes of policy.
The domestic front is different. There is room for a substantial difference between a Trump and a Harris presidency. And the domestic issues might have the same international ripple effect that the election of Ronald Reagan, in 1980, had on economic policy in Europe.
Three factors, among others, should be highlighted.
First, the electoral result, whoever wins, may take a long time to be determined. US elections are difficult to audit in a way that convinces doubters.
The number of voters who believe the 2020 election was rigged has grown, according to one survey, from 39 per cent to 47 per cent in the last four years. Going back 24 years, activists of both the Democratic and Republican parties have challenged the legitimacy of their opponents’ presidential victory. There’s no reason to think they’re going to stop this year.
Such contested results have consequences. They shake Americans’ faith in their democracy. The shaken belief could spread to Europe – through both disinformation and the sharing of partisan techniques of how to cast doubt on electoral results.
America’s geopolitical constraints are constant- Ranier Fsadni
Second, this election has displayed the waning influence of the legacy media on public opinion. Social media have emerged as more significant for both publicity and setting the agenda.
The development means successful politicians need to acquire a new set of communication skills. The polished sound bite is being replaced by the viral tweet, whose artfulness is disguised. The 10-minute grilling by a news anchor is becoming less relevant than a long-form conversation with a podcaster. Where the US leads, Europe usually follows.
Third, both parties are accusing the other of being “fascists”, although, sometimes, Harris is accused of being a closet communist while the Democrats liken Trump to Hitler. In both cases, the fascist/communist accusation is absurd and the Hitler accusation insults the victims of real Nazism.
No accusation has a plausible basis, even if both candidates are engaging in divisive rhetoric. If Trump is like Hitler because he organised a rally in Madison Square Garden (the site of a 1939 Nazi rally), where does that leave John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, who also organised events there?
If that’s all it takes to establish a link to Nazism, Harris is lucky that no one has pointed out that her campaign slogan, Joy, is “reminiscent” of the Nazi slogan, Joy Through Strength.
Both sides pile up the “evidence” for their respective claims. All the prominent ones are campaign lies and hoaxes.
Unfortunately, political rhetoric has consequences. Irrespective of who wins the election, the victory will be partly ascribed to the rhetorical strategy. And that means that such a strategy will migrate to Europe, whose politics are becoming Americanised by the year.
It would be a game of crying wolf. We should pray Europe avoids it. It’s a dangerous game. It damages the credibility of the media and politicians who play it. And the risk is obvious: that they won’t be believed if, or when, a real fascist wolf is spotted.