Standing in the cool of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC, on the last hot day of the year, I watched American tourists taking selfies in front of the giant of American history and at either end of the chamber, where the Gettysburg address of November 1863 and his second inaugural address—delivered weeks before Lincoln’s assassination in 1865—are carved into the walls.
How many of these amiable out-of-towners were Republican and would be voting for Donald Trump next month, I wondered? Did Abraham Lincoln’s warnings about the consequences of a divided nation and war resonate with them? Were they making the connection between his time and ours?
Around 70m Americans, brought up to revere the first Republican president’s example, have decided to vote for a rapist, a felon, a racist and a man who has tried to overthrow the democratic process, who now threatens to use the National Guard and the military to suppress “the enemy from within” and whose former chief of staff, John Kelly, says meets the definition of a fascist and would rule like a dictator. How do these sweet people descending the memorial steps with me, maybe going off in search of water and ice creams, contemplate the threat to democracy and loss of freedom with such equanimity? How do they even consider voting for a man who is unravelling before the eyes of the nation every day, commenting publicly on the size of a golf player’s penis?
This is to say nothing of the chaos Trump brings to everything. Even if they ignore his threat to liberty and instead focus on his supposedly strong suit, the economy, they must have their doubts after his interview this week in Chicago with the editor of Bloomberg, John Micklethwait. Trump waffled and became rude when pressed on his plans to place a 10 per cent tariff on all imports, which, with tax cuts for the rich and corporations, would, Micklethwait suggested, increase the national debt by about $7.5 trillion. Surely Republicans know that tariffs do not make sense and will simply pass the costs onto the consumer. Sixteen Nobel prize winners have said Trump’s package would reignite inflation.
After Trump’s abysmal performance in Chicago, Harris has managed to claw back credibility on the economy. An Associated Press-NORC poll shows her with a slight lead on key economic questions that affect the middle class. At 45 per cent to 44 per cent nationally, Harris leads Trump by one point, according to one poll conducted by USA Today and Suffolk, while another by CBS and YouGov puts the numbers at 51 per cent for Harris and 48 per cent for Trump. On Tuesday, the New York Times published polls from the seven key swing states. The candidates are tied at 48 per cent in four; Trump is up by one or two points in Georgia and Arizona; and Harris is up by one in Wisconsin. Things do not look good for her in these crucial battlegrounds. However, every election contains a secret that isn’t revealed until the results start coming in. My strong impression is that women and young voters will be significant on the day.
All my American friends are nervous, hoping for the best but preparing for the worst, because 48 per cent of their compatriots are evidently sticking with their man, no matter that the 78-year-old appears crazier, more menacing and older by the day. You have to ask when they stopped paying attention and why they don’t know where their own interests and those of the nation lie.
It's dangerous to write off 70m people just like that. But we must ask: what the hell has happened in the US? Just as Trump exploits the weaknesses in the American system, he also illuminates them.
Arguably, there would be no Trump or Maga today if in 2016 Barack Obama had supported Joe Biden, his vice president of eight years, instead of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee. Biden was the stronger candidate and would almost certainly have beaten Trump, but this is not really the point. Clinton and Biden both won the popular vote—by almost 2.9m and seven million, respectively—yet the Electoral College system, in which a certain number of electors are chosen from each state once a candidate has won a majority, meant results in the swing states ensured Trump’s victory in 2016 and almost allowed him to squeak it in 2020.
Everyone knows that the Electoral College was designed to balance the power of the coastal cities and the sparsely populated heartland states. This is true, yet it is only half the story. The college was also devised to protect the interests of slaveowners in five southern states, who argued that the men and women they held in bondage should be included when it came to fixing the number of Electoral College votes for their individual states. A chilling formula was created—the Three-Fifths Clause of Article One of the Constitution—which meant a slave was counted as three-fifths of a free (white) person. So it was that the five slave-owning states won a greater number of college votes for themselves.
More than 200 years later, this relic of one of the two most shameful episodes in America’s history (the slaughter of Indigenous Americans being the other) may allow an out-and-out racist to set light to the Constitution and tank the economy, while his opponent, a Black and Indian woman with impeccable credentials, could very well be denied the White House even if she wins a huge majority in the country.
After her superb performance over the last week—Kamala Harris’s campaign is gaining momentum, while Trump’s seems to be stalling—I am beginning to dare to hope this won’t happen. But at the time of writing the candidates are neck and neck in the critical Pennsylvania contest, which has 19 Electoral College votes at stake, and they are within a point of each other in the remaining six battleground states, which have between six and 16 votes each.
If you’re looking for the single most important reason why Trump still plagues American life, it is the way presidents are elected. Expose him to a fully functioning democratic election, which is decided on a simple popular vote, and he wouldn’t have a prayer. Trump has been aided by other institutional crises, too. The enfeeblement of the GOP is one. Who knew that Lincoln’s Republican party was in such a sorry state? Trump, with his unswerving instinct for weakness, knew. The party allowed him to take control after he lost in 2020, then consolidate his position after defeat in the 2022 midterms. Despite all his failures at the ballot box, Republicans opened the door and let him build a great golden throne for himself in the ruins of their once great party.
He hollowed out the GOP, just as Boris Johnson did the Tory party. Yet there was a moment in 2021, after the 6th January riots, when the Republican leadership could have dispatched Trump for good by impeaching him. The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, condemned Trump utterly and blamed him for the disorder, but in the end he refused to help build the two-thirds majority needed for impeachment. It would have done for Trump and ended his White House ambitions in 2024, but McConnell and his colleagues, fearful for their own futures, stayed their hand in a historic act of cowardice.
Having stripped out or sidelined the party’s talent, Trump can now only field creepy lieutenants like Stephen Miller and Jason Miller or billionaire fans like Elon Musk to make his case in this election. His campaign lacks ideas and originality. The Democrats, in contrast, have Obama, Bill Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, Hakeem Jeffries, and Nancy Pelosi—and all of them have national standing and make very effective surrogates.
Not all GOP politicians have been so gutless. Former members of congress Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, as well as her ultra-conservative father Dick, have backed Harris, and countless former members of Trump’s staff and state-level Republicans have come out against him.
With three weeks to go, Harris held a rally alongside 100 Republicans in Pennsylvania, just before her interview with Bret Baier on Fox News. It was a hugely successful event and she performed with a new seriousness and authority in the interview, quoting Trump’s former chief of staff, two defence secretaries and his national security adviser, who have all come out against him. She fiercely accused Baier of trying to soften Trump’s threat to use the military against his political opponents by playing a video of Trump lying about it. Baier later agreed that this had been a mistake, and her commanding presence in the interview went viral. A pivotal moment perhaps, and certainly one which underlined the contrast with Trump.
There is a sense in these last weeks that everyone is dashing to the barricades. From Snoop Dogg to Jeff Daniels, they’re out in the media warning America about the threat. Carl Bernstein, the former Washington Post journalist responsible with Bob Woodward for exposing much of the Watergate scandal, captured the binary nature of the election on CNN. “This is a campaign in which there will be a reaffirmation of regular political order in this country,” he said, or “there’s going to be a real triumph of fascism, in which good, well-meaning Republicans have allowed themselves to get carried down this path... Listen to General Mark Milley, former head of the joint chiefs of staff, quoted in Bob Woodward’s new book War, saying of Donald Trump—‘fascist to the core, the most dangerous man in this country’.”
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve met many “well-meaning Republicans”. Being a Republican is a primary part of their identity that they don’t question, even when they hear Trump threatening to rid the world of his opponents. That conventionality and tribal loyalty of rank-and-file Republicans is another weakness Trump has exploited. He knew that despite their often deeply held religious beliefs, they would forgive his leching and infidelity, his bankruptcies and fraud, his lying and wholly amoral narcissism so long as he won them an abortion ban. Most accept that Trump doesn’t care one way or the other about abortion, but he has used the issue to keep his support loyal.
It seems odd to say it, but Trump has also benefitted from an institutional weakness in the legal system, which, despite multiple crimes, has barely laid a glove on him during his third presidential campaign. It is true that he’s been found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records in the hush money case, but sentencing has been delayed until after the election, so it may never happen. The secret documents case in Florida is stalled with an appeal; charges have been filed in Georgia on election fraud, but that case is delayed until after the election; and in the big 6th January case, the special counsel Jack Smith has filed a revised indictment after the Supreme Court ruled that former presidents are immune from prosecution for official actions carried out while in office. Three out of four cases may never be heard if Trump becomes president, and he has been granted immunity by the highest court in the land if he is returned to the White House.
That’s one hell of a net gain from all legal troubles, and it underlines the deep crisis in the American justice system. The Supreme Court has granted immunity in office to a man who suggested that his political opponents be executed—but has withdrawn the control of women over their own bodies after 50 years of the Roe v Wade judgement.
And last, the mainstream media has not covered itself in glory this past few years—though admittedly life is increasingly tough for broadcasters, news sites and newspapers as the information space fragments. Disinformation, much of it dreamed up by the Trump campaign and its foreign allies, now competes with truth and verifiable facts. The media has tiptoed around Trump, somehow confounded by his weird, empty personality and unwilling to admit that half of America is in the thrall of a truly bad man. He is regarded as a delinquent so held to almost no standards, yet at the same Harris is expected to behave as though this were a regular presidential contest.
The New York Times concentrated on Biden’s age and his mental acuity, but only in the last two weeks has it given Trump the same level of scrutiny on the subject, which is surprising since he has unravelled to a much greater extent than Biden. Indeed, people are beginning to talk about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which, in the event of the president’s mental or physical incapacity, allows the vice-president to take over after gaining the backing of half the cabinet. On social media, it is described as the bait-and-switch strategy to get JD Vance in the Oval Office, and as Trump becomes crazier this does seem to be a real possibility.
Political commentators have been obsessed with Harris’s avoidance of interviews and ignored that Trump had dropped out of 60 Minutes and declined a second presidential debate. And only recently has the mainstream media begun to take Trump’s fascist raving seriously, although he has been doing that for some time now. Tactically, I feel sure that this is disastrous for his campaign. However, journalists who are clutching their pearls about stating he’s a stone-cold fascist should remind themselves that among the first individuals on Trump’s hit list will certainly be journalists.
In all the above I am, in some way, seeking an excuse for 70m Americans who will vote for Trump on 5th November, the kind of people I saw in small towns and cities across a couple of states and at the Lincoln Memorial. I am trying to avoid dismissing them as “deplorables”, as Hillary Clinton did. Trump has taken advantage of institutional weakness in a country which has not confronted a mortal fascist threat like this one before, and supporters can’t be blamed for those failings. To that extent I give Trumpers a pass.
But there is a complicit credulity in the way they accept anything Trump or his cronies say. When Vance tells a made-up story about Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, or Trump says that money has been diverted from the Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief funds to help immigrants, or Marjorie Taylor Greene suggests that the government can control the weather and aims hurricanes at Republican areas, people have a duty to mark it down as BS. To believe the nonsense just because it fits one’s political prejudices is unacceptable and should be condemned. Trumpers are the amplifiers not the victims here.
The phrase “permission structure” is overused at the moment, but it describes exactly what’s happening. Trump has licensed his followers not just to believe his incredible lies, but to be openly their worst selves, to be racist and cruel to transgender people, to condone inhumane treatment of migrants (he says he will expel up to 20m illegal migrants from the United States) and to urge America to ignore the world’s concerns in favour of solipsistic isolation. This seems to be the most permanent of the damage he has done to America and even if he is defeated, it will take some time to restore decency, awareness and humanity to the Republican party. We must hope Harris wins and can begin that healing work for, as the Texan senator Sam Houston, said 11 years before the Civil War, “a nation divided against itself cannot stand”.
But if she loses, we’re in another era. Quite apart from the concern about what happens in the US, liberal democracies around the globe will find themselves threatened by far-right parties boosted by Trump, the expansionist ambitions of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin and a collapse in the international effort to respond to rapid climate change. The world will not easily forgive America for awarding the presidency to a man who makes dick jokes as part of his closing argument to the American people.
