One summer evening in 2016 I was sitting around one of the old mismatched tables in my local village pub with some neighbours enjoying a quiet drink when the subject of Donald Trump came up. I clearly remember saying don’t worry, there’s no way he is ever going to be elected president of the USA in November. How wrong was that? I wince even now when I think about it. It was well into the Daniel Hannan League of erroneous forecasts. Eight years on and with everything we now know about Trump - with more being revealed every week - it's quite possible he will be elected for the second time in November.
What I had assumed was impossible in 2016 should be even more inconceivable today, but it isn't.
I think it was H L Mencken who said: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people" and Trump is demonstrating it's still true today. He is paying his huge legal bills with money raised for his political campaign - and his supporters apparently don't mind!
The Trump presidency was an unrehearsed black farce. Virtually every sane person outside of the MAGA Republicans could see he was a complete imbecile. Anybody who thought COVID could be cured by injecting bleach or shining a bright light into someone’s body has to be in the bottom 0.1% as far as intelligence is concerned. He is almost sectionable.
Senior positions in his cabinet were swapped and changed with stunning frequency. Chiefs of staff, secretaries of state, attorneys general, defence secretaries, spokesmen and women arrived to great fanfares of hyperbole only to be sacked weeks or months later as utterly hopeless.
When he was defeated at the end of 2020, it appeared the US public had had enough and regained a grip on themselves by rejecting a man so obviously unfit for the job.
The three years since have only added to the weight of evidence that Trump is congenitally incapable of doing any sort of semi-responsible work of any kind. He has been found guilty of rape and fraud in New York, and facing more serious charges in Washington and Georgia including espionage, election interference and insurrection. You would think there was no way on earth that he could run for POTUS again but not only is it 99% certain the Republican Party will adopt him as their candidate, it appears there is more than an even chance he’ll be in the White House again next year.
CNN’s latest polling shows Trump leading Biden by 4% nationally:
"Overall, 49% of registered voters say they would back Trump if an election between the two were held today, while 45% support Biden and 5% say they’d vote for someone else. Those numbers are identical to CNN polling on the contest in the fall, and the demographic dynamics of the contest appear to be steady – with a wide education gap among the most notable demographic divides, and smaller differences by age or race than in other recent presidential elections."
The political pollster Frank Luntz tweeted:
Trump is still leading Biden in every single swing state. https://t.co/o6iBmsljyW
— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) February 27, 2024
NBC say Biden is ahead in Union households but only by 9% compared to 16% at the same point in the 2020 election cycle.
This NBC chart is truly terrifying:
I’m a baby boomer and I have often defended the Americans when friends or work colleagues have been critical, as they sometimes have, particularly those leaning to the left. Without American military strength and NATO, my generation would have had a very different life. I have no doubt about that and I'm grateful.
An American I once knew said to me: "We mean well but we often screw up." I think they're about to screw up again - in a big way.
For eighty years we have lived in relative peace under the US military umbrella, built by American tax dollars. They used to spend on defence more than the 15 next highest spending nations put together. We shouldn’t fool ourselves that the Russians were ever worried about European NATO countries. It was the US that gave Article 5 of the NATO charter a real punch.
If Trump is elected at the end of the year, he will certainly try to pull America out of NATO.
Europe needs to give up the idea that President Trump (if that is what he is) is going to step in if Russia continues its advance in the west and occupies more and more of Ukraine. He isn't and a majority of American voters might agree with him. There is no way we can rely on the USA anymore.
Macron seems to understand the position:
For the first since World War II, our allies around the world are preparing for the United States to abandon them if Trump wins. https://t.co/lxeED2Knaj
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 27, 2024
Europe must get its act together because the outcome of the 2024 US election could be exactly what Putin has been working towards for a decade or more.
Brexit has weakened the EU which has no real military strength. It has a common defence and security policy which sounds good and is certainly headed towards a defensive union, spurred on by Russian aggression in Ukraine. But it’s fractured and nations are still acting in their own interests.
Britain may soon have reasons other than trade to regret Brexit. I seem to remember when this point was raised in 2016, Brexiteers always said NATO is our defensive shield, not Brussels. After 2025 that may no longer hold good.
Russia is going to be a threat for years - perhaps decades. Trump has shown why the EU needs to accelerate moves towards creating a genuine European army with a unified command structure capable of resisting Putin or his successors.
