How Trump made the biggest political comeback possible

How to account for Trump’s astonishing comeback? How did this rude, crude, lewd buffoon defy the odds and bounce back from the depths of despair, including an assassination attempt?

For one thing, Trump had plenty of help from his opponents. Their unprecedented campaign of criminal and civil litigation reaffirmed the conservative belief that Trump is a victim of a “corrupt” system (Trump even turned his mug shot into a marketing tool).

Democrats and their media mates went to great lengths to cover up Joe Biden’s evident flaws, and when the truth about his health was finally exposed, they thought they could simply swap him for a substance-free candidate who hadn’t been tested by primary competition.

At the same time, Democrats wilfully misinterpreted their small majority in 2020 as a mandate for economic statism and left-wing progressivism. As a result, the chaos of a dysfunctional immigration system spilled into neighbourhoods. Crime shut down cities where officials refused to enforce laws and the homeless invaded public spaces.

Bidenomics – massive post-COVID spending splurges – wasted tax dollars and led to a surge in inflation that shrank real wages. A clear majority of Americans say they’re worse off today than they were four years earlier.

But Trump’s populist message has also had wide appeal in ways that media elites and urban sophisticates have never really understood. Sure, many people harbour deep reservations about Trump. But for all his vulgarity, he has tapped into the legitimate anxieties of many low-income Americans without college degrees, who feel unrepresented.

Indeed, this is largely due to the Democrats having lost their working-class base over the years through their support for globalisation, identity politics and lax immigration controls.

This election, moreover, is indicative of a cultural clash that the veteran US political analyst John B. Judis has identified. It’s not just the gender gap that has widened in this election, but a great divide between the people who live in the great metro centres like New York and the San Francisco Bay Area – which have benefited from the rise of finance and high tech – and the mid-sized and small towns that have been decimated by the flight of industry or that depend upon resource extraction, be it farming, mining or oil drilling.

In other words, the Democrats have become the party of the big metro centres and the Republicans the party of small-town America.

So, what now? What to make of the next four years?

It would be pleasant to think everybody would now close ranks and get on with the business of governing America and addressing the country’s urgent problems. The sad thing about this dispiriting election campaign, however, is that it hasn’t clarified America’s problems, but deepened them.

This was an immoderate campaign, coarse in its tone and unedifying in its substance. And America’s politics are likely to stay that way for the next four years and beyond.

As for US trade policy, higher and across-the-board tariffs will likely slow global growth and hurt US consumers with higher prices. A trade war with China is not in Australia’s national interest.

And US foreign policy? Trump is unpredictable, but at least he recognises the folly of the “forever wars” that the neoconservatives and liberal hawks launched in the Middle East. He has also recognised the perils of antagonising the Kremlin with NATO expansion, which has provoked Putin into protecting Russia’s near abroad, as well as pushed Moscow closer to arch-enemy China.

With the return of power politics in a more multipolar world, the US must now recognise its limits and reorder its strategic priorities away from Europe and the Middle East towards Asia to check and balance China, the only power capable of threatening the US. Is Trump up to the task?

Photo by Gage Skidmore