A week is a long time in US presidential politics
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Well, that got interesting very quickly, didn’t it?
Not that US presidential election campaigns are ever anything other than riveting, but with less than four months until polling day, the Republican Party has nominated Donald Trump as its candidate, he has selected a Trump mini-me half his age as his running mate, a federal judge has thrown out another of the rapidly diminishing pile of court cases Trump is facing, and a guy on a roof with an AR-15 assault rifle came within an inch and an ear of ending Trump’s campaign before it even began — and that was all in the space of one week.
As Lenin is often said to have observed during the 1917 Russian revolution: “There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” Sadly, there is no evidence that the old boy ever said any such thing, but hey — let’s not allow the facts to get in the way of an apposite quote.
What does all this mean for the presidential election on Nov. 5? The answer is, quite a lot.
As recently as a year ago, Democrats still hoped that weaponizing the justice system would hold Trump to account for what they viewed as a catalogue of disreputable behavior — using campaign funds as “hush money” to cover up a grubby sexual liaison, trying to overturn the 2020 election result with violence and intimidation (most notably in the state of Georgia) and secreting a cache of classified documents at his home in Florida when they should never have left Washington.
What actually happened was that Trump masterfully played the victim card, poor little powerless Donald at the mercy of the “deep state,” and every new prosecution simply added a percentage point or two to his electoral support. The Democratic strategy finally began to unravel when the Supreme Court ruled on July 1 that presidents were entitled to immunity from prosecution for acts committed in their official capacity.
The ruling is patently absurd, railroaded through in a 6-3 majority vote by the three conservative justices Trump appointed. It shreds the US Constitution by effectively placing the president above the law — precisely the opposite of what the Founding Fathers intended when they rejected the supremacy of England’s 18th-century King George.
There was more. In a concurrent opinion that was little reported at the time, Justice Clarence Thomas questioned the constitutionality of Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel to prosecute Trump. That opinion was not shared by any of the other eight justices, but it was enough for District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the case brought by Smith in Florida alleging that Trump illegally kept classified documents after leaving office. Cannon — appointed to the bench by, yes, you’ve guessed it — has used everything in her considerable power to drag the Florida case out with interminable delays and the Thomas opinion gave her the opportunity she was looking for: on Monday, she threw it out entirely.
It now seems highly unlikely that any of the criminal cases Trump faces will reach a conclusion before the election and even his sole felony conviction in the “hush money” case, for which he is due to be sentenced in September, is likely to be tangled up in legal wrangling inspired by that Supreme Court ruling. So, we can chalk all that up as a Trump win.
The attempted assassination is another matter. In US history, politicians who have been shot but not actually killed have had mixed results. The last former president to survive a bullet while campaigning for his old office was Theodore Roosevelt, who was shot while preparing to deliver a speech in Milwaukee in October 1912. Roosevelt’s grit and courage — he gave the 90-minute speech anyway, while bleeding copiously from a chest wound — “captured the imagination of the country,” according to his biographer H.W. Brands, although not enough to persuade it to vote for him. He lost the election to Woodrow Wilson.
The success story is that of Ronald Reagan, the eternal optimist who remained positive while recovering in a hospital bed after being shot in a Washington street in March 1981. Reagan is said to have temporarily removed his oxygen mask to inquire if his bodyguards were definitely Republican. Whether they were was not recorded, but a majority of American voters most certainly were and Reagan romped home to reelection in 1984. The jury remains out on whether Trump will be a Roosevelt or a Reagan, but dodging a bullet does not seem to have moved the polls much, if at all.
The same cannot be said of Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate, which at first glance appears to be a masterstroke that enthused the Republican base at this week’s convention in Milwaukee. Trump and his advisers seem to have been studying the arcane workings of the Electoral College, something they clearly failed to do in 2020.
The college’s peculiarities have been well rehearsed over the years, so I will not insult your intelligence by doing so again. Suffice it to say that the national vote, while important, pales into insignificance beside how people vote in individual states — and specifically in the handful of “battleground” states where November’s presidential election will be won and lost. In other words, in America, the world’s greatest functioning democracy, where more than 160 million people are registered to vote, the next occupant of the White House will be decided by a few thousand voters in the states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Nevada — as it was in 2020.
No one else’s vote matters, which is where Vance comes in. The junior senator for Ohio was brought up in poverty and deprivation and his bestselling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” demonstrated not only a deep intellectual understanding of the frustrations of white working-class life in America’s Rust Belt, but also the fluency to articulate them. While Trump, with his gilded history as a wealthy young man in cosmopolitan New York, talks a good game, Vance has actually lived it: “Hillbilly Elegy” is many things, but “The Art of the Deal” it is not. Polls show Trump and Joe Biden within touching distance of each other nationally but, in those seven crucial states, Trump is comfortably ahead. If Vance can help to deliver them, Trump is as good as in the White House already.
There are, of course, caveats: with US elections, there always are. For one, Vance has no real national public profile and he has yet to be tested in the white-hot ferocity of a presidential campaign. A weakness that may yet emerge is that his opinions can be, shall we say, negotiable. On support for Ukraine, he has flip-flopped. On combating China, he has flip-flopped. He is, in fact, a classic Marxist — not Karl, but Groucho, who famously declared: “These are my principles! And if you don’t like them ... well, I have others.”
Vance’s most egregious flip-flop, of course, was on the subject of Trump himself, for which he has been widely ridiculed. “America’s Hitler” was one of his kinder epithets for the older man eight years ago, but he can now be safely relied upon to echo Trump’s views on pretty much everything.
While Trump, with his gilded history as a wealthy young man in cosmopolitan New York, talks a good game, Vance has actually lived it.
Ross Anderson
The two men are said to have bonded over a 90-minute chat at Mar-a-Lago, where Vance apologized for the many disobliging things he had said about Trump, while Trump claimed to have read “Hillbilly Elegy” and loved it. Forgive me if I doubt that. Trump is certainly known for reading everything anyone has ever said about him, at any time: he has an aide called Natalie who follows him everywhere with a portable wireless-enabled printer for just that purpose. But I do not see him reading a book from cover to cover. On the other hand, who knows? Perhaps, like the former British Prime Minister John Major, Trump enjoys nothing more than retiring to bed each night with a favorite, well-thumbed Trollope.
Literary tastes and previous history aside, it is clear that Trump and Vance are now two sides of the same coin, speaking as one voice. Together they make a formidable team. And as things stand, this election is theirs to lose.
- Ross Anderson is associate editor of Arab News.
