Can Trump Do It?
In May 1929 the Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes, together with a colleague, published a political pamphlet, Can Lloyd George Do It? The Welsh wizard had just resumed leadership of the British Liberal Party on the death of Henry Asquith. He planned to fight the upcoming general election on an aggressive program of government spending to attack the high unemployment rate that averaged around 10 percent in Britain throughout the 1920s. This, of course, flew against all contemporary economic advice coming from the business and financial sectors and most economists of the day. But this was a view that Keynes had come around to as he watched the British economy languish after the disastrous return to the Gold Standard and the recent turmoil of the General Strike. Long before he developed the theoretical justification for deficit fiscal policy to ease the economy out of recession and before the cataclysmic impact of the Great Depression, Keynes began pushing for active state intervention in order to right a listing ship. In Can Lloyd George Do It? he endorses the Liberal party platform calling for substantial public investment in social housing and communications. Keynes disliked Lloyd George personally (after their experiences together at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919) and would have agreed with Margot Asquith’s comment to him in a letter at the time; “LLG …is a natural cheat & liar& wd [sic] blackmail his mother.”
He didn’t do it! labour won the 1929 election under Ramsey Macdonald. Two years later MacDonald and a few Labour ‘rats’ defected and formed a national government with the Conservatives, to thereafter follow a traditional economic policy of strictly balanced budgets and a tight monetary policy. Keynes watched helplessly as the Great Depression rolled on and went back to his writing desk.
I was reminded of this bleak period in history as I contemplated various recent commentaries on the prospects of Donald Trump’s re-election later this year. Can he do it? Whereas Lloyd George’s (and Keynes’) disappointment gives one a nostalgic feeling of sadness for how different history might have been if…the thought of a Trump victory in November sends shivers down the spine. Surely, given the record of the man in office, the bizarre behaviour, the bungles and gaffs, the continuous stream of blatant lies, the linguistic gibberish and the contempt shown for all and every norm of political life, the people will send him packing. That seems to be a gradually emerging consensus in the mainstream media. But wait. Wasn’t that the also case in 2015 and 2016? Trump would never win the Republican nomination. Well okay, he did but he could never win the election. He did. Why would 2020 be different?
I think it probably will be. I say ‘probably’ because it’s five full months till election day. That’s a long time. Think of what has happened over the past five months around the world. It’s unusual for a modern US President to miss re-election; only once has it happened in the last 40 years, to Bush senior in 1990. Bush Junior won comfortably in 2004 even though he was presiding over the disastrous war he’d blundered into in Iraq. A national crisis usually benefits the White House resident. The powers of incumbency are great, and Trump will have no hesitation in using and abusing them in order to win. Still, the reasons I think Trump is toast are as follows. (Health warning: I don’t have a very good record in predicting election outcomes, and I am happy to be held to account for my attempt to improve my batting average.)
The first reason is the very specific set of factors that came together in 2016 to get Trump across the line. They included: the weak field of alternative Republican hopefuls; the personality, record and surname of his Democratic opponent; the stagnant state of the economy for the vast majority of American families; the covert influence of ‘dark money’, Russia and computer hackers; Democratic Party complacency; the peculiar way in which Americans elect their presidents; and wild card pop-up events like the FBI Director’s eleventh hour intervention. Despite losing the national popular vote by almost three million, Trump won 30 of the states and by 77 electoral college votes. Had Clinton won Pennsylvania, Ohio and either Michigan or Wisconsin, she would have won in the Electoral College. These were states that Democrats regarded as rolled gold, rusted on certainties. But no one told the voters. Trump’s angry, out of left field rhetoric directly delivered via social media resonated the feelings of being ignored, dismissed as rednecks and worse by big city elites. Trump was able to tap into a rich vein of frontier mentality and resurrect a myth – Mr. Trump goes to Washington. They had a point, one that was missed by the Democratic Party establishment. If you know that you are being screwed, what have you got to lose? Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war! At least it’ll be entertaining.
The voters in the swing states have now seen Trump in power for more than three years. His overall popularity is low, even by past presidential standards but he continues to gather support by the loose coalition of the faithful, possibly around forty per cent of potential voters. If he captures votes in the right states, it is possible for Trump to do it again, but the odds are high against. He can no longer credibly claim to be a new force for change, someone totally unlike others who have gone before. His record in office shows reliance on precisely the same alligators who have always inhabited the Washington swamps. His failure to pass meaningful legislation, except to deliver large tax cuts to the rich, and his flaky foreign policy threaten to turn off two critical sections of his support base. The first to go are likely to be the very voters in the rust belt who handed him victory in 2016, the people who have not seen their living standards rise as promised. The second is the solid belt of suburban America, natural Republican voters, who wince at the crudities and idiocies of the Trump circus. A Biden candidacy may dissuade just enough voters in the right places from hanging onto Trump to see him defeated. Biden, the Senator from Delaware and Obama’s Vice-President, is also likely to appeal to some of the white working class and African American voters who went over to Trump last time. The former bloc has supported Biden in the past, the latter group has seen Trump’s support for racism and white nationalism in action. Trump will still in all likelihood sweep the south and Mid-West but will probably lose support among liberal Republicans in the larger cities. The smaller and more rural the community, the more the residents voted for Trump. Will this trend repeat, given the uneven impact of Trump’s trade policies? His recent deal with China promises greater access to some US farmers but not all. (Thanks to China’s decision to slap an 80 per cent tariff on Australian barley exports, their American competitors will gain.) But all Americans are paying more for their imported goods, including farmers. Can Trump’s rampant protectionist rhetoric continue to hide this fact from voters, including his tribe?
A second reason to doubt a Trump second term is the likelihood that the Democrats will not run as dumb a campaign as last time. Effort will be more strategically focused in order to heed the required Electoral College arithmetic. It is probable that the Democrats will raise more money to finance their campaign which now has a highly visible opponent to attack.
A third reason for Trump’s departure would normally be his outrageous mishandling of the Corona virus pandemic. But this is not a normal time or a normal president. He continues to use mainstream and social media to misrepresent the scale of the crisis and peddle snake oil advice. The result has been the largest recorded total death toll from the virus in the world and ‘only’ the fourth or fifth highest official death rate. The fact that anyone can actually say that coming in fifth from the bottom on one metric and dead last on the other in the world’s largest economy, is a victory reminds me of the US Senator who said tongue-in-cheek during the dog days of the Vietnam War that the US should just declare victory and go home. If this is winning, then give me defeat. But winning is all Trump cares about. The man is obsessed with appearing to be invincible.
Victory over Covid-19 will become increasingly difficult to celebrate unless the deaths stop rising, especially in Trump’s heartland. Governors in Trump states are being bullied into removing restrictions with the unsurprising consequence of escalating infections. Past evidence suggests that in the face of brute truth, the president will continue to lie. His remaining loyalists will swallow anything he serves up, including the most recent folk cures doing the internet and twitter rounds. But at what point will the less rusted on and more disenchanted Trumpite jump ship? Answer – no idea.
The great unknown in the picture is how Trump will respond if the political tide continues to run out. He has upped his go-to ‘bait and switch’ strategy by blaming China and the WHO for the pandemic. He is threatening to muzzle the social media giants after Google placed a fact-check tag on a presidential tweet. This looks like panic, since the major loser if Twitter is restricted is the tweeter-in-chief himself. He is also starting to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the upcoming presidential poll, by criticising California’s program of postal voting, a system in wide use in America and other democracies. In particular the mail-in vote is heavily used in the more rural shires of Trumpland.
These are normal modes of behaviour for Trump. What is more worrying is the thought that a desperate president might really go off the rails completely and use his considerable powers to either engineer a war before the election or refuse to hand over the office after defeat in November. In the latter instance would the hard rails of America’s Constitution hold? Would the military command obey their commander-in-chief? Would the angry white men with guns rally behind their leader? A 1960s film, Seven Days in May, starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas turned on an army plot to sack the elected President. The film was later remade starring Forrest Whitaker. The plot was foiled. But that was fiction. Trump is fact.
Short of a coup or civil war, there are two further possible loopholes for Trump. If he loses the election by a close vote in the Electoral College, say by a handful of votes, there may be enough faithless electors there to swing the result his way. This follows from the peculiar and antiquated nature of the way the Electoral College is composed. There are 538 electors chosen across the 50 states and District of Columbia. In many jurisdictions some electors are selected before the general election and confirmed if their party wins the state vote. That means that a significant number of electors are partisan picks who are technically free to vote for whichever candidate they want. In 2016 seven voted against the majority result in their state (five ratted on Clinton and two on Trump). This didn’t make any difference to the overall result – that time. But in 1800 Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied in the Electoral College vote, a deadlock that was broken by Jefferson bribing one elector to change sides. A close election is also likely to bring into play all the techniques of legal knit-picking over vote validity – who can forget the hanging chads of 2000?
The second way out is for Trump to bailout early, to take the advice of the senator mentioned above, declare victory, mission accomplished and go home. That would really throw the whole contest into confusion. Is Trump a quitter? Only if he can dress it up as a victory. Well, black-is-white is his speciality.
The greatest uncertainty of all is the perennial one – the health of the candidates. Once again, it looks like coming down to a contest between two old white men, members of a vulnerable demographic in today’s time of the pandemic. Five months is a long time. It has once again stimulated heated interest around who each party will place one heartbeat away from the White House on the Presidential ticket.
After he lost in 1929 Lloyd George hung around trying to find a way back. He failed, as did his once great
party.