A second Trump presidency would be much more dangerous

This Advent, the Ghost of Christmas Future is already haunting chancelleries, universities and the mainstream media across the globe.

By December 2024, there is a very real possibility that the United States of America will have elected Donald J. Trump for a second time as President of the United States.

The front cover of The Economist’s annual guide to the coming year The World Ahead edition depicts the unmistakeably black silhouette of Trump’s profile blocking out half the world. Inside, the lead editorial is bleak: “a Trump victory next November is a coin-toss… victory would confirm his most destructive instincts about power… The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states. In 2024, the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.”

In The Washington Post, Robert Kagan, a distinguished foreign policy expert who has advised presidents of both parties, blasted out a clarion call to waken the brain dead. Under the headline “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending”, he urges Americans to wake up: “Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face stark reality… we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance, and above all our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy.”

There is no doubting the grounds for thinking that Trump is on the way back. The electoral evidence is consistently suggesting that he is the racing certainty for the Republican nomination. Opinion polls spell out that he appears to have at least as good a chance of being re-elected as Joe Biden.

Still even Scrooge was redeemed in A Christmas Carol, the worst did not happen to him or his circle of acquaintances. Before rushing prematurely to read the funeral rites for liberal democracy in what is still the most powerful and influential nation in the world, there are some vital questions that need asking. Is Trump certain of winning the Republican party nomination as its candidate for President? How likely is he to beat Joe Biden and/or be elected on 5 November 2024? And, if so, how bad a President would a second-term Trump really be?

Without ignoring the weight of the evidence favouring Trump, there remains a possibility that he might not prevail all the way back to the White House. My experience covering US elections over the past forty years or so is that they have not been easy to predict, especially almost a year away from polling. Neither Trump nor Obama were favourites at the equivalent stage of their successful bids for the presidency. The rules for qualification may have been tightened and the primary calendar shortened but upsets remain possible. 

That said, nobody expects that the Republican Party will stop Donald Trump. The moment to do that was his second impeachment trial after the January 6 insurrection. If Republican senators had convicted Trump, he would have been disqualified from running again. They let him off because of his popularity with the base vote that they also depend upon. That base is the same one, more Trumpian than the average Republican voter, which will vote in the primaries and caucuses. 

Even so, Iowa and New Hampshire are renowned for delivering upsets. Without taking part in the candidates’ TV debates, Trump is miles ahead in the Republican race– some 50% ahead of any rival. There is only one other candidate picking up any momentum heading into the early selection contests in the first six weeks of next year. Nikki Haley is a former governor of South Carolina and US ambassador to the UN. She is emerging as the best hope of Trump’s Republican opponents. Last week, her status was confirmed when she was given campaign funding from the Koch brothers’ influential Americans For Prosperity network. 

There is a chance Haley could squeeze out Ron DeSantis in Iowa and then power into New Hampshire as easily the most popular Trump alternative. That in turn could be a springboard to Super Tuesday, including in her home state of South Carolina. At the very best, by early March she could have cleared the field of any Republican other than Trump. This would put her in a strong position should anything happen to him. The current RealClearPolitics “general election match-up” of polls shows that Haley would beat Biden by a bigger margin, 4%, than Trump, 1.7%.

On current polling, the Republicans do not need Trump to win the presidency, but Trump needs Biden as an opponent, as much as Biden needs him. Were something to happen and Biden was replaced by a younger man or woman – Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer say – Trump would struggle to look viable. 

As things are now, and in spite of his unprecedentedly negative profile, it is difficult to see what could stop Trump running, before or after securing nomination. He is only a few years younger than Biden and clearly suffers from much greater brain fog, yet his age, unlike the President’s, is not a negative factor with voters. He is facing over ninety felony indictments around four major cases: the January 6 insurrection, election interference in Georgia, illegal possession of classified documents in Florida and payment of hush money in New York. There is also the fraud case against his family in Manhattan. 

Trump’s genius is to turn his negatives into positives. He has done so much to degrade American politics, yet he is running against a political establishment he characterises as corrupt. He is fighting alongside news organizations, to televise his many court cases in election year, convinced that he can persuade the public, or enough of it, that he is the victim of injustice. Meanwhile his lawyers are doing all they can to delay the court cases – until 2029, the end of his second term if they have their way. It could be fatal for Trump’s hopes if he is put behind bars for any reason during the campaign. US public opinion is clear it will not accept a jailbird as President, even if the US Constitution allows it.

Practically all the Republicans standing for election next year continue to say they will support candidate Trump as do Haley and the other wannabe nominees. By any objective measure, the US economy is doing well – growth and employment rates are higher and inflation is coming down faster than in comparable countries. Yet Americans are refusing to recognize this or to give Biden any credit. Instead many of those prospering seem inclined to back Trump to help them keep what they have got against outsiders and immigrants.

If re-elected, Trump is openly threatening vengeance on all who have resisted him including the Department of Justice and “radical left thugs that live like vermin in our country, lie, steal, cheat on elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and the American dream”. This time, he does not plan to have any restraining “grown ups” in his team. By most conventional analyses his main economic policies – tax cuts for the rich and a massive universal tariff on imports – would derail the US economy.

Trump has said he would end the Ukraine War on day one, presumably denying Ukraine the support it needs and handing victory to President Putin. He continues to be sceptical about NATO. He would be bullying and disruptive of the rest of the world. 

The Washington Post at home and The Economist abroad have ample reasons to be worried about what next year could bring. Before that, there must be an election. That vote remains the best chance of stopping Trump. He has never won a popular vote. More people voted for Hillary Clinton when Trump won in 2016, and for Joe Biden in 2020 when Trump lost. 

What made the difference was the electoral college and narrow victories – those few tens of thousands of votes referred to – in swing states such as Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The signs are that voting assumptions in these battlegrounds are changing in ways which could change the outcome significantly in these states and perhaps some others, such as Ohio and Florida, which are now written off as Republican.

Younger black and Latino men seem to be much more open to voting for Trump.

On the other hand there is a, perhaps more powerful, counterforce: in spite of his relatively modest policy stance, many women have been deeply alienated by the vote against abortion rights by the US Supreme Court which Trump backed. 

Ghosts are scary. Democracy and the American people will be tested as never before next year. But reports of their demise are before time. It is too soon to look for them in the spirit world. 

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